Evolution or Creation — Dr. A.E. Wilder-Smith

Evolution or Creation: The Great Debate

Now, ladies and gentlemen, tonight I have to talk to you about the great debate, the great debate, God or chance, that is, evolution or creation. And I'm going to do the same passage of Scripture—I'll just read it out to you—so that it really does remain with you for some time to come, to introduce this subject.

And it's the passage in Romans, chapter 1. I'm going to read it out too carefully. Verse 19, For what can be known about God is plain, and he means it's plain to the godless. That goes out of verse 18, the wickedness of men and the ungodliness of men.

What can be known about God is plain to them, to the wicked and the ungodly, because God has shown it to them. It isn't that they've sought God. You know, men run away from God. It's God has shown it to them.

He's been the active one in doing it. And here's how he does it. For ever since the creation of the world, God's invisible nature, namely his eternal power and dignity and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that are made.

Creation Reveals God's Invisible Nature

Now science is the study of the things that are made. We study matter in time. The Holy Scripture says here through Paul that God has shown himself actively to all men in the study of nature. That is in the study of plain science.

Then he says, since God has done that, men are without excuse. Just listen to it. Ever since the creation of the world, his invisible nature, that is his eternal power and deity, the eternal power of God and God's deity, his Godhead, think of that, has been shown plainly to all men, especially to the godless and especially to the wicked, in the study of science.

Okay? Therefore he says, since he's shown them actively in the study of science, the things that are seen, he's shown the invisible things, so that they, the godless, are without excuse. That is, God expects us to be reasonable creatures.

That is, creatures able to use the gray matter up here, and when he shows something to us that we realize the consequences. We call that in science, inductive thought. That is, we're able to extrapolate from the visible to the invisible.

And he says, the extrapolation is so simple and so plain, that the godless, the atheists and the wicked, are without excuse. Now don't think that we're going to argue with God when we stand before him.

We shall be speechless, because we're without excuse, unless we take this lesson. Now it's a very, very serious thing to say, and when I read it as a young man, you know it really upset me, because it sounds very bigoted and dogmatic.

But in my old age, I've come to the absolute firm conviction that it's logically absolutely the case. Now I'm going to show you that, with God's help and your attention tonight, that it's just as the Apostle Paul says.

And I'm going to show it to you from the scientific point of view. You must do the rest with your pastor here, from the theological point of view. Now let's just have one short word of prayer, because I've got to dive into the pool, and I need a deep pool to dive into to be able to swim tonight.

We'll pray together. We ask thee, Lord Jesus, that thou who didst make us in thine own image, so that in ourselves we can see thee, fallen as we are, so that we're without excuse if we don't see thee in thy creation.

We ask thee that thou mightest be so good as to open our minds, open our understandings, as thou didst to thy disciples, that we may see thee, thy truth, as thou art, that the truth might make us free.

We ask thee to give us the truth, to me and to all of us, this night, and we praise thee for doing that, because the truth sets us free. Thy word is truth. Amen. Now, ladies and gentlemen, this question of the great debate is really the debate on whether there's a creator who created the creation, or whether there isn't.

General Revelation and Special Revelation

And I'm going to go into a bit of the creation tonight, to show you that there's a creator, and that we can know him right well, just by studying science. Now, I know that the Bible gives us the one side, the revelation of God, in thought and concepts.

And that revelation is in the book, in the Bible. But the other revelation, which is equally effective, says the Scripture, to bring us to God, not necessarily to Jesus, because that's a special revelation of God, which he's given us in his word.

But he's given us a revelation of himself, and if we find himself, we should find that God the Father and God the Son are one. I am one with the Father, says Jesus. So, we'll go back to that anyway, but when we're talking about the scientific side, you've got to be very careful, especially in America, to keep off the theological side, otherwise you'll get people saying that you don't separate the church from the state, and all that sort of thing.

Now, if you ask the average American in the cities whether he believes in God, I believe over 90 say they do, whether they're Christians or not, about that figure somewhere. If you go to Europe, which has been brainwashed more effectively than you have, by the Marxists, and no Christians have done, very few Christians have done anything about it, you find that 52 of the people on the street, adults, by Gallup Poll, say they don't believe in God.

They're atheists. They don't say they're agnostics, that is, they don't know, but they say they do know that there isn't one. And of those 52%, when asked, why don't you believe in God, 85%, 83 or 85%, said that they didn't believe in God because Darwinism, evolution, had made it unnecessary, indeed ridiculous, to believe in God.

So 82, 83 of the atheists there say that Darwinism is the reason for it. And that's why I've concentrated so much of my attention on Darwinism. Now, let's just have a look why they talk like that. If you look at biology, you find that we are metabolic machines.

Purpose, Information, and the Need for a Designer

Now, don't worry, a metabolic machine is an apparatus for getting energy for its own purposes from the environment. You get your energy from the potatoes and steaks which you eat, and thereby you're a machine.

Now, you're more than a machine, but your psyche rides on a machine, and you're given the executive ability you have to do things with your hands, to do things with your feet, and to think about things with your head, because you are a machine and can extract the energy required to do these things from the environment.

Now, I'm going to ask you one thing, and I want you to think about this throughout the whole evening. Do you think that anybody would dare to stand up in a lab and say that any machine, that is something with a purpose, a machine has a purpose, say a car has a purpose to transport you, a sewing machine has a purpose to sew, a milking machine has the purpose of milking cows, okay?

Do you think that any machine, and a machine is per definitionem, purposeful, do you think it ever arises by chance? I mean, it's just a simple, perfect, straightforward question. The answer is no. You have to insert into the machine information from without to make matter, aggregate itself to produce the machine.

I mean, if you thought that by shaking iron ore together in Birmingham with coal or coke that you'd get out a cadillac, you'd have to shake a mighty long time to do it, because you know, everybody knows, that a cadillac or a sewing machine is a combination of matter with extrinsic information put into it.

The iron and the steel and the plastic and all the rest of it, if I dare say that a cadillac has plastic in it, but if it does, then all those things are put together with the help of information which does not reside in the machine.

That is, all machines prove that you've got to have an engineer to make them. If anybody will stand up and say to me that a machine requires no engineer, then I'll say, dear sir, do you know that matter is not purposeful?

Matter doesn't have concepts, like a cadillac is a concept. Matter does not contain in itself sewing machines, and sewing machines have concepts. Where do they come from? Well, they turn around and say to you, they arose by chance.

But then I say, what you're saying is this. This is for the students amongst you. What you're saying is this, that teleonomy, which is the correct term for purpose, I have to use both. You see, otherwise if there are scientists here, they say he's a crude sort of a person who doesn't know his term any, and I wouldn't like you to say that, you know, because you might not listen to me then.

And if I mystify you with one or two terms, but I explain them at the same time to be nice to you, then you might listen to me, okay? Matter itself is the term a-teleonomic. It doesn't have purpose in it, it doesn't think, it doesn't have concepts.

But it'll take a concept, it'll store a concept, it'll store a machine, but it can't make them. So you've got to put in the information from outside, which of course is the reason why I say that if you find matter, which we know from the three laws of thermodynamics, particularly from the second law, that there's no concept in it, that is machine concept in it, it has other concepts like the concept of deviancy.

If you say that, then you've said immediately, well okay, if matter does make machines, you've got to have an engineer to put the information onto the matter to make it a machine. But machines don't form spontaneously.

But you are, among other things, a machine. Your psyche is not a machine, I know that, your soul isn't a machine. But your personality runs on a machine. When your machine wears out, your psyche takes flight, and if you're redeemed, the Lord, you wait until the resurrection when God will give you a new machine which is eternal, namely the resurrection body.

But that's how things work. Now look, what they say to us is this, that perhaps you have the first picture. What would they say to us is this, that the machine arose by chance. I put the formulae up there on the board.

I've got nothing suitable to show it, but never mind. If you take the first formula, you'll find there that matter itself, are you listening? This is a bit theoretical, but we need it. Matter itself is made from energy.

Don't ask me to define what energy is, because I don't know. But matter is made from energy plus know-how, that is, plus concept, that is, plus mathematical formulae. You can make from matter, as Einstein showed.

You can make from energy matter. We can make the transuranium elements now by that. So the first formula I want to show you is that you've got to have concept onto energy to make matter. Where are you going to get the concept from?

That's teleonomic. The orbitals around a nucleus are conceptual. They're mathematical formulae. Mathematical formulae, you know, don't arise by chance. You try it. Neither do chemical formulae. They require concept and active thought and energy to do it.

Life, Energy, and Information

Now that's the first formula. The second formula is this, that matter plus energy, say the evolutionists, give you life. Matter plus energy give you life. That's what the Nerovinians say, and that is a defective formula, a formula which we know to be untrue.

The real formula for life is matter plus energy plus know-how or concept or thought, if you like, logos, equals life. That is, if you take sardine can with all the proteins in it, and you put in energy, you don't get life out.

That's the second formula. We've done this millions of times, and that's what the Darwinians teach, that in an open system, matter plus energy gives you life. We've done it billions of times, in all the cans of sardines and other things that have been made, and it just don't work.

It just doesn't come out. But we do know this, that if you take the same sardines, plus energy, that is in an open system, plus concept, then out comes life. The whole thing bursts into life. And the concept, you put in on a spore.

The concept is written up instructions on how to make an organism, and you put it in, and out will come life. So we know that the creationist formula is right. There's no doubt about this being two models which you can choose.

The first, the second one, matter plus energy equals life, we know that's defective. Why are we wasting our time on it? No scientist would ever work on that basis. The American government doesn't work on that basis.

Because if it thought that you can sardines in an open system, such as a can is, you can put in energy and dig it out. If they thought that there'd be the slightest chance of you people getting poisoned by a new organism, they'd forbid all canning.

You see, they forbade cyclamate, didn't they, because you might get one in a million person with cancer as a result of it. If they thought that that was the case, they wouldn't let it go on. But at the same time, they force, or are trying to force, teaching in the schools that second formula, which we know to be wrong.

It isn't true. And they know a thousand million times over that if you take the same system, sardines plus energy, plus a concept of spore, which is just written codes in concepts, concepts and codes, codes and concepts, know-how, chemical instructions, that if you do it, the whole thing blows up with life.

We know these things. Well, why argue about them? It is simply so obvious. But you know nobody teaches it. That's the trouble. Now I'm going to show you how this works. This is just simply the preliminary canter, so you get used to my accent, you see.

Okay. Just take this one. This is an easy one, but it'll help you. If you take—perhaps we have the second picture up—if you take a puzzle, a jigsaw puzzle—now you know what a jigsaw puzzle is, don't you, in case my termini in The Ordinary Things of Household Life are wrong.

Say you take a jigsaw puzzle of the Matterhorn. You know what the Matterhorn is, don't you? The mountain I climbed when I was young, and other people have climbed, and so on. It's a lovely mountain, it is, you see, done by Picasso himself.

If you take that as a jigsaw puzzle, a thousand pieces, all fitted together nicely, you put your child on the floor and say, now, Tommy, you put that together. He'll sit there, and he'll try the pieces out, and you'll put him in, and he'll try the pieces out, and put it in, and gradually, gradually, the jigsaw puzzle comes out.

Okay? Now it requires careful fitting together to get the concepts of the beautiful Matterhorn out. Now look, if you've got your puzzle now nicely on the floor, and you put it in a laboratory shaking machine, you know, these things that shake bottles, they're like, this is the way the farmer rides, you see, ever so slowly, and they shake, and they shake, and they shake all night.

How long would your puzzle remain? You put the whole puzzle put together on the machine. What happens to it? Does it remain the puzzle, or does it break itself up? Breaks itself up, doesn't it? It falls to pieces.

You mustn't get near and jog the boy while he's putting it together, because if you step on it, you know, everything will fall to pieces. Now look, I'm going to ask you a question. If you had the thousand pieces of this Matterhorn puzzle, and you put them in the shaking machine, how long would you have to shake until you got the Matterhorn concept out?

Now, isn't it a joke? This requires a little bit of sharp thought. Would you ever get the complete puzzle out, the thousand pieces? Do you think you would? Well, I mean, the chances are so small that you almost might write infinity, mind you.

I mean, to get it out, oh, that would be a terrible job, wouldn't it, because you keep breaking down again. Actually what happens is you get an equilibrium, and two or three pieces will fall together, and if they're small enough, they'll remain stable even in the shaking.

And if they get bigger, they get more fragile, so they break down again. And if they break down a bit too far, because you're shaking, you will build them up again. So you get an equilibrium of a small part of the puzzle, and nothing else.

Now, any chemist will tell you that. That's an equilibrium reaction. Now I'm going to do a little experiment, and then you'll see what I'm after. I'm going to take each piece—you see I've labelled them up there—piece A, piece B, piece C, piece D, piece E, piece F, and I'm going to fit them so together in my little workshop, with a loaded spring and a ball, a ball bearing, in each piece, so that when you slot it in, it stays there.

Now the chemist will call that an entropy hole, which is used for making substances, because you see I'm going to use these puzzle pieces as an illustration of the atoms of which we're made. Okay? Now if you put piece A and piece B together, and then push them into one another, and slot them in with a spring and a ball, they'll slot in and won't come out again.

So you've made the reaction irreversible. This is very, very important. Irreversible. It slots in and won't slot out. Now when you take piece A and piece B, that have slotted in right, and they'll only slot in when they're right, and then they'll stay there, and not come out again.

Then you take piece C, and you fit it into piece A and B with another slot which is specific, and will only stay when it's right. And you see you shake them, then A, B, C, plus D, and you put a slot on that specific that it fits right, until you get right through the whole thing.

Now if you shook puzzles like that, do you think that you, by shaking, would be able to get out the Matterhorn picture? Come on, get some oxyhemoglobin up there and give me the answer. You would, wouldn't you?

It would come out like a Polaroid picture. You know, you take a Polaroid picture, and suddenly from that pictureless mass, you get a shadow of a picture, and then the whole thing comes out, and in two or three minutes, you've got a marvellous picture, arisen from a no picture.

Now if all the pieces were like that of the puzzle, you could put it on the shaking machine, and gradually before your eyes, the Polaroid picture would appear. Because you see, by shaking, they'd slot in, but they wouldn't slot out, okay?

Now think of that. That is produced by making your reaction—are you listening ?—go in one direction, not another. That is slot in, but not slot out. Now if the reactions go just as easily in as they do out, you can shake till the cows come home, and you will get no picture.

You'll only get a small bit of equilibrium lower down. Now there were plenty of chemists, you know, plenty of organic chemists, lots here in America, who believed that matter was made like that. Lots of Darwinists do today.

They think that if you take matter, which is to be compared with my puzzle pieces, jigsaw puzzle pieces of the Matterhorn, they think that if you shake long enough, life will come out, like the Matterhorn come out.

Will it, or will it not? The answer is no, because we know that we function—are you listening ?—we function on the basis of reactions, millions of them, which are reversible. That is, they slot in, and they slot out.

The very fact that we require at least 2 ,000 enzymes to make us go, to start the motor. Enzymes only work on reversible reactions, and they establish equilibrium more quickly. They don't shove the equilibrium around.

They just let it stay there, but they do it ever so quickly, so that you will get, if you put an enzyme, a coagulant system like that, you get ever so quickly a very, very small piece, like an amino acid formed, but nothing else, because it's reversible.

And the very fact that all scientists who know their job, know that the reactions of life to go, are just like the bits of that puzzle. They go in, and they go out. And the fact that we're dependent on enzymes to do it, proves the point.

If you put one piece of a crystal, of sodium cyanide, prussic acid, the sodium salt of it, on your tongue, you will die instantaneously. Why? Because the enzymes are poisoned, and there's no forward and backward reaction, which stops the total metabolism.

They're all reversible, and it stops that, and you die on the spot. It's an awful sight to see. But we know that these are the cases. The only way to do it, is to slot them in, so that they don't slot out, to stop the reversibility.

Thermodynamics, Reversibility, and Design

Now the problem is, is nature like that? Is matter like that? And we all know that it isn't, because matter, particularly the matter of which we're made, is reversible. Now how are you going to do it?

I'll just draw a little conclusion here, so that you can see how to do it. If you see matter slotting in—oh, thank you. If you see matter slotting in, and not slotting out, if you see our puzzles here, like the Matterhorn, slotting in, the bits of the puzzle slotting in and not slotting out, what's your conclusion?

Do you think those bits of matter arose by chance? Do you think that complicated slotting device, which is necessary to make by chance, just by shaking, the Matterhorn picture come out? Would you ever say that those bits of puzzles started by chance, and designed themselves by chance?

They show every sign of design, okay? Now, if you do do this experiment in matter, say you take methane, ammonia, and water, and pass an electric current through it, that is, you shake it, you will get out the amino acids, the alanine of life, and that will happen by chance.

But does it happen by chance? Of course not. It'll happen apparently by chance, but the real reason is that the bits have been designed to fit the amino acids. No other explanation. They fit perfectly, but they're only a small part of it.

If you try to go right up to the total Matterhorn picture, the total picture of life, you can't do it, because they're not organized like that. Now that was the means by which one professor of evolution, while he was busy teaching evolution in his class, and teaching that if you shook the elements of life together on a shaking machine, you passed energy through and shook and shook and shook, he taught, he wrote a book called Biochemical Predestination, as the explanation of life, that out of chance order could come by just shaking.

One student went up to him and said, Sir, have you ever thought of that? And gave him that little book of mine called The Creation of Life, where I've pointed this out. And he read it, and in six weeks, he was a believer in God.

When they gave him the other book, Man's Origin, Man's Destiny, in a few months, he saw that the one who did it was Jesus himself, and he became a Christian. You see, these things, if you think, they testify to you in such a strong language to anybody who's done his homework in science, that he must draw the conclusions that in matter he sees all the evidence for the eternal designer of the bits of matter which make the whole.

Now, there's a second stage here that in a mixed audience such as we have, I won't do. It will take me half an hour to do, and I don't think it's worth doing now. I've given you the start. If you want to look it up, look it up in the natural sciences, know nothing of evolution.

What I've shown is this, that if you get the small bits out in equilibrium, you can only get the large bits out by not having the information stored on the molecules themselves, but have them injected directly from outside, and you can see how he did it.

But it takes quite a little bit of study to do these things, and you have to do your chemistry to understand them. I'm going now to talk to you, just a little line under that, I'm going now to talk to you about how you can say this another way, and yet get a very clear picture of how God did it, or the mechanism by which he did it.

Darwinism and the Oxford Debate

The evolutionists say that if you give time long enough, you will get out the matter on picture, which is life, biology. Darwin started to preach this, you know, and he did so in his book called The Origin of Species in 1859.

And he showed, as he thought, that all life was better explicable on the basis that chance did it. And of course the English, the British at that time, were very, very pious, and they were rubbing arms against the preaching of this doctrine that if you shook the machine long enough, you'd get your answer, fall out of the bottom.

And in 1860, a great debate, this is the great debate, the first one, and all other debates have followed the same style. They had that at Oxford, and they asked Bishop Wilberforce, Samuel Wilberforce, who was Professor of Mathematics at Oxford, and Bishop of Oxford, both, a very, very good theologian and mathematician.

They asked him if he'd debate Huxley. He didn't debate him, he was a very nice man. So he said he would, and he produced a huge meeting there in Oxford, they arranged that, with the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

And they said that they'd give Wilberforce the first word. So he stood up in a huge concourse of people, and he said this, now this is what most of you would say, what I used to say, and which you can say today if you know how, but you have to be very careful how you say it.

He stood up and he said, all machines must have a creator. He said, for example, that his watch obviously presupposed a watchmaker, because the metal of which the watch is made can't do the mathematics to get the wheels the right size, and get the spring the right strength, and therefore if you see gold and steel put together so nicely so they mathematically parallel the rotation of the earth round the sun and round itself, that that must be information that's put in from outside, and wasn't on the metal, although the metal can hold it.

And he produced what we used to call Paley's, P-A-L-E-Y, Paley's natural theology. He said if you see a knife, that the knife is sharp, has a handle on it, and that the information to make the sharpness and the handle on it doesn't reside in the metal nor in the wooden handle, therefore it must have been put there, and a cutler is necessary where a knife is.

Well, you can see that argument. And he argued that right through, and that argument was valid until 1926, when they pushed it out of the University of Cambridge. It was an entrance examination to get into Cambridge until then, you had to know that.

But then they put it away because of evolution. Now, Huxley got up, and he said, well, he was very pleased to hear that because that was an old argument, and we could easily demolish that. And he asked Bishop Wilberforce if he would give him one or two axioms to work on.

So Bishop Wilberforce said yes, of course he would. The first thing he says, would you give me six eternal typewriters that don't go wrong? Typewriters just come out in those days, you see, so it was a thing to take.

Oh, well, the bishop said, I don't see why you want six eternal typewriters, but I'll give you them if you want them to argue with. He said, I do. Then he said, I want six apes that don't die. And I want enormous amounts of paper, infinite amounts of paper to go in the machines, and gallons and gallons and gallons and gallons of ink so they don't run out of ink.

I said, the bishop, if you want them. He said, you're a professor of mathematics, you can deal with these things, give them me. So I said, okay, he would. Now, I said, Huxley, you let those apes chain to the typewriter six and six.

You let them type. You let them type at random till eternity is almost past. Well, that'd be a very long time, wouldn't it? He said, yes, that's what we want, is almost eternity. I'd like eternity if I could.

But he said, I can't argue with eternity because we don't have it, but we'll have almost eternity. So the bishop said, okay. He was mystified about this. This is the valid argument today. I'm not talking old hat, you know, here.

This was in Science, your journal, quite recently. Somebody wrote in, I think it was Science, it was Scientific American, one or two, wrote in to the editor and said, if you cut out the name of your creator in your journal any more, I won't buy your paper.

And the editor wrote back and said, if you're so ignorant, I don't mind if you don't buy our paper, because you're a hopeless case. Because the argument with Huxley and Wilberforce settled once and for all that chance will do what a creator does if you give it time.

And here's the argument, which is still valid today. Let your typewriters be typed upon by the apes and let them go. The bishop said, okay, let them go. Now, before time quite ran out, almost at the end of it, we look at what they've typed.

Okay? Said the bishop, what have they typed? He said, I look through millions and millions of papers and I find one paper with, the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside still waters.

Well, the bishop almost went purple when he heard that. He said, you mustn't say things like that. But he said, I must. You're a professor of mathematics. Don't you know the probability formula, bishop?

Well, now, a professor of mathematics couldn't very well say he didn't know the probability formula, could you? I mean, that wouldn't do. So he said, of course I know the probability formula. But he said, do you believe it?

Do you believe it? Well, the bishop said, of course I believe it. Well, he said, don't you see that where P, where T, which is time, equals infinity, P, which is probability, equals one, that is, you've given off time enough for a reaction that's going on, typing, then you will, with certainty, get anything and everything out.

You just let it go long enough, and you'll get out the twenty-third psalm. But the bishop said, the twenty-third psalm was written by David. And here you're saying it wasn't written by David. Oh, no, I'm not, said Huxley.

What I'm telling you is that chance can do anything that you can do if you give it time enough. That's the nature of the probability formula. The earth now is very many billions of years old, and the reactions that make you have been going on all this time, if you give time enough, just as your Carl Sagan says, life will arise.

Therefore, they've been listening, and they've been looking. They sent labs to Mars and to Venus to have a look and see how life was coming along. That was just it. I had Irwin in my house with his children recently, and I asked him about it.

And he said, yes, we were told to look for this rock and that rock, and then it would be examined for chemical evolution, which was starting. And they never found one chance in five million that there was any sign of chemical evolution at all.

Well, Huxley said, so you do see, Bishop, that if you have time enough, all the works of God, including yourself, will be produced. Because where T equals infinity, P, probability, equals one. Do you understand me, Bishop?

Well, poor professor of mathematics had to understand him. So it's only a question of time, and you can do the works of God without God. David's works, made by David, were just as well made by chance if you give time enough.

So you see, all you've got to do is have very old Earth, a very old solar system. And if you touch that question, you know, this is the nitty-gritty of it. This is the neurologic point. If you touch the age of the Earth and take away the infinite time, you've torn it.

You've just about done it, because it all depends on that. That's where you've got to be careful about, do you understand me? That's where it turns. Well, the poor old Bishop, he was absolutely upset by this.

He said, you don't really seriously mean that a man like me could have written by chance? Yes, he said, I believe in my mathematics, and obviously you don't. Finished. So the Bishop said, look, we can't accept that, because we could say that all the things we have in our civilization were made by chance.

Exactly that, said Huxley, that's exactly what I'm telling you. There's no need to have the chance. And what's more, said the Bishop, you know, said Huxley to the Bishop, what's more, I put sense into this universe, and you put nonsense with your creationism.

The Bishop said, I don't understand you. Well, he said, it's time you did. Because, you see, you've got a world, an Earth, a solar system, made, as you say, by Jesus Christ, the Creator. And it's full of bad things.

It's full of cancer. It's full of war. It's full of violence. It's full of death. And those are bad things, aren't they? Yes, indeed they are, said the Bishop. Well, he said, if you've got a good God who made a bad world, that good God is a devil.

Answering the Problem of Evil

Okay? Okay? When I got converted, you know, in England many, many years ago, I had a professor of physical chemistry, and he heard me witnessing to a student, and he stood behind me. And he said to me, now, Wanda Smith, I don't want any of this theological nonsense even mentioned in my lab.

He said, you know that I'm a Marxist, and indeed I knew it. And he said, I'm absolutely convinced that you're intellectually dishonest. And if you're intellectually dishonest, I don't want you in my lab.

You can do endless harm with your froth of intellectual dishonesty. Because if God made the world, as you say, and I'll admit that he might have done, then he made it bad, and he made it good. And if he made it bad, he's a devil.

And if he made it good, he's an angel. Now, you can't answer those things. Now, you shut up about these things. I've described it in my little book. In my little book, Why Does God Allow It? That was the conversation with my professor shortly after I got converted.

He said, you Christians are intellectually dishonest. You say you believe in a good God, and at the same time he's bad. You're just neutralizing what you said, and you said nothing. It's all froth. And all you do is you wallow in emotions, instead of a bit of common sense which you were made, and you haven't got any, no more.

Now, do you understand that? There are plenty, plenty, who believe like that, and unless you can tackle them, unless you can show that you can give a reason, at any time, for the faith that is in you, you're disobeying a commandment of Jesus.