If Francis Crick is hypothesis is correct that…”You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”, then, said John Polkinghorne, “it is ultimately suicidal.”
Polkinghorne went onto to state, “If Cricks hypothesis is true we could never know it. For not only does it relegate our experiences of beauty, moral obligation, and religious encounter to the epiphenomenal scarp-heap, it also destroys rationality. Thought is replaced by electro-chemical neural events. Two such events cannot confront each other in rational discourse. They are neither right nor wrong. They simply happen….The very assertions of the reductionist himself are nothing but blips in the neural network of his brain. They world of rational discourse dissolves into the absurd chatter of firing synapses. Quite frankly, that cannot be right and none of us believes it to be so.”
P 117 Beyond Opinion: Living the Faith We Defend, Zacharias. R, 2007 (Thomas Nelson)