Arthur Ernest Wilder-Smith (1915–1995) held three earned doctorates — from Reading University, the University of Geneva, and ETH Zurich — and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He was Europe's leading creationist scientist of the 20th century, a NATO consultant, and a man who debated Richard Dawkins at the Oxford Union. He began as an atheist and came to faith through the influence of C.S. Lewis.
Wilder-Smith was born in Reading, England in 1915 and educated as an atheist. His intellectual conversion came through friendship with General John Frost — the commander at Arnhem — and through his acquaintance with C.S. Lewis at Oxford. His faith was not an escape from rigorous thinking. It was the conclusion of it. His three doctorates in chemistry and pharmacology gave him the scientific credentials to engage evolutionary theory at the level of chemistry, information theory, and molecular biology — decades before those disciplines were widely applied to the creation debate.
He served as a professor of pharmacology at the University of Illinois Medical Center, Hacettepe University in Ankara, and the University of Bergen in Norway. He won three consecutive Golden Apple Awards for excellence in teaching. He served as a NATO consultant for drug abuse prevention. His life was one of extraordinary range — scientist, teacher, author, apologist, and husband to Beate, with whom he moved homes twenty-three times while raising four children, all of whom became professors in medical fields.
In 1986, Wilder-Smith and creationist physicist Edgar Andrews debated Richard Dawkins and John Maynard Smith at the Oxford Union on the question of creationism vs. evolution. Dawkins, who rarely agreed to formal debates, participated. Wilder-Smith held his ground. The debate is available on SermonAudio. His central argument — that the information content of DNA cannot be accounted for by undirected natural processes — anticipated by decades the information-theoretic arguments that would later form the core of the intelligent design movement. William Dembski wrote in 2005 that Wilder-Smith's intuitive ideas about information “has been the impetus for much of my research.”
Notes integrating creation-science and the biblical text. Click any verse to read his commentary; the full archive is also wired into the main Bible reader (teal “Wilder” chip).
Wilder-Smith's most accessible apologetics work — the scientific and philosophical case that a thinking person is compelled toward belief in a Creator. Written in 1981. Raw OCR scan available free.
He Who Thinks Has To Believe by A.E. Wilder-Smith (1981, The Word For Today). PDF provided for personal study.
Full archive of Wilder-Smith audio including the 1986 Oxford Union debate with Richard Dawkins, creation science lectures, and apologetics series.
These titles are still under copyright. Find them through your local library or Christian bookstore.
Wilder-Smith's scientific case rests on the same foundation as Thread 5 — the Dispensational Roadmap. If Genesis 1:1 is literal history — six real days, a real Adam, a real Fall — then the entire dispensational structure stands on solid ground. Wilder-Smith spent his career demonstrating that the scientific evidence, properly interpreted, is consistent with that literal reading. His work on information theory, molecular biology, and thermodynamics provides the scientific scaffolding beneath the doctrinal position this site holds.