The Scientist Who Had to Believe

He started as an atheist.

That is the part of Arthur Ernest Wilder-Smith's story that gets buried under the three doctorates and the Oxford Union debate and the thirty books. He did not grow up in a Christian home and inherit the faith like furniture. He came to it the hard way — through the laboratory, through the mathematics, through the molecules, through the slow accumulation of evidence that a mind honest enough to follow data wherever it leads cannot ultimately ignore.

He was converted, by his own account, partly through the influence of C.S. Lewis. This is fitting. Lewis was himself a former atheist who came to faith through argument. Wilder-Smith was a scientist who came through data. Two roads, same destination. The God who made the cosmos apparently has more than one way to make his existence obvious to the people he made to think.

What Wilder-Smith did with the faith he found is the story worth telling.

The Credentials

Arthur Ernest Wilder-Smith was born in Reading, England in 1915. By the time his academic career was complete he held three earned doctorates:

A doctorate in organic chemistry from Reading University. A doctorate from the University of Geneva. A doctorate from ETH Zurich — the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, the same institution that produced Albert Einstein.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He served as a professor of pharmacology at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago, at Hacettepe University in Ankara, Turkey, and at the University of Bergen in Norway. He won three consecutive Golden Apple Awards for excellence in teaching at the University of Illinois — a rare enough honor once that three consecutive wins is almost without precedent. He served as a NATO science advisor on drug abuse prevention.

He published thirty books across pharmacology, organic chemistry, creation science, and apologetics.

He raised four children with his wife Beate, moving homes twenty-three times over the course of his career. All four children became professors in medical fields.

This is the biography of a man who lived at a different altitude than most of us. Three doctorates in hard sciences. Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. NATO advisor. The highest teaching award at a major American medical school, three times running.

And he believed every word of Genesis 1.

The Oxford Debate

In 1986, the Oxford Union held a formal debate on the question of creationism versus evolution. The affirmative position — that the scientific and historical evidence supports creation — was argued by A.E. Wilder-Smith and creationist physicist Edgar Andrews.

The negative position — that evolution is the only scientifically credible account of origins — was argued by Richard Dawkins and John Maynard Smith.

Read that again. Dawkins and Maynard Smith are not obscure figures. Dawkins was already becoming the most famous evolutionary biologist in the English-speaking world. Maynard Smith was one of the most respected theoretical biologists of the twentieth century. The Oxford Union debate on creation and evolution, 1986, had as good a field as you could assemble on the evolutionary side.

Wilder-Smith held his ground.

The debate is available on SermonAudio. Listen to it with the transcript of Wilder-Smith's arguments in front of you and notice something: he is not arguing from the Bible. He is arguing from chemistry. From information theory. From the mathematics of probability as applied to the self-organization of biological systems. He is fighting on evolutionary biology's own ground and insisting that the data does not support the conclusion evolutionists require it to support.

Dawkins, who rarely agreed to formal debates, participated. That fact alone is telling. You do not debate people you can easily ignore.

The Central Argument: Information Cannot Organize Itself

Wilder-Smith's scientific contribution — the argument that William Dembski later acknowledged as "the impetus for much of my research" on intelligent design — was built around one central insight from information theory:

DNA is information. Information requires an intelligent source. Therefore the information in DNA requires an intelligent source.

This sounds simple. The implications are not.

In the 1970s and 1980s, when Wilder-Smith was making this argument, the molecular biology revolution was just beginning to reveal the staggering complexity of the cell. What was once thought to be a simple blob of protoplasm — a bag of chemicals — turned out to be a manufacturing facility of extraordinary precision. Ribosomes that read genetic code and assemble proteins. Molecular motors that transport cargo along internal highways. Error-correction systems that proofread DNA replication with a fidelity that exceeds any human-engineered system. Membrane pumps that maintain chemical gradients across cell walls. Signal transduction cascades that respond to environmental information with specific chemical outputs.

Every component of this machinery is a protein. Every protein is specified by a gene. Every gene is a sequence of DNA base pairs carrying encoded information. The information content of a single bacterium's genome is approximately equivalent to a library of several thousand books.

Wilder-Smith's question was simple: where does the information come from?

The materialist answer — that random chemical interactions over sufficient time can generate biological information — is not a scientific answer. It is a philosophical commitment dressed in scientific language. No experiment has demonstrated the spontaneous generation of specified biological information from non-living chemistry. The second law of thermodynamics — entropy — describes the universal tendency of closed systems toward disorder, not toward increasing specified complexity.

Wilder-Smith spent his career making this argument with the precision of a chemist who had actually done the math. The evolutionary response — that living systems are open systems receiving energy from the sun — does not resolve the problem. Sunlight falling on a pile of bricks does not produce a house. Energy without information produces chaos, not organization. You need not only energy but a blueprint, a code, a plan — to direct energy toward specified complexity.

The blueprint for every living thing is DNA. And Wilder-Smith's point — made two decades before the intelligent design movement formalized it — is that the existence of a biological code requires a coder.

The Books Worth Reading

He Who Thinks Has To Believe (1981) is Wilder-Smith's most accessible work. The title is the argument. A mind honest enough to follow the evidence wherever it leads arrives at belief in a Creator not because of cultural pressure or religious inheritance but because the data demands it. The title is not a slogan. It is a scientific claim.

The Creation of Life: A Cybernetic Approach to Evolution (1970) is his most technically rigorous work — the book that introduced information-theoretic arguments against abiogenesis to a generation of scientists. This is the book Dembski was referring to when he described Wilder-Smith's intuitions about information as the impetus for his own research.

Man's Origin, Man's Destiny (1969) addresses the philosophical and theological implications of creation science — what it means for the human person, for ethics, for the question of meaning, if the materialist account of origins is false.

The Natural Sciences Know Nothing of Evolution (1981) — later republished by Answers in Genesis — is his most polemical work, a sustained scientific argument that the mechanisms proposed by evolutionary theory are insufficient to account for the evidence.

Free PDFs of some of these works are available through the SermonAudio archive. The link is on his resource page on this platform.

Why Wilder-Smith Matters for This Platform

Whosoeverwill.bible holds the Young Earth Creationist position. Six literal days. A historical Adam. A global Flood. An earth approximately 6,000 years old. This is not a peripheral doctrinal commitment squeezed in alongside the main arguments. It is the foundation on which every subsequent argument rests.

A real Adam means a real Fall. A real Fall means real sin entering real creation. Real sin entering real creation means a real need for a real Savior who took real sin onto himself in a real death and rose in a real resurrection. The gospel is not a solution to a mythological problem. Touch the history of Genesis 1-11 and you have touched the load-bearing wall of the entire theological structure.

This is why Thread 5 — the Dispensational Roadmap — begins at Genesis 1:1. The roadmap has to start somewhere. It starts at the beginning. A real beginning. A six-day beginning. A beginning with a real first man who made a real choice with real consequences that the whole of Scripture is the story of God addressing.

Wilder-Smith spent his career demonstrating that the scientific evidence, properly interpreted, is consistent with that literal reading. Not in tension with it. Not requiring awkward harmonization. Consistent with it — and in several specific areas (the origin of information, the second law, the Cambrian Explosion, the fossil record's pattern of sudden appearance) actually predicted by it.

Henry Morris gave us the geological and flood geology framework. Wilder-Smith gave us the biochemical and information-theoretic framework. Together they represent the two most rigorous scientific defenses of the literal Genesis account produced in the twentieth century.

Neither of them was ignorant of the data. That is the point. The argument against Young Earth Creationism is almost always made as though the creationists simply haven't looked at the evidence. Wilder-Smith had three doctorates in hard sciences, had won three consecutive teaching awards at a major medical school, and had debated Dawkins at Oxford.

He had looked at the evidence.

And he believed every word of Genesis 1.

The Last Word

Wilder-Smith died in 1995 in Basel, Switzerland. He had spent sixty years in laboratories and lecture halls and debate halls making the same argument: that a thinking person who follows the evidence honestly arrives not at atheism but at the God who made the evidence.

He was not a simple man. He was not an uneducated fundamentalist retreating from data he found threatening. He was one of the most credentialed scientists of his generation, fluent in organic chemistry, pharmacology, information theory, and molecular biology, who looked at the world his discipline was revealing and concluded that it required an Author.

Psalm 19:1 — "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork."

Wilder-Smith's life was an extended commentary on that verse. The invisible things of God — his eternal power, his intelligence, his design — are clearly seen in the things that are made. Romans 1:20 does not say probably seen or arguably seen. It says clearly seen. Wilder-Smith spent his career demonstrating that this clarity is greater, not less, the more powerful the microscope you bring.

Three doctorates. One Oxford debate. Thirty books. Twenty-three moves. Four children who became professors.

One God who made the cosmos in six days and said it was very good.

Darren ReinhardtAuthor of Whosoever Will · whosoeverwill.bible