By Elias Ayala (MDiv & M.A.T.)
Francis Crick was a British molecular biologist, biophysicist, and neuroscientist. An influential mind to be sure. However, his materialistic atheistic outlook on the world demonstrates very clearly the futility of the materialistic atheistic perspective. Crick astonishingly wrote: “The astonishing hypothesis is that you-your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules…” This reduction of human beings and rationality to “no more” than… is detrimental to his own perspective and undermines human rationality hence demonstrating the intellectual futility of such a position.
For if we grant Crick’s hypothesis, then we could conclude that his very hypothesis and the apparent rationality that led him to conclude this is itself “no more” than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules…”. We must ask: Is this hypothesis true? How does one even get truth from that which is “no more” than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules…”? Indeed, Crick did not “freely” utilize his rational faculties based upon proper interpretation of the evidence to come to this conclusion, because within his hypothesis, he denied the reality of “free will”. He consistently applies his materialistic perspective in that if materialism is true, and man’s rational faculties, etc. are nothing more than the behavior of vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules…” than free will is an illusion.
The logical entailment of such an irrational perspective leads to the conclusion that knowledge itself is impossible since every conclusion one draws will merely be the result of electro-chemical reactions in the brain that are part of a materialistically determined process bound by the laws of physics. In general, this would not only undermine human rationality, but ironically, it would undermine his own fields of study: Molecular biology, biophysics, and neuroscience. Surely, a hypothesis that undermines the rationality of one’s hypothesis is truly intellectually bankrupt.