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Is Man a Machine?
Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith

Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith (December 22, 1915 – September 14, 1995) was a British preacher, organic chemist, and creationist whose ministry bridged science and faith to challenge evolutionary theory and proclaim biblical truth. Born in Reading, England, to Ernest Walter and Florence Emily Wilder-Smith, he pursued higher education at Reading University, earning a Ph.D. in Physical Organic Chemistry in 1941, followed by doctorates in Pharmacology from the University of Geneva in 1964 and from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Initially an atheist, he converted to Christianity in his 20s after intellectual struggles with evolution, influenced by his wife Beate Gottwaldt, whom he married in 1949. Wilder-Smith’s preaching career combined his scientific expertise with evangelism, beginning during World War II while working at Imperial Chemical Industries. He preached across Europe and North America, notably debating evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and John Maynard Smith at the 1986 Oxford Union Debate, where his arguments on information theory and thermodynamics gained attention. He served as Professor of Pharmacology at institutions like the University of Illinois (1959–1961) and Hacettepe University in Turkey, earning three Golden Apple Awards for teaching. Author of over 70 scientific papers and books like The Creation of Life (1970) and Man’s Origin, Man’s Destiny (1968), he emphasized creationism’s scientific basis. With Beate, he raised four children—Oliver, Petra, Clive, and Einar—and died at age 79 in Frauenfeld, Switzerland, leaving a legacy as a pioneering creationist preacher.
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Sermon Summary
In this sermon, the speaker discusses the concept of man as a machine. He highlights the complexity of the human body, which is capable of producing babies and learning to speak. The speaker emphasizes that humans are fearfully and wonderfully made, and that a simple machine cannot arise by chance. He concludes by stating that the purpose and information necessary for the creation of machines always come from outside the matter.
Sermon Transcription
Evening, ladies and gentlemen. We spent 14 hours in the jumbo jet yesterday and went to bed at nine o'clock last night. I woke up at 10 this morning. So we're gradually overcoming the jet lag. Now, I want to talk about, since I've been flying in machines since I saw you most of the time, you've been in Australia and places like that in Thailand. I want to talk about mankind, or man, a machine. That is, a machine with a question mark after it. Man, a machine. And we'll see what sort of lessons we can get out of it. If you understand what I've said in an hour's time, you'll be able to sing all those songs that you've been singing with real gusto. If you understand what sort of a machine we are. Let's have a look. I'm going to read to you from Psalm 139. If you have your Bibles, they're fine. Psalm 139, verse 13, where it says, for thou didst form my inward parts. I don't know if you've had a look at your inward parts. Have you ever been operated on outside anesthesia and had a look at what your inward parts look like as I have? It's very interesting. Thou didst knit me together in my mother's womb. I praise thee for thou art fearful and wonderful. He says he took a look at himself and then the praise welled up in his heart. The great danger in Christian circles today is to try to work up praise by emotion. And that's why a lot of music is emotional and will work up praise of a sort. The scriptural sort of praise comes from knowledge and understanding. I saw a film in this jumbo jet that I was coming over in. Now it went on for hours and hours and hours. The flight went on for 14 hours. But, you know, all there was in that film was action. There was no thought or understanding in it at all. But you know, it quickly gets very boring that, you know, people throwing custard in one another's faces and all that sort of thing. Now, it really is funny because, I know, but it's not, it didn't last very long. And once will do, and then you don't want any more. I praise thee for thou art fearful and wonderful. And he says that from the structure of which he was made. And that's what I'm going to talk about tonight. You, and then you'll praise God that God made you like he did. And you'll see what he wanted you for. Wonderful are thy works. He can't get over it. For thou knowest me right well. My frame was not hidden from thee when I was being made in secret. This is all scientific work, being made in secret. You know, that's what a scientist is after, to find out the secrets of the structure of our body and our mind. Intricately wrought in the depths of the earth, it's a rather poor translation, but the intricately wrought will suit us for here. My thine eyes beheld my unformed substance before my substance was made. God, because he knew all about precognition, knew all about us before our substance was made. And in thy book were written every one of them. That is, there was a blueprint of our unformed substance made long before the machine was made. And you think of that, God working according to blueprints which he made. In thy book were written every one of them. The days that were formed for me before I was made, God made the days for me, and all the works that I can do in those days that he made before I was made. You think of that for planning. I mean, you see how a machine is planned today, and then see how God planned our machine. Boy, it makes you sit there and you know you forget sin. You think more of holiness. When as yet there were none of them, how precious to me are thy thoughts, O God? How precious are thy thoughts? That is, the thinking machine that God made for us is made to be satisfied by the thoughts of God. And he says, how precious are those thoughts to me? Now, when I've had a nice steak, you know, to eat, my stomach feels very satisfied after a steak, and you get this sort of nice, satisfied feeling down inside, don't you? Now, if you ever work with your head, I said, if you ever work with your head, I wasn't being facetious, but it's like digesting a good meal. To understand the thoughts of God brings satisfaction because we're made for them. The stomach was made for good food, and the head was made for good thoughts. Where can you get better thoughts than the thoughts of God who made me? Because I'm reality, you know. Sorry, but I am. He made me. Let's read it to the end. If I would count thy thoughts, O God, the thoughts which satisfy me, he said, they're more than the sand. And I'd go on until I went to sleep doing it. I am now awake, I'm still with thee. We ask thee, Lord Jesus, that thou mightest open our thoughts and minds tonight. Amen. Now, that's what I want to do. Friends, we want to think of one or two things about our own body. You do look after your body, don't you? You see these people jogging, don't you? Sometimes their faces don't look very happy, as they have an agonized look, as they go on on the tarmac roads, which they shouldn't do jogging, but they do, because they don't really better probably. But I want to tell you this, that jogging done at the right time, not overdone, keeps the body trim. You don't want to get on unnecessary fat. It clogs the heart and clogs the vessels. Now, what I want to do with you tonight is do some jogging with the mind. Now, our muscles take blood to work with, and you've got to keep them going, otherwise they get flabby. Now, the mind, the brain, which is the thought machines, machine that handles the thoughts of God, has about 30%, takes about 30% of the blood that the heart pumps. And that blood is intended to work. Now, if you work the muscles, they keep going. If you put your arm in a plaster cast, you know when you take it out after six weeks, you find a skeleton there, don't you? Because it's not worked for six weeks. Now, the brain is the same. If you don't use it, you can't use it. You understand? That's why they say, you know, that if you shake a lot of people's heads around, you can hear it rattling around inside, because it's gone a little bit into a consumptive decline, was the old word that they used for it. So I want to do with you a little bit of jogging tonight. Now, I don't want you to put on that agonized look of face that you sometimes see on joggers when they're out at six in the morning. But I do want you to recognize, if the going does get hard, that it's all for the good cause, you see, to keep you trim in your mind. Now, what I'm going to do in this jogging, I want to talk about the nature of the machine that we are. Because you see, the human consists of a body. And the body is a metabolic machine. And a part of that machine is the brain. The brain is definitely the computer. It's much more complicated than any computers we know, but it's a machine all the same. And let's have a definition of a machine first. This is part of the preliminary jogging process to see if you can get your breath. What would you, how would you like to define a machine? Well, I'll help you. Are you ready? I'll give you a nice bit of steak, but it'll be nicely cooked. So bite it carefully, what I say, and consider it, that it tastes nice while you're digesting it. A machine, you ready? A machine is a teleonomic aggregate of matter. Now, you know what telos means, don't you? If you don't, I shall ask your schoolmasters what he did all those years you were at school. A teleonomic aggregate of matter. That is, it's an aggregate of matter which has purpose. Telos is purpose or aim. Now you take a car, that's a machine, and it's teleonomic in that it burns gasoline and converts the energy, chemical energy, combining gasoline with oxygen into kinetic energy. For our purposes, it'll transport you to Calvary Chapel. It'll transport you to Hawaii, if you can get there. It's teleonomic, you want to go there, and you burn the gasoline to get you there. That's a machine. Now, the brain is a machine in that it oxidizes chemical substances, sugars, fats, and proteins, in order to drive chemical impulses and electrical impulses by iron passage through the nervous fibers in a certain direction to carry information, just like the electrical wires which supply the light here and electrical wires for the telegraph or whatever you want, carry information. So the brain works on that basis, but the brain works on the basis of oxidizing chemical substances to do it. So we can say that the brain is a machine. Now, lots of people don't like to think. They think that they are being deprived of something Christian if they call the body a machine. Now, just think very carefully. I'm the very last person to want to disparage the worthiness and the beauty of the human body or any other part of biology if you like, but think very carefully. Do you think the heart is a machine? Well, obviously it is, because if you take out a heart, say the heart goes into failure, you can put a plastic heart in and that plastic heart is designed as a machine to pump blood and other valves on a plastic heart are not as good as the valves in our heart because the valves on the plastic heart break the blood corpuscles down and ruin your blood every time they close, but they will keep a man alive. So that that part of the body which pumps the blood is certainly a super machine. There's no doubt about it. It's more difficult to talk about the machine character of the brain, but the heart is certainly as much a machine as the brain is. The brain's an electronic one or electrical one and the heart's a mechanical one. Now, just think about that. You think of your kidney. Now, if you're going to kidney failure, you can put a person in kidney failure on a dialysis machine. Pump his blood through the dialysis machine and that machine will do the work of your kidney. It doesn't do it as well, but it will do it and it'll keep you alive. So your kidney is also a machine. Now, it's rather more difficult to replace the liver because it's very difficult to get such a super chemical laboratory as the liver is, but the liver's also a machine. Now, all these things being machines, without the slightest doubt, are teleonomic. That is, they're purposeful. Now, the basis of the Darwinian theory, evolution, is this, that there is no purpose behind biology. One of the things a machine does is it takes out the chance element in life and converts them into direction and is therefore of a machine nature. Now, if you get a machine anywhere, whether it's outside the human body or in it, then there's purpose. A machine is a purposeful aggregate of matter. So one of the basic things you learn at school and in high school and in university, that life depends upon chance, is wrong. It's out. It's caulking up your thought processes. Because let me ask you this, do you know of any machine that ever arose by the Darwinian chance method? Do you know of anyone? I've never known a machine to arise that way. And we know that it can't arise that way. Now, this sort of thing that we arose, our super machine, because we are a super machine, arose at the time of David Hume. Now, David Hume, 17th, 18th century, said this, that all, this is a bit of jogging. It really is jogging what I'm going to say now, but nevermind, it'll do you good. It does me good to think about it too, even though I've got jet lag, but it gets you out of it if you do enough of it. David Hume said this, all matter is in movement. And all atoms combine, he didn't know much about atoms, but all parts, particles of matter combined with one another and uncombined, combined and uncombined, that is their continual movement. And he said this, that if that's the case, then because everything is in movement, combining and uncombining, in the long times, which are available in the history of the earth, all the possible combinations of matter will have occurred, including the machine combinations of matter. That is, if you leave iron ore long enough to itself, then the combination and decombination of all the atoms of iron will happen so often that the chances of forming a car or a machine are so great in that length of time, that that machine will have arisen by chance. Now, Darwin applied that to the primeval soup and said that in the primeval soup in the primeval oceans, all the atoms and molecules combined with one another and uncombined with one another, and all the possible combinations are applied and tried out so that you do get, in those possible combinations, the combinations that work as machines. That is, machines will start by chance. Now, listen, that is the second fundamental error that if you have any kids in the school, you need to get into the heads of your children so they understand that that is an error. It's an error of science. Now, I can tell you why. It isn't true to say that teleonomic parts of a machine will arise by chance in the way that Darwin said. Why isn't it true? Now, I'm going to talk to the gentleman here first. I don't know, perhaps American ladies are different from European ladies, I don't know. But they don't usually, not very usually interested, in Europe anyway, in machines. But we'll try it out on you and I'll watch your faces very carefully and see if you're looking into the middle distance and your thoughts are miles away from me and there's that blank look not reflecting any intelligence out of your eyes and I know that I've lost you, you see. And that's one of the awful things that can happen to a speaker to lose his audience. Now, listen, think of this. Take a four-cycle engine, okay? Shall we say a rabbit engine? You know, one of these golfs that they have in Europe, you call them here, Volkswagen rabbits. Now, they're very neat little engines. Now, on those engines, you have the piston, four of them, fitting into a cylinder. Now, on the top of the piston, you have three or four grooves and one of the grooves further down the skirting of the piston is there to scrape the oil off so it doesn't too much get burned, okay? Now, I'm going to concentrate on one thing, you gentlemen. Ladies, I hope I'll see that brilliant flash of intelligence coming out of your eyes. In order to get the fit of a piston into a cylinder so that it's hermetically sealed by piston rings, you have to make grooves and those grooves are turned out on a lathe. Now, do you think that you could get on principle, on a piston that already fitted a cylinder, say that that did happen, I'm giving you a lot if I gave you that one, but say that that did happen, do you think that any movement of the atoms and molecules in iron or steel would ever make a groove in a piston or would ever make the size of the piston ring fit that groove? Well, the answer is you know perfectly well that a groove made by chance rather than on a lathe isn't very straight. And there's one thing about a groove is that it's got to be accurate down to how many points of a millimetre. Now, that sort of information on how to make a piston fit into a ring, into a groove, into a cylinder is not a property of chance. It's a property of cutting out chance. And to make any machine, you need millions of parts that are cut down to a definition of that degree of accuracy. You can't do it. I mean, you're going to twist up a kid's mechanism of thought. If you tell him that a piston ring with its grooves, which fit hermetically to hold in gas is going to arise by the ordinary chances of molecular movement, it's bunk. It's nonsense. It won't work. That groove is made by one process. And I don't think I'm being slighting. What I'm trying to do is jog your mind and realise how far our teachings in the schools and universities has gone wrong to say that an engine, an engine, a machine, could on principle ever arise by chance. You can't, because molecular movement and the properties of the iron or the steel don't make the fit that you need. They can't. Now, this is very, very simple and crude. Now, you take a sewing machine. I'm not very good at sewing machines, but my wife is, and we have quite a nice one at home. Now, you think of trying to make the thread, the hole, in a sewing machine needle by the forces of the molecular movement working on the steel of which the needle is made. You try and get a hole so that you can thread the cotton through it, the yarn through it, such as you need for any sewing machine. Then you try and do the same on the bobbin, and then you try and do the same on the gearing, which pushes your bobbin along. You can't do it. It's not there. This is teleonomic information which does that, purposeful information which builds a machine. There isn't any idea of the nature of the complexity of the biological machine, which is a billion times more complex than the most complicated machine we have made by man, to do it. It can't do it. Now, listen to this point most carefully. You remember William Paley? William Paley, who wrote his Natural Theology, he said this, and William Paley was one of the great men at the beginning of the 1800s. He said this, look, gentlemen, we've looked at David Hume. David Hume says that all design is only apparent design. It really arose by chance because molecular movement alone will produce all the aggregates of matter, which produce a machine. That's what he said. Now, Paley stood up and said, no, look, if you take a watch, we know on the basis of hard facts that to make a watch, you've got to have a designer who is the watchmaker. Because he said the properties of the cogwheels, the mathematical size, the number of teeth on a cogwheel, are mathematically worked out so that the watch keeps time. And there's no means of making a watch, no matter how long the time is, without applying the mathematics to make a watch. And the mathematics to make a watch is not in the middle of the watch. Now, he said that, and that was the basis of his natural theology years ago. Now, people, when they were hit in the face by Paley, in that way, the biologists said, well, look, you can't talk like that because Paley had no idea of how long a time had been given by the history of the world to be able to produce the watch by chance. And the watch, after David Hume, is only really produced by chance, it's only apparent design, it isn't real design at all. Now, that's how they put out the argument, David Hume, who lived before Paley, neutralized the argument put out by Paley, William Paley, on natural theology. And that was the argument which Darwin used. Darwin said, if you give the world chemistry time enough, by David Hume's method, you will, on principle, get the parts necessary produced by chance, which look like design, but which aren't. And all the world is full of apparent design, which isn't real design. Now, let's have a look at that very, very carefully. It is not possible to produce the parts of a teleonomic machine by any other method than by that of information put onto the matter from outside. There's no way of doing it. There's just simply no way of doing it at all. And there's no evidence that it ever happens in nature, except by the method of putting in information from outside, which is creationism, if you want it, right at the bottom of things. Well, let's have a look at this just a little bit further. If Paley was right, then okay, you must have a designer. But if Paley was wrong and David Hume was right, then you can get round the idea that a creation demands a creator. Now, I want to fix that one point in your mind. And this is very hard to do because it needs quite a lot of experience in mathematics and also in science in general. But I'll try and put it through as clear as I can. Why is it true what William Paley said? And why is it untrue what Darwin said and what David Hume before him said? Let me give you this. I'm going to give you this just to think about. It took me 35 years to get to it myself. I'll see if I can catalyze it with you. What you need to make a machine is to put in information from outside. You've got to add the factor I to get the information from outside. Now, a Nobel laureate in Europe of the name of Manfred Eigen stood up and said, 10 years, 15 years ago, and it's circulated through here, the American Association for the Advancement of Science propagates it. He said, ah, right. We've progressed since Paley. We've progressed since David Hume. What's the progress? The progress is, he said, that information required to make a machine, such as Paley said, and which David Hume denied, is true. You do need it. But he said, the information we need arises by chance. Well, it's very easy. He developed his hypercycles to say that. Now, I'm going to say this. This is hard, but I'm going to try on you because you see, you're the elite of Anaheim, aren't you? And you're the intellectuals of Anaheim. They'll surely digest this one, but it's hard. Now, there are two forms of information. With this, I'm going to go on to something more concrete. Well, this is concrete enough. It's hard to digest like concrete is. If you take a photograph of a person and it's reproduced in the newspaper, what does that photograph consist of with your brilliant, intelligent face on it? What does it consist of? A photograph in a newspaper consists of black points on a white background, doesn't it? You know, it's what we call half-toning. Okay? Now, each point is a piece of information. Each dot on the white paper, each black dot is one surprise effect. Now, you're all the computer experts of the world here, aren't you? You know what a surprise effect is. It's something you can't work out from natural law. Okay? Okay? The DNA molecule is full of surprise effects. Where do you get them from? Well, you get, say, a million black dots on a piece of white paper. And if you put the black dots on the white paper, what does it do to the paper? Well, it fogs it, doesn't it? If there are black dots, black surprise effects, black bits of information, all over the white paper, then you do get a fogging effect, you see? There's no picture to see. If they're all randomly distributed all over the white paper, the black dots, well, okay, you fogged your paper. There's no picture. Now, listen, that means that the surprise effects alone are there, but they don't give any picture. Now, if you shepherd the distribution of those surprise effects, out of those black dots on the white paper, you can produce a wonderful photograph, either of yourself, or of a Bentley car, or a baby, or whatever you like. What it is, is this. Manfred Eigen forgot. It's the shepherding, the herding, the grouping of the black dots on the white paper, which make the picture. It isn't the black dots themselves. It's their grouping. Now, the black dots themselves are certainly information, and they can arise by chance, no doubt about it. Where are you going to get the chance grouping of a million black dots on white paper to produce your beautiful face? It's the grouping that does it. Now, if you tell me that grouping, and shepherding, which is teleonomic to make a picture arises by chance, then you'll be on medical aid, because I can't help you at all. I won't argue with you. I won't argue with you about the fact that the black dots are surprise effects, and they could arise by chance. I won't argue with you about that at all. But when you tell me that the grouping to make that beautiful picture of the Bentley car, or your beautiful face, if you tell me that is the product of chance, well, there we've reached the end of the road. The brain is defunct, and we can't work anymore. Now, it's the grouping of the black dots to produce your picture, which is like the grouping of the pieces of machinery that make a car, or a watch, or any machine you like to make a machine. That's where the rub lies. Who's going to do the purposeful teleonomic grouping to make the machine? Now, our body is a super machine. You take a heart. Now, you can put a plastic heart in, but it makes an awful racket, and it drives people mad. They can't sleep with it, you see, because it makes such a noise. But the valves aren't very good, but it is a machine. You think how those valves work. Now, if you tell me that the grouping of the molecules to make those valves work is a matter of chance, we've reached the end of the road. Because we know it isn't a matter of chance, because it's determined with the grouping of the sequences of the nucleotides on the DNA molecule. And the grouping of the sequences on the DNA molecule, if you tell me there's a chance, then you are, as I've said before, beyond medical aid. We know that it isn't. So, we're finished. And yet, you know, if anybody attacks the evolutionary theory, they get defrocked. If you know what I mean when I say defrocked. You know, when you turn a person out of his church, he's defrocked. Well, we scientists sometimes get turned out for saying things like that. Now look, just a little red line under your notes, because I've got to get finished on time tonight. There are three types of machines. Perhaps I'll get time to speak about two. The first machine is the machina simplex. The simple machine. Can be quite complicated, but a two-stroke motor, two-cycle motor, a four-cycle motor, a sewing machine, a computer, a telephone, anything you want, which is teleonomic, that is, has a purpose in it. Quite simple. Now, the thing about an ordinary machine is that to make it, you have to put in information. You have to group the molecules together. That is, it's dependent upon a source of intelligence outside it to make any machine. I don't know any exceptions, do you? I don't know any. Now, that's a simple machine. And to maintain that simple machine, you've got to keep on putting information into it. You've got to take your car to be serviced, you see. And you've got to put in the information outside. You've got to change the filters and all those sorts of things. That's got to be done. That is, a simple machine is so simple that it's dependent continually on outside information. Now, a man called von Neumann, who was an American mathematician and physicist, he had a mad idea. I won't talk about this mad idea just for a bit because mad ideas are sometimes good. He said, look, the trouble about an ordinary machine is this. Somebody has to stand there and put in information into it all the time. You've got to have a blueprint and you've got to stand at the line and see that the machines are produced and then see that they're maintained afterwards. And they don't leave any offspring machines, do they? Well, he said, what we want to do is make a machine that sprouts little machines. That is, he wanted, and he said so, did von Neumann. He said, we want to make a watch that sprouts little watches. Yes. That is, the blueprint for making the watch is not outside the watch but in the watch. That is, you don't write the information to make a watch on a piece of paper or blueprint. What you want to do is put the information to make the watch onto the metal of which the watch is made so that it can build itself. You want to make a watch that sprouts watches. Now, he went into this and being a mathematician, he worked it out. Now, he said that the complexity needed to make a watch, the information that you've got to put in to make a watch is, shall we say, 1,000. Just 1,000 units, anything you like, 1,000 units. The complexity, the bits of information that you've got to put in to make it is so much. Now, he said, if I make that machine such that the blueprint is in the machine instead of outside it, it'll be so complicated, a watch that sprouts watches, that it won't need 1,000 bits of information to make it, it'll be 10 million. You think a watch which is capable of taking out little cogwheels out of the atmosphere or making them itself, putting them in to sprout little cogwheels and little machines out of it. Well, I mean, it is simply marvellous, isn't it? So he said, look, we'll make a machine that sprouts machines, the same types of machines, sticks to the same species. Well, you know, the Europeans wanted to certify them. You know what to certify a piece of person, we don't show, do you know, do you do that here? Some doctors do here, they say they clear them to be mad, you see, and put them into an institute or give them phenothiazine or something like that. Well, they hadn't got that in those days, this is 1926. So where did he go to the place of all madmen? He came to the States, you see. And the States, well, you see, the States greeted him like their long lost uncle because he got ideas. Well, that's why Europe isn't getting on very well, you see, because they don't have the ideas that they used to. So he came here. Well, von Neumann said, the great difficulty about my machine is this, that it's so frightfully complicated that it goes wrong quicker than I can build it. You understand me? You know that the more complicated the machine is, the quicker it goes wrong. You do know that, don't you? Vive les choses simples, is what the French say. Long live simple things, because they don't go wrong. But if you have them so that they're very complicated, they'll go wrong. Well, von Neumann said, if you need a watch which needs, say, a thousand component parts, you can build it before it goes wrong. My watch usually runs about two years and it goes wrong, you see, and you have to send it back to the makers and he charges you three times the price what it costs for a new one, you see, and put it right for you, okay? Now, he said, okay, well, do this then. We'll make a machine now that is so complicated that it'll reproduce itself. But he said it'll require 10 billion component parts to make it. And before I've got in a billion component parts, some of them have gone wrong. So what are we going to do? Well, American thought's of one idea if we can solve that problem. So they got him over here, and he started to work on a machine that reproduced itself. NASA is doing this now. They want to send up a machine into space that builds factories for them itself. This is real. Well now, okay, von Neumann said, if we're going to have a machine that reproduces itself, it will, on principle, be so complicated that it'll go wrong before I can build it. So he said, there's only one thing to do. I must put another horizon, another level of complexity into it. It's so complex that I can't build it before it goes wrong if it reproduces itself. But I must do one thing more, otherwise I'll never build it. He said, are you listening? Are we jogging? I've got you. I'm watching for that distant look, you know, looking into the middle distance and that vacant look. No, look. He said, look, we'll have to, are you ready? He said, we'll have to build into it a mechanism for diagnosing what goes wrong. So he had to produce another 10 billion bits of information into his machine to put a self-diagnostic apparatus into it so that when a bit went wrong before he'd started, finished building it, it put it right again. Oh, wait a minute, it diagnosed the trouble. Well, no, you've got 1,000 bits of information to make the machine, and then two or three million to make the machine reproduce itself in complexity. And now we've got to have a self-diagnosis horizon on it to make it know what's gone wrong while you're building it. Well, he put that in a huge amount of complexity to make it self-diagnostic. Then he found out, well, look, he said to the Americans, it's no use to make a machine that diagnoses it's wrong if you can't put it right. No use to know unless you can heal it, you're saying. So they said, well, okay, put in that one. And he said, we need a third level of complexity, so many billion bits of information to not only know what's gone wrong, but how to put it right again. So he built this huge triangle of complexity. Here's the point down below for the machine. And he goes out and out and out here in complexity. So he had the third level on top of it, the machine that not only diagnosed what went wrong, but that put right what was gone wrong. And that's known as the von Neumann machine. And everybody in secret is working on that today. Now you think of this, ladies and gentlemen, the worthy intellectuals of Anaheim. You got it? You are, you are a von Neumann machine. Using all the bits of machinery that I've talked about, your heart, your liver, your kidney, your brain, do you know anything goes wrong in your brain, your heart, the body makes a supreme diagnostic effort to know what's gone wrong. And if anything goes wrong with your DNA molecule, if it's not too gray, if the whole thing is not cluttered up with radiation damage and all the rest of it, your body is capable of repairing it, of diagnosing it and then repairing it. Then the last thing is this, these von Neumann machines, sprouted little von Neumann machines. Now you will admit, won't you, ladies and gentlemen, without my touching any delicate subjects, that you are von Neumann machines there, aren't you? You put any two of you people together, you see, the right sex and you will sprout babies. There's no doubt about it. Now you think, now listen, you understood me. You think of the complexity of the machine that is capable of sprouting little machines, eating a few potatoes, maybe a bit of rump steak and yoghurt and things like that, and producing from that energy that you put in your mouth, right, purely physically speaking, producing little marvels of babies. We've had four, my wife and myself. But you know, when they come into the world, perfect as they are, how they learn to speak, you try and teach a machine to speak. But a baby can. Baby looks at his mother and fixes it with her, fixes the mother with its eyes, watches the movement of its lips, and of her lips, and in a very short time, she speaks Anaheim English, doesn't she? Or he, there's no doubt, there's no doubt about it. Now the only thing is this, what I'm telling you is we're fearfully and wonderfully made. Fearfully and wonderfully made. Now, even the machina simplex, a machina simplex, a simple machine, cannot arise by chance. There isn't the information there. There's no teleonomy there. The purpose necessary to supply the information, to produce the aggregate of matter, which is a machine, always comes from outside the matter. Always. Now if a simple machine, which can't reproduce itself, can't arise by chance, who in the name of reason, reason, is going to say that a von Neumann machine, which sprouts little machines, diagnoses trouble and puts it right, is going to arise by chance. It's the sheerest form of degeneration of the thought process as I know of, to say that. Now I don't say that in any carping spirit at all. I say this in the spirit of logic. Now I must finish off on this line, ladies and gentlemen. You know this does me good, just to think what sort of a creator and saviour I have. It fills my heart with praise. It is intelligent. The biggest part of my body, which is given me and uses most blood, is without doubt the brain. It's super. The bits of information, the 10 billion bits of information necessary to make a brain. You talk of the Eccles book on the self and its brain. You have a look at it. It's only a thousand pages and if you can't sleep at night, read it. It's better than any sleeping pill because you'll go to sleep when you see these things. You think if a machine is purposeful and that includes a von Neumann machine, the purpose of man, the most important purpose of man is not to eat steaks and enjoy himself. The most important part of the teleonomy, the purpose of man, is to have right thoughts. The nature of the new birth is metanoia. To think again and to think anew. The world's thought, now I don't suffer from manic depression or anything like that, but the world's thought in scientific circles has to a very large extent gone wrong. To think that a von Neumann machine could ever arise by chance. But let me throw this one little bit in here for a titbit that people have children at school. If an ordinary machine can't reproduce itself and can't arise by chance, you think what Darwin was saying when he said a simple cell which reproduced itself arose by chance. Because a simple cell, there ain't no such thing because it's a von Neumann machine. And if you have the temerity to tell me that a von Neumann machine can be simple, well I don't know, as I see you're beyond medical help. We can't aid you there because any machine that can reproduce itself, diagnose its troubles and put it right as any biological cell can, no machine of that type can be simple. It can't be. But you think this, Darwin and the whole evolutionary theory is dependent upon a von Neumann machine arising by chance. Because until a machine can reproduce itself, it can't have any posterity. It can't have any errors. It can't reproduce itself. Now, you can't expect any cell which can't reproduce itself to have any purpose in evolutionary theory, can you? It must have mutations and pass them on to its posterity. Now, if it can't do that, then evolution is out. So evolution is absolutely and completely dependent on the spontaneous chance production of a von Neumann machine. Because any machine which is less than a von Neumann machine can't have any posterity. And if there's no posterity, there's no evolution by natural selection, isn't there? Can't be, absolute out. Now, let me come to the last thought because my time is just about up. It's this. One of the most satisfying things in life is to have right thoughts about our creator. Now, if any man sins, particularly against his machine, that sin, say a man goes into adultery, is unfaithful to his wife, or say he's an imbecile or a liar, or say he doesn't even care anything about his creator. Because anybody who does a bit of biology must know about his creator. And he doesn't care about it. That man loses the ability to have contact with his savior. The spirit is dead in trespasses and sins. And it's sin and trespasses which breaks off our contact and our thoughts about God. You know, if we sin, God becomes unreal to us. Now, I've sinned in my life even since I became a Christian. And I've sinned more than I care to think about. But I will tell you this, my own experience is when I forget the commandments of God, the 10 of them, particularly the first two, they're all 10. If I forget there isn't sin against them, God becomes unreal to me. When you find a person who's concerned about breaking the laws of God and asking for forgiveness, then suddenly the light of God's countenance becomes real to him. And any person who tries to live in the forgiveness of Jesus Christ and the correction of his sins, that person begins to use his computer here a right. And we're filled with the thoughts of our creator. You think that he loves us. I know what I am. And I'm not worth it. But God knows what I am and what my potentialities are. And he wants me and he wants you and your thoughts. And if your thoughts are cleansed by the blood of Christ, he forgives us. If they're cleansed by the blood of Christ, I will guarantee one thing, your thoughts will be cleansed towards God and he'll become real to you. And if he becomes real to you, then he promises this, by directing our thoughts, that he changes us into his own image. What he wants to do is have a Calvary Chapel and all the other chapels here in the United States and all over the world. He wants to have people there, little Christs, who think the way God thinks. And the way that God thinks is he loves his aberrant machines. Because our machine is coupled to our spirit and to our psyche, which has thoughts and connection with our savior. And that's what fills me with joy as I go about my scientific work, you know? Every new thing you find in the way of science speaks of the way he's built us and that fills me with joy and wonder. We'll pray together. Thank thee, Lord Jesus, that thou hast opened these things to the minds that seek thee. Forgive us, forgive me, all the things which have deceived thee and depressed thee and grieved thee this day. And renew us with a right mind who may think thy thoughts after us and so be renewed in our inner mind. Amen.
Is Man a Machine?
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Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith (December 22, 1915 – September 14, 1995) was a British preacher, organic chemist, and creationist whose ministry bridged science and faith to challenge evolutionary theory and proclaim biblical truth. Born in Reading, England, to Ernest Walter and Florence Emily Wilder-Smith, he pursued higher education at Reading University, earning a Ph.D. in Physical Organic Chemistry in 1941, followed by doctorates in Pharmacology from the University of Geneva in 1964 and from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich. Initially an atheist, he converted to Christianity in his 20s after intellectual struggles with evolution, influenced by his wife Beate Gottwaldt, whom he married in 1949. Wilder-Smith’s preaching career combined his scientific expertise with evangelism, beginning during World War II while working at Imperial Chemical Industries. He preached across Europe and North America, notably debating evolutionists like Richard Dawkins and John Maynard Smith at the 1986 Oxford Union Debate, where his arguments on information theory and thermodynamics gained attention. He served as Professor of Pharmacology at institutions like the University of Illinois (1959–1961) and Hacettepe University in Turkey, earning three Golden Apple Awards for teaching. Author of over 70 scientific papers and books like The Creation of Life (1970) and Man’s Origin, Man’s Destiny (1968), he emphasized creationism’s scientific basis. With Beate, he raised four children—Oliver, Petra, Clive, and Einar—and died at age 79 in Frauenfeld, Switzerland, leaving a legacy as a pioneering creationist preacher.