eBook Fulfilled Journey epub

Wilder-Smith (WS) was a fine man, a great christian, and a scientist with brilliant deductive and analytical capabilities. This book is full of funny anecdotes, for example the story about WS and his brother having a great time driving their father's huge car around (without permission). There are many stories about his visits to other countries, and also a story about a friend of his who was a scientist, but also a muslim. This friend borrowed a large sum of money from WS (3000 dollars) in order to buy certain chemicals overseas. He promised to pay it back, but upon reminding him some time later, the friend denied ever asking for this sum of money, or indeed receiving it. WS explained that this was due to the matter of 'honour' in Islamic and Middle Eastern culture. The friend lied about the matter because he didn't want to lose face for not being able to pay it back. WS also tells about his father's membership of the masonic lodge and his own refusal to join, his days in the army, and so on. I had great pleasure in reading it. WS fearlessly confronted the evolutionists, and once said about Richard Dawkins (some time after the Huxley Memorial Debate in 1986): 'This man has nothing to offer science.' And in my humble opinion he was absolutely right.

The book gives interesting detail of his conversion from atheism, his work helping German prisoners of war 'de-programme' as well as about his scientific career. A.E Wilder-Smith and his wife both led interesting lives and come across as warm lovely people, as well as intellectual heavyweights.

Readers might also be interested in the following book:

Who Made God? Searching for a Theory of Everything

Amazing read! Covers every subject under the sun! Intelligent, informational, humorous, uplifting, challenging, thought-provoking, amusing; it will be required reading for my homeschooled children!

The author was undoubtedly a genius and a highly committed humanitarian with a great passion to use his teaching skills to better the world.

The book exhaustively covers the entire range of his life, starting with a memory from the time he was an infant!

Besides being an accredited academic, with multiple degrees in Organic Chemistry and Pharmacology, he also was a scholar of languages, speaking English, German, Russian French Turkish and Norwegian. He traveled the entire world speaking before student groups and business conventions about the compatibility of Science and the Bible. He was dogmatically opposed to Darwinism and was one of the pioneers of Creation Science and Intelligent Design Theory.

So why do I give this book only 1 Star?

Partly to get your attention. But primarily because I perceived certain flaws in the book that are inexcusable for a man of Wilder-Smith's intellectual caliber and alleged religious devotion.

The most serious problems I saw are these:

(1) While professing a love for German people and culture and commanding a fluency in German, WS evinces zero understanding of the German situation during WWII. He devotes many pages describing the suffering of the English under NAZI bombardments throughout the war, but he fails to explain that England mercilessly bombed German civilians in nighttime bombing runs (violating the Geneva Convention) for six months before Germany retaliated with the so-called Battle of Britain. He also mentions almost casually the firebombing of Dresden in one line, without ever revealing any sense of guilt about this massacre of a purely civilian target by English and American bombers.

(2) He is staunchly anti-Communist, and he includes Socialism in this camp. He frequently derides state run socialist policies. Yet during a teaching stint in Norway he admits that he and his wife benefited enormously from the generous maternity and child care allowances of Norwegian law.

(3) He manifests no understanding of the economic travails of the so called Capitalistic West (really Cancer Capitalism or Corporate Welfare Facism) even as he complains about policies that lead to widespread unemployment.

(4) Most annoyingly to me, he maintains an air of moral superiority while riding the coattails of a society that does not live up to his professed religious standards. During WWII, he worked for a British Chemical company doing basic research. He insisted on this so he would have no direct part in the war effort. But he is strangely unperturbed by the fact that this same company produces many weapons and chemicals for the British military. Similarly many Christians live in a bubble of moral self-righteousness, pretending they can wash their hands of social policies not to their liking even as they derive benefits from living in such societies.

I have been a doubter of evolution and ID proponent for a long time, but after reading this book by one of the most intellectually respected pioneers of the ID movement, and seeing the above kinds of shortcomings and blindspots, I have to wonder if ID itself is fatally flawed.

For example, WS relentlessly attacks the supposed flaws in Darwinist theory; yet he refuses to consider that the Genesis creation account is anything but literal truth. No one, it seems to me, doubts for a second that the cave paintings found in France are about 30,000 years old;meaning that some form of man was in existence long before the Genesis Creation date of 6000 BC, but WS won't even consider this.

In my experience both Darwinists and Creationists excel at poking holes in the other side's views, but they are woefully unable to consider, let alone address, the flaws in their own theories! And this book follows this narrative.

Wilder-Smith's autobiography actually is moving me to question ID and Creationism and to move farther away from the Christian Church and all organized religions.