Assumes there is no physical-chemical process that can gradually give rise to a cellular state. In effect, that a cell must spontaneously form all at once or not at all. Baseless assumption.
All criticisms of the origin of life that attempt to undermine it’s plausibility are based on such baseless assumptions. Typically that the process must begin with the sort of instantaneous production of a self-sustaining cell.
I’m not aware they’re required to exist to for life to originate.
While on the topic of things we’re both unaware of, I know of no intelligent designer that isn’t also a cellular form of life.
Tour isn’t catching flak for “pointing out the huge difference between the imaginary biology of OOL scenarios, and what is actually known to occur in nature”.
Tour is catching flak for:
A) Making claims he can’t support (claiming flat out that life should not exist, for example).
B) Making grandiose extrapolations of essentially zero significance (declaring that because we haven’t found life on Mars, we shouldn’t expect to find it anywhere else).
C) For misrepresenting the state of the field because grandiose claims are made in the popular press(a problem in all branches of science).
D) Completely ignoring other parts of it(I’ve seen zero evidence that he’s even aware of the sort of work done by people like David Baum, or Nick Lane).
E) For his hypocrisy(complaining he doesn’t know what “spontaneous” means in chemistry when he uses the term himself in his own work).
F) For his painful ignorance of evolutionary biology (when he demands OOL explanations for attributes only found in eukaryotic cells).
G) Showing a picture of a barren, rocky desert claiming this represents all environments on the early Earth.
That’s just off the top of my head. There’s much more.