In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Sir Francis Crick (1916-2004; co-discoverer with James Watson of the double helix structure of DNA) declares his thorough-going naturalism and reductionism very clearly:
“A person’s mental activities are entirely due to the behavior of nerve cells, glial cells, and the atoms, ions, and molecules that make them up and influence them.”
“The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.'”
***
By contrast, here’s a good passage from the admirable Catholic physicist and thinker Stephen Barr:
To a materialist, we are just congeries of atoms; and atoms must go whithersoever they are driven by the laws of physics and blind chance. . . . There is no place for intellectual or moral freedom in a universe that is mere matter in motion. That is why Sir Francis Crick, Edward O. Wilson, and many others who share Dawkins’ basic views call free will an illusion.
Dawkins contrasts ideas that are just memes, mindlessly and slavishly copied from brain to brain like computer viruses, with scientific ideas, which he likens to useful software that is critically evaluated by potential users and adopted or rejected on rational grounds. Such a distinction may be valid, but it is not a distinction that a materialist can make. It is based on there being an essential difference between machines, which can only do as they are told, and intelligent and free users of those machines, who can decide for themselves what to do. In the materialist’s universe, however, all users are themselves just machines, and are therefore as much driven by physical necessity (or chance) as everything else is. As the great mathematician and physicist Hermann Weyl observed,
There must be freedom in the theoretical acts of affirmation and negation: When I reason that 2+2=4, this actual judgment is not forced upon me through blind natural causality (a view that would eliminate thinking as an act for which we can be held answerable) but something purely spiritual enters in.
The inescapable conclusion is that Dawkins and materialists of his sort do not in fact “stand up full-face into the keen wind of understanding.” They don’t face the implications of their ideas. If they did, they would have to dismiss all talk of morality, rebellion against nature, and intellectual freedom as so much sentimentality.[1]
[1] Stephen M. Barr, “The Devil’s Chaplain Confounded,” First Things 145 (August-September 2004): 29.
Posted from Chicago, Illinois
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In