Sir John Ambrose Fleming (1849-1945) Important Scientific

Achievements• English Electrical Engineer and Physicist• Studied under James Clerk Maxwell at Cambridge (PhD

1880)• Taught at Nottingham and Cambridge• He was the first Chair of the Electrical Engineering Dept

at the University of London• Invented vacuum tube, diode, the right-hand-rule, and is

the “Father of Modern Electronics”• Father was a Congregational minister• He preached a famous sermon on the “Evidence for the

Resurrection” at St. Martins in London

John Ambrose Fleming

• In 1901 he designed the transmitter that G Marconi used in the first successful trans-Atlantic broadcast

• In 1904 he designed a radio receiver for G. Marconi• In early 1900’s, he worked with Thomas Alva Edison• Royal Society and Knighthood in 1929• Wrote 19 textbooks and over 100 articles• Wrote the first article for the Institute of Physics on a

battery

John Ambrose Fleming (cont)

• First President of the Television Society• In 1932, he established the Evolution Protest

Movement• Wrote two creationist books– The Intersecting Speres of Religion and Science– Evolution or Creation?

On Evolution

• Organic evolution is not an ascertained scientific truth fully established by facts but is a philosophy…without regard to the absence of any rigorous proof. (Evolution or Creation, 1938, Fleming)

Evolution as a Failed Theory

• Evolution, like all natural theories of origins, has failed to account for life, the mind, and humankind. For a theory to be true, it must not fail in critical places as does evolution.– Evolution fails at explaining the unbridgable gap

between living and nonliving things– Evolution fails at explaining the unbridgable gap

between cells and organic compounds (such as methane)

Evolution as a Philosophy

• Evolution is essentially atheistic

• It is an attempt to dispense with the very idea of God and substitute for an Intelligent Creator an impersonal non-intelligent agency

• The assumptions underlying Darwin’s theory…and the general theory of inorganic evolution have not withstood the valid criticisms leveled at them.

Every Mutation Theory for Evolution has been Invalidated

• De Vries’ Theory of Mutations and Mendel’s discoveries on the transmission of the unit characters have come in as antagonists more or less of the original Darwin ideas, and it cannot be denied that no theory of organic evolution or explanation of its causation has commanded perfectly general acceptance. Rather, as HF Osborn, the late eminent American palaeontologist, said to the British Association in 1931: we are more at a loss than ever to understand the causes of evolution. One after another the Buffonian, Lamarkian, Darwinian, Weismannian, and de Vriesian theories of causation have collapsed.