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The Five Senses
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 focuses on the concept of Logos in biology and how we experience our environment. He emphasizes the importance of our senses, including the sixth sense of extra sensory perception. The speaker highlights the wisdom of Jesus Christ in creating our ability to perceive and interact with the world. He also discusses the significance of redeemed faces and the communication we have with the external environment. The sermon encourages the audience to appreciate and think about God's thoughts.
Sermon Transcription
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. What I want to do tonight is speak about logos in biology, as we've been doing on the other nights I've been here, but with special emphasis on how we experience our environment. That is, how I know you're there and you know that I'm there. And it would be a poor world if we couldn't experience it, wouldn't it? And we'd be the poorer for it in the world too, I hope. Our testimony is dependent upon our instrumentation to experience the environment. And all environment is experienced by the five senses that we have, plus the sixth sense, which is called extrasensory perception, which we're going to have a look at tonight. Now all these things show the extreme wisdom of Jesus Christ who made them. That all things were made by him and for him, and by him all things consist, is the testimony of Scripture. So when we look at these complicated mechanisms, they're there to show his supreme wisdom. Now tonight we've thought of his suffering on the cross. Now we're all instrumented to feel pain. One of my, one of our boys is in oncology, that is in cancer. And he has all the terminal patients in Switzerland. He'll be coming out to see us in two weeks, two weeks time, the Lord willing. And his job is to reduce some of the pain that these poor terminal cancer patients experience. And for a young man, it's an enormous load to see how people have to suffer. But when we think of the sufferings of Christ tonight, and that he did it on the basis of the perfect suffering for the sinful, we can see what it means. Now the experience of those things is what I want to get over you tonight. And it's all done by a superb system of instrumentation. Now instrumentation, I use the word like that, so you see how much wisdom and thought and logos is behind it. All this idea that's going on in your education system, that we were made by evolution, by chance. Chance never produced any instrument that I know of. When you see what he's done, then you can only worship him for his great wisdom. I'm going to read one scripture out to you, and it's this. It's from Psalm 139, 14, where it says, I praise thee, for thou art fearful and wonderful. Wonderful are thy works. Psalm 139, 14. Now, wonderful are thy works. Now the works that we're going to talk about tonight are the works that are thought out beforehand. They're premeditated. You don't make instruments without premeditation. You've got to make one system compatible with another, and all those things have been thought out. So it goes on, the text, to show that his works show how precious the thoughts of God are. When you look at God's works, and that's what we're going to do tonight. I've excused myself from my little sketch on the board. I never was a Picasso, but I do my best just to make things clear. Now it says that the works show us the thoughts of God, and the thoughts of God we've just been celebrating, that is, to bear our sins for us. That was his great thought in redemption. But he has his other ideas in making his works, and those ideas are that we enjoy the world, the environment he's made for us. Now we have been worshipping him for his sacrifice tonight, and that we should do. But the other thing is this, we can thank him that he's done things so well that we can experience and enjoy the environment round about us. So it says, how precious to me are thy thoughts, O God. When you look at his works, you think of his thoughts, and he says they're precious. Now that's nice, that gives me enjoyment when I meet an intelligent person and share thoughts with him. Does you, doesn't it? Does you, doesn't it too? It's not only that we enjoy strawberries and ice cream, is it? But it is that we enjoy one another, don't we, by talking to one another and sharing what God has given us. He says, how precious are thy thoughts. Now don't think you only live by bread, you don't. You do live by sharing the thoughts of others, and before all things, the thoughts of our Creator. How precious are thy thoughts. They're as good as a meal, aren't they? How precious are thy thoughts to me, O God. How vast is the sum of them. If I were to count them, they are more than the sand. There's abundance of all those thoughts. Now what I'm going to do tonight is just simply try and give you some of the thoughts of God as shown in the instrumentation of the body. Now the environment we live in is given us, for us to rule over and order and take care of, but it's also given us to enjoy. Now if an environment were cut off from us so that we couldn't experience it, we shouldn't enjoy it, should we? We shouldn't profit from it. We've got to have a means of communication in our inward life with the external environment round about us. And I want to have a look and see how we do that. You have to put up with just a little bit of technology. You don't mind that, do you? Because if it increases your appreciation of his thoughts, then I'll say, risk stuffing a little bit more technology down your throats, so that you do really appreciate his thoughts. You only understand his thoughts if you appreciate them and think about them. Now let's have a look at one thing. One of the things that does me good, you know—I expect it does you just as good—is to see a redeemed person's face. A person comes up to you. I was in the park at Tustin the other day, and we were just enjoying the hummingbirds flying around and hearing the mockingbirds singing to us, you know, because they solicit us around our way, keeping you supplied with music all day long. When somebody got off one of the agricultural machines, which was distributing manure on the lawns to keep the lawns nice there, and artificial manure, and going along with my wife arm-in-arm, you see, just enjoying it. It was lovely. And what I did enjoy more was he turned off the motor, the wretched motor, so that we could hear ourselves talk. He walked straight over to me and addressed me by name. Well, you know, I'm but a stranger and a pilgrim here, so I was very surprised. He said, I was with you in Calvary Chapel the other night, and I just wanted to say how fine it is to meet one another like this. What a coincidence. You know, and there was a man there who'd obviously been redeemed. Now that does me good, because that's a thought of God, what he wants to make of us, by giving us faces that show his redemption. That's the first thing I want to say. You know, one of the things about the face that's being redeemed, you know, are the eyes, aren't they? You look into a person's eyes, and sometimes they're just like looking into somebody who's got very dark spectacles on, and you can't see at all what's going on. But other times you see a depth of affection, clarity, and redemption, don't you, in other people's eyes. Now how does an eye see? Well, an eye doesn't only see by receiving and taking in the photons that come from outside. An eye also gives out. It's like a flash lamp. It has not only a mirror in it to reflect, but it also receives. When a person is dying, you suddenly see that there's something not being given out, which was being given out, while the spirit was still in the body. Now the eye sees, just look at my little drawing. I can't go away from the microphone here, because I haven't got my usual little piece of apparatus on my tie. The objects in our environment are seen by the photons, either produced by the sun, or by our little imitations of the sun up in the roof, which come out and fall on the objects round about us, in the world round about us, and are reflected from that. And when they're reflected from it, they are picked up by the eye, and the eye has a plastic lens in it. And you can alter the focal length of the plastic lens by certain muscles in the eye, which are exceedingly delicate. When you've got your lens just nicely focused, how do you do that? You don't know how you do that, do you? It's all automatic. It's all underground. Some of the newer cameras have automatic focusing apparatuses to get the lens and the distance just right. And when you look into them and see how they do it, you realize what a super apparatus that is, to get the lens just squeezed to the right extent, so that you get a clear image in photons on your retina. Now when you get a bit older, you needn't get as old as I am, but when you do get a bit older, you'll find that the muscles on the lens of the eye, and the accommodation muscles, get tired and stiff, and they don't work anymore. So then you have to put on spectacles to do the bending of the photons coming into your eye, to get them just right to sit on the retina. Now you get then, by this bit of instrumentation in the eye, an image in photons of the environment round about you. This is the instrumentation in biology. And that image there is color sensitive too. It's in all the colors of the rainbow. And there are in the retina special substances synthesized by the body. You don't know how to do it because your chemistry is not good enough. But it recognizes some colors over against another, other colors, and transforms these photonic images on the retina of your eye, transforms them into electrons. You try and do that. It's a super piece of technique. And we don't know anything about it. It goes all automatically. Now when they've been, the photons have been converted into electrons, they go up through one you see there, the red that I've marked with one, up to the optic nerve, which is the biggest nerve in the head, and go through a computer underneath the brain. And then they're sprayed, if I might put it like that, onto a screen. This is figurative language, ladies and gentlemen, in the brain, a screen. And on the screen they appear, the images which were photonic on the retina, appear in the brain, just in front of the consciousness. This has been done experimentally by Wilder Penfield in Canada some years ago. They appear in the brain as an electronic image of the environment round about you. So I can see you all here, but you know, I don't see you as you are. I see you as an image in electrons on the bottom of my brain. And that is pushed up onto the screen on the brain, and the consciousness reads that off the screen, what I've seen. Now it's a super piece of technique. It's absolutely marvellous. It's only now just beginning to come out what it does. Now the remarkable point about this is this, that you don't see things as they are, you see things as they ought to be. And therein lies a story. You see, if you go to a person on the beach, and he's lying in a deck chair, as he should be on the beach, and you photograph him from nearby his foot, you've done that, haven't you? You get in your photograph one huge foot, don't you, or a toe or something like that, and right in the background a little tiny pinhead of a man lying in his chair. Now that is things as they are. Now your eye, if he sits down at the foot of this deck chair and looks at him, sees it like that. The picture on the retina is one huge toe or one huge foot, and the rest of it is a pinhead somewhere in the middle distance. Now that's as it's shown on your retina. Now your retina takes that down, puts it up through the computer, and says this won't do. This can't be true. The man doesn't consist of one toe. There's other things more important. Although you see with the retina the right sort of picture, which is one huge toe and the rest of pinhead, your brain, the computer under your brain, corrects that picture. And it isn't nearly as bad when you look at it with your eye as it is when you look at it on a photograph. Because on the photograph you see things as they are, don't you, just one toe. But in the brain you don't. Now you think of building in a computer the ability to project the picture as it should be and not as it is, not as it physically is. It's absolutely astounding. We do that in other things, you know. When we hear a story about a person, we sometimes automatically correct it, don't we, as it ought to be. Now whether you ought to do that in love or not, I don't know. But the fact is this, that we're automatically built in by the hardware which one sperm and one ovum contains to build the computer under the brain to correct all pictures that are put in so that they're seen as they ought to be and not as they are. You think of asking your photographer to do that with your photographs and see what sort of a face he pulls when you tell him to do it. And you say, well, I do it and I don't have any trouble at all, I do it automatically. Then see what he says. He'll probably ask for a psychiatrist and see if you're all right. But that is the sort of luxury with which Jesus has provided us, because it is a luxury. There's nothing cheap, there's nothing cheap about the instrumentation of the human body. It's for the maximum enjoyment of the environment that's possible to get. Why does he want us to enjoy ourselves? He does. That your joy might be full is one of his words, isn't it? And here you've got it, correcting nasty pictures and putting them right. Well now, just keep that in your mind about how the eye sees and think what you do if you waste your time filling your brains with all sorts of pictures which will haunt you for the rest of your life, which you'd wished you'd never seen. We should ration that very, very carefully, how we use our eyes, so that we don't destroy what God has given us for our enjoyment. Now the other thing is this. Everything that I see is corrected. Everything that I see is given there so that I get the maximum enjoyment from it. But you think of this one other little refinement we've got, which the Creator has given us for our joy, is this, that I have a memory bank for all the pictures that I see. A memory bank, and it's completely compatible with these color pictures that I get in electrons on my consciousness when I look out into the environment round about me. I can, if I've seen anything very nice, you know, I was looking at a hummingbird sitting in our garden this afternoon. And this little fellow, you know, they're quite bright little fellows, hummingbirds, most beautiful colors. He sat up there and watched me reading for a long time, then he dived straight at me. And he hovered in front of me, looked at me with one eye, because you see they look out both sides, and he looked at me with the other eye in the air all the time. And I was real pleased to see him because he was a beautiful little fellow. And, you know, what I'm doing now is calling back on my recall system what I saw two, three hours ago. Now you think of the refinement of that, that I've got a memory bank which in a second will store in chemical compounds, by doing certain syntheses, that which I've seen. And I can sit here, the hummingbird's no longer here, but I can call him to memory. And you think of the joy that gives me when I sit down and think about this. When I go to bed at night, you know, put my head on the pillow, all these pictures that I've had during the day give me great pleasure. Think of the thoughts of the Creator, when you look at his works, in giving us a system like that. And don't you think, ladies and gentlemen, that that sort of thing arose by itself? You ask any engineer, any information engineer, what he thinks of a system like that, he'll very rapidly tell you. The marvellous thing is this, a few potatoes and strawberries and cream, things like that, fuel the system that it works. Just think of that, and just a little bit above room temperature. You don't know how to have oil pumps and explosions and all that sort of thing to do it, but it just works nice and calmly while you're digesting your dinner. It really is a super system, isn't it? Well now, that's the first one, that's the biggest nerve in the head, the optical system. And we must now go and have a look at the next little system, that is the ear. The auditory nerve is just underneath the optical nerve. You see number two, I put it down there. And that works on the sound waves beating on the eardrum and cochlea, which is like a snail, you see how that works in there. And it's tuned to recognize and vibrate to all sorts of harmonies. But it does object to disharmony. Now that is built in to the shape of the thing, so that it vibrates just at the right time with just the right harmonies that are coming in. And I don't know how you are, ladies and gentlemen, but I can sing much better. I'm not very good at it. But I can sing much better when there are a lot of people singing round about me because we all get into harmony together. The vibrations go together and my system is such that it fits into what's round about going on round about me. Now let's just have a look at this sense of hearing. Certain animals, and we can do it to a small extent, a very, very small extent, like bats, have a radar system, a sonar system, by which they can recognize in pitch blackness the objects which they would fly against if they didn't recognize them. You can put a bat up in a room which is completely without light, absolutely pitch black, and you can string steel wires all over that room in the most outlandish sorts of positions. And then you fly between an absolute maze of wires in pitch blackness, and it won't touch them once. You can do it for hours. Now it does it by uttering a little chirp. You can hear it sometimes when you're young. You can hear it better than when you're old because it's a very, very high pitch. And the high pitch chirp goes out and is reflected from all the objects which, against which it's directed by the direction of the chirp which the bat emits. Now it never hits anything. It's absolutely a perfect system. And when you think how quickly the bat flies, think how quickly it must do its mathematics, because this is a mathematical problem. You see, it gives a chirp, a high pitch chirp, and the chirp hits the wire in front of it, and the wire reflects the chirp back. And the bat's brain receives from its directional ears the echo of the chirp it gave a millionth of a second ago. Now from the distance, the time required for the chirp that it emitted to come back, the bat can calculate to within a millimetre the exact position of the wire, and it'll avoid it. Now you think what that means, ladies and gentlemen. This is a good thing to think about. The bat must know how quickly that wavelength travels in air at that temperature, so that it can calculate, I sent the chirp out, and the chirp has now come back, and it was so many millionths of a second. And then knowing the speed of sound in air, it can calculate from that, but it couldn't do it without that. It must know, in its program, the speed of sound in air at that temperature. It can calculate the distance and avoid it. And that's so quickly, and you remember a bat flies quite quickly, so quickly that it never collides. Now you think of the mathematical ability of a lowly animal like a bat to calculate that heart. It's astounding, isn't it? Just you think he's flying, and on his mathematics depends his life. Because if he flies into the wire, he'll hurt himself. He always misses it. And he can do it for no end of the time. Now the other one that I'd like to mention, because it's on the same system, is the bottlenose dolphin. You've seen them, haven't you? Down at Oceanside, they play out in the water, and you can watch them for hours, up and down, and up and down, as they play with everything they can find. Now the bottlenosed ones are nice little fellows. They have on top of their head a huge dome, and the dome is called a melon. And nobody knew what melon was for, until quite recently. And then the analysis was done on those domes, and they found it consisted of discrete layers of unsaturated fatty acids, and linoleic acid, and things like that, with the double bonds in different positions. And they thought, well, why does the dolphin go to such trouble to make such acids, which are difficult to make, with the double bonds in the right position? Why does it do it? So somebody hit on the idea that the linoleic acids—nobody knew this before—deflect sound waves, just like a lens deflects light and will concentrate light. And so they've got these layers of different fatty acids there, which will concentrate sound waves, just like a lens concentrates an image onto the retina. And the dolphin does that. So they tried it out, and they blindfolded a dolphin, blindfolded so it couldn't see anything at all with its eyes, and sent it out to fish. And do you know, that little fellow didn't even notice he was blindfolded. He could catch those fish just as quickly before he could see Jack Robinson with his eyes or without his eyes. And he was doing it by uttering ultrasonic sound, measuring the time required for that sound to be reflected from the fish, quickly doing his calculations and grabbing the fish. But you think, he's got to know, this is the important point. This is where the thoughts of the Creator come in, which make us so glad, because he thinks of us. That's the important thing. He not only thinks about problems like us, problems like that, but thinks about problems like us usually. Now the dolphin knows for his computer the speed of sound in water. And the speed of sound in water is a different problem to the speed of sound in air. So the dolphin's computer must be differently programmed to the bat's computer. The bat knows it in air, and can unfailingly catch his prey and avoid the wires by doing his mathematics quickly in his head. He doesn't need a bit of paper to write all the calculations down that we might need, you see. He does it in his head. And he avoids flying into things in the process. The dolphin gets his living by it. And if you've ever watched them, when we were going up the coast on the Norwegian freighters, we used to watch them down through the holes through which the anchor goes in the front of the ship, in the bow of the ship. You could watch down there, and you could see the dolphins sitting in the bow wave of the boat. And there they'd sit all day long. They wouldn't move. They were traveling at high speed because they're riding on the energy of the ship. And they'd just dart off, catch a fish, come back again, and sit there again, wait for the next one. But their calculations are being done all the time on a computer programmed on the speed of sound in water. Now you think, if you're going to tell me, and your education partner tells me, that a computer of that degree of instrumentation is programmed by random events, you know, I'll have a man like that arrested if he tries to tell and to teach my children that sort of nonsense. Because this is a job of the highest computer technique. You can't program a computer to do this sort of thing at the rate that bats fly, and at the rate that dolphins swim. You can't do that except by thought. Now what I'd like to encourage you in thinking about is this. Especially tonight, we've been thinking about the death of Jesus for our sins. We've been thinking about that. We're commanded to think about these things, and I'm happy to think about them. But if we think of these things, and Jesus puts his thought into instrumenting us like this, think how much more he thinks of us men and women and all our problems. He thinks of us. He is the logos, and his works show his thoughts for as many as the sand of the sea. He not only thinks of us, he thinks of all the things we need for our enjoyment and for our salvation. Well that'll be enough on the way of the first two there, the sight and the sound. You'll be disappointed if I don't do anything on three and four, won't you? Because I've sometimes mentioned some of these things, and perhaps we can just get a little bit more, as John Wesley said, off this joint than just one meal. We can have two or three meals off one joint, was what Wesley's idea was of a good sermon. Now if you take the third there, that's the nose. Now we can smell things. You think what an advantage that is for our pleasure. Now I have in my garden on the mountainside near Spiez, where we live in Switzerland, I keep in my garden, I'm very careful to keep it there, what we call Seidelbast. It's what you people call, because you're so elite here, you see. I'll give you this Latin name. It's called Daphne, and it's one of the lilac types of bushes, and it grows wild in the woods there, and it's very carefully protected because it's one of these endangered species. But it grows in the woods, and it blooms before it gets any leaves on it. The blooms come straight out of the little branches of the bush, straight into a deep purplish blue flower. And at night, just when the sun is going down, that emits the most beautiful odor. It blankets the whole garden in my garden, because I have two or three of these plants. Now what are we going to say about that? You think what that means. These plants start to bloom just about the end of February, the beginning of March. And the last day we were at home, in the middle of March, it bloomed this time. And you can, you don't need to go out and see it, you just open the door. It's like the orange groves here, you know. You get that lovely orange grove perfume, don't you? We were out at Lake Elsinore a week or two ago, in the evening, and it's a blanket of olfactory delight, isn't it? If I might say that to you. Of course, the ladies have been leading the men around by their noses all these years. They don't appreciate this so much. So just think, just reflect. These plants, the Daphne plant, produces from CO2, and water, and sunlight, and a few minerals, one of the most complex, odiferous substances we have, the ionones. Now, they're lovely compounds. You find them in the lilac plant. You find them in a number of plants of that kind. And they're beautiful. Now you think, the ionone goes on to the nose, and is there converted into electrons? Think of that. You try and do that in the lab. Very, very difficult indeed. And the electrons go up to the brain, and there they're converted into an electronic picture of the perfume of the ionone. An electronic picture. Now I can't describe a perfume. Neither can you. I can't describe a taste. Neither can you. But if I tell you what lilac smells like, you know, don't you? You don't need a word because you know. But you couldn't describe it in words. But that's done electronically for you. You know, I can stand here now and talk about that extreme olfactory pleasure, because I can call it up from my memory bank. I can. So can you. Now you think what that means. I not only have the pleasure of smelling that once a year, when it blooms, but the whole year through, it's stored in my memory as a synthesis. Proteins, probably, in my brain. And at will, I can recall it. So that the pleasure that I have on one day, when I left here and it was in full bloom, I can recall all the year. Now you think of a savior who made us with that last refinement, so that we're not merely utilitarian. We're not merely the products of utilitarianism. There's somebody behind us who knows how to make pleasures forevermore. Don't you think that's something to worship him for? That he takes care of us so much that we have extra pleasures. Now let's just do one little bit more about this, and I'll have to get finished because time's getting ahead. There's a lot more to do, but we'll think about that later. We used to have, on the farm where I was brought up near Oxford, we used to have an Alsatian dog. It was a bitch. And she loved us children. Never anything happened to us. She was there, and she'd look after us. She's like a mother would. Now sometimes, or very often, I was away from home for a long time. You see, we went to public school. That's boarding school. And you'd be away for three months. Now this dog used to love to go hunting with me. And I used to go hunting from the time I was eight or nine years old. She loved that. She just thought this was it. This was the cat's whisker. So when I came home, you know, this dog would watch the big farm gates, Kentwood Farm, where we used to live, and bark. That was her job. And she'd stand up at the gates, and she could open the gates too. That was the awful thing. She could open the gate. But when you came to the gate, she'd look through. Now Alsatians don't see very well. They see, but it's like trees, you know, walking. They don't see very clearly. And she'd come up to you, and she'd think, after three months she'd been away, she'd think that perhaps she was barking wrongly. And then she'd excuse herself, and put her tail between her legs, and come and excuse herself. But to make sure, this is very important, ladies and gentlemen, this is very, very important. To make quite sure, she'd come up to you and have a look, and then be unsure, but then she'd smell. She'd smell you. She'd reassure herself from her memory bank. And she got a memory bank of millions of smells. And her eye bank of memories was not so good. The identification by the eye is not so good. But with a dog with a huge nose like that, you know, they've got plenty of room for memories of smells. Then she'd smell you, and then she'd give you punches with her nose all over to show how much she loved you. And she'd wag her tail, and everything in the garden was beautiful. But you see, she had, in her memory, a whole different consciousness system than we. She recognized smells rather than forms. And once she got her smell, she was absolutely certain that you were the one she was looking for, and everything was beautiful. Now, you think of storing millions of smells. You know, when a dog goes along the street, it'll always want to stop and sniff something, won't it? Because you see, that for them is a real pleasure. It's a real pleasure, they know. And they've got everything categorized by their smells. Now, we're poor, deprived persons on that respect. The only thing we can recognize is eau de cologne and things like that, isn't it? But they can recognize all the finesse of every person. Now, just keep that in your mind. What that means, technically, to supply us with the extra pleasure of being able to call to mind all these things, just be thinking about them. His thoughts are as numerous as the sand of the sea, and they're thoughts of goodness for our well-being and for our pleasure. Think how excruciating it must have been for the Lord Jesus to have his back opened with the lash, like it was, and then to be left there to die. To see them dividing up his clothes, he'll never need them again. Before his eyes, before he was gone. I think he did that for us, so that we'll have eternal pleasures forevermore at his right hand. Okay, well, just let's leave that. I'll do one more thing, and that'll be enough for tonight, because there's one little spiritual message we must get out of this. It's rather a big leg of to have for one meeting. You can get two or three meals off this. When I was a young man, I used to read, when I got converted, Wesley's sermons. They're marvelous, how he went about winning people for Christ. Now, let's put in this last little bit. The last one I've got is proprioception, number five. Now, proprioception means the perception of yourself. One of the things about us, you see, is that we have consciousness. We know that we are. How that works, no man knows. They used to think that it worked just by networks of nerves going through world lines, and the body being conscious of those world lines of impulses going through it, which give us our consciousness. But today, that's gone. It doesn't work out experimentally. Sir John Eccles did a lot on the consciousness of the brain, and he showed that we're capable of conceiving time running backwards in the consciousness, and did some experiments to prove it, to show how complex that is, that we are conscious of ourselves. Let's have this one little simple point out, and then I'll finish it off with the sixth sense at the top there. When I stand here, I'm mechanically, as I've said before, very highly unstable. I'm standing on two toes and a heel, and my weight is up here. My center of gravity is anywhere where it ought not to be, you see. And I have to keep on checking things to see that I don't fall over, because normally speaking, if I weren't conscious, I would fall over. So would you. Now, you think how that's done. There are in the legs and in all the muscles of the body little sensors which determine the exact pressure on each part of the muscle, and they unconsciously to us pass up through the spinal column up to the brain the exact pressure on each part of the muscle. And the body, with its computer up here, is so programmed that when there's a certain pressure on that muscle, then the body can calculate that if that pressure is not relieved or corrected quickly, that I shall get out of balance and do a nosedive. Now, the degrees of pressure are very, very small. But millions of them, of the pressures per pounds per square inch, ounces per square inch, whatever you like to call them, sent up here, and they're all computerized, and there's an exact picture sent down to the rest of the muscles to correct that pressure on this muscle and to relieve the pressure on that muscle so that I remain upright. Now you think of a computer doing that when a girl stands on her toe in a ballet dance and pirouettes at enormous speed, left ways and then right ways. Now you think, do you think of doing that? With the speed of rotation one way and then the other, not getting giddy, and still be able to stand and walk after you've done it. Now I think it's one of the most supreme pieces of programming that any computer you can find, human or otherwise, or machine, that you can consider. Think of that. Now, I'm saying these things merely to show you how wrong it is to give kids the ideas that all the design that we have is not due to designer. It is due to the materialistic formula that I've given you on other nights. It's due plain to the thoughts of God. And there are so many thoughts there which are extra measure that we might have pleasures on earth in this life, as well as the pleasures forevermore at his right hand, that it's worth thinking about. Now I'm going to give you this last idea, because the time has gone, and it's this. We not only have the five senses, such as I put up there, we also have, and it's a well-established fact today, extrasensory perception. We all know things which we can't tie down to any particular organ of perception—the eyes, the ears, the nose, the mouth, and the proprioception. What do I mean by that? We all know things, for example, the presence of God, if you're redeemed, which you can't tie down to any particular organ that you've got. You don't see him with your eyes. You don't feel him with your touch. You don't use your olfactory system to do it. But you know. I'm going to tell you one ever-so-short story to show you how this works. We were in Bergen in Norway. I was there as professor for a couple of years, and Clive, our third child, who'll come and see us in about two weeks' time, was born there on the Bergen fjord in a chalet. And he was a little Churchill, blue-eyed and fair-haired and everything that there ought to be in Norway, you see. So after we'd had—he was born in our home. He wasn't born in hospital. None of our children were born in hospital. They were all born at home. Even in the Chicago petter, our daughter was born at home. Now, just think of this. Just after he was born, my brother came to see us, and he had then four little girls. One of them is living quite near here now. He's living in Lake Elsinore. He had four little girls, and they'd never had a little brother, and they did so want a little brother, never got one. So little girls pay far too much attention to the newborn babe and put fingers in his eyes and all that sort of things, like little girls do, you see. So we were very worried about this, unless anything untoward happened. So we got an invitation just at that time when my brother came to have an evening with the king of Norway. He wanted to greet the faculty and recognize all the work we'd done there amongst the fisher people and people of Bergen. And so I said to my wife, now, would you like to go? Well, it was 10 days after the confinement, so she said she'd like to go. So I said, well, what are you going to do about these little girls around that baby? That'll never do. So we had a really good nurse, a Christian nurse, who'd helped my wife during the confinement. And I said to her, now, Fuan Erika, don't do the washing up. Watch for that baby. No nonsense, because those little babies, those little girls, don't understand very much, and you could easily blind the child. So she said she would watch for the babe and not do the washing up. So we set off at 10 minutes to seven in our old Mercedes to go over the mountains, a rough dirt track it was, right over the mountains and then down into the city of Bergen. And when I was just going over the last hump, before we got into the valley the other side, my wife, who is rather, she's not very emotional in these things, but she suddenly said to me, stop. Now, my wife doesn't usually address me like that, but I knew that there was authority here, so I stopped. So I said, what's the matter dear? She said, it's the babe. She was as white as a sheet. So I said, well, what is it then? She said, I don't know, but we must go back now. So I sweat to get this car around, you see, on this dirt track, and got it downhill again. And she looked up again, and she said, oh dear, it's all right now, we can go. Now, well, you know, I know my wife well enough to know that she doesn't do silly things, if they are silly, that's it. So I said, you want to go down, see the king of Norway? So she said, yes. So we went, and we had a nice evening with the king, and about nine o'clock, we started to come home again. So I said, well, when we're going over this dirt track again, you see, to get back, I said, well, we will find out what happened in this house at seven o'clock. So we went in together, and I asked for Erika, the girl, I said, would you tell me exactly what happened in this house at seven o'clock tonight? And she coloured up, and she said, yes, I can. So I said, well, what was it? Well, she said, while I was doing the washing up, I heard little feet just above me. So I dashed up the stairs, and the little girl had pulled the baby by its legs out of the cot, and was dragging it across the floor, all those splintery Norwegian floors, you know, dragging it to the stairs, and she was going to bump it down, feet first, down the stairs, a newborn baby. And she said, I rescued it then. So I said, anything happen? And she said, well, it's a bit scratched, but otherwise, it's all right. So I went and inspected the baby, and he'd taken no damage from it. You'll see him when he comes. And he's the one who's doing the cancer patients, the oncology, so he knows. Now look, friends, how do you account for that? You can't, it isn't an experimental question that you can do any scientific experiment on. You can't do that. You can't arrange things like that. But the arrangement, the relationship between a mother and a baby is often very, very close indeed. And it often, when they're a bit older too, we know the case of a mother who knew the exact time when her son was wounded in the First World War, and said so. Something has happened to Billem, and it was so. He'd been hit by shrapnel. These things are real. Now how do you account for them? Well, I think that we have in our instrumentation the ability to have a connection with things that are extra material. And I don't mean a cult. I mean, we have that ability too. But we certainly have an ability to sense the presence of God, don't we? I mean, if you get a person who has confessed his sins to Jesus, and has received forgiveness and absolution, you'll get that person to say, I know that my Redeemer liveth. Won't you? We've all experienced that ourselves. Now I think this, that the extrasensory perception is an ability we have, but it's very easily clouded over. You see, Adam was made to have fellowship with God. He was made to walk with God in paradise. And I think to walk with God in paradise is obviously extrasensory. You can't do that with your eyes, your hands, your feelings, or anything like that. It's something that we have, which God has given us. Now if sin comes into our life, even as Christians, there's one thing that is absolutely sure. I know when I've done anything wrong. I've done lots of things that I regret. There's one thing that I do know. If I've sinned, the reality of my prayers grows faint. Right or wrong? And I think if a person noticed that his extrasensory perception with the Lord Jesus is growing weak, then I would ask you to think about it and see if there's any clouding coming up by sin which impairs the fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ. These are realities. And if a person takes care every day, every morning before he goes to work, and every night before he lies down to sleep, to see that the extrasensory perception is clear, that person will remain in the presence of God forever. That person will never fall if he does that daily and regularly. But if he doesn't, you see, if you get, say, dirt in your eyes or a foreign body in your eyes, you can't see. If you get foreign bodies in your ear, you can't hear. If you get flu and the white coating from flu on your tongue, you can't taste. It upsets your perception. And your perception of the Spirit of God is certainly coated by sin and needs therapy to get rid of. And if you get rid of it, then the presence of Jesus will be new to you. These things are real. We've all experienced them in a more or less degree. You can't get over them by activities, by hopping around and all that sort of thing. You can get over them by letting them being removed, the hindrances being removed with the blood of Christ. If you do that, then you will sense the Lord Jesus every day as you ought. Thank you for being so kind to listen to me so long. We'll pray together. We ask thee, Lord Jesus, that these things may be real to us and that we may sense thy presence daily more and more as the time goes on, that we may be conformed into thine image. So we thank thee for this time together and for the supper we've had together. Amen.
The Five Senses
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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.