Francis Crick

By Ranald Macaulay
“The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no god’”
(Psalm 14: 1)

Francis Crick died last week and his obituaries make clear that the definitive factor in his life was his decision, aged 12, no longer to believe in God. Hence, his choice of biochemistry and his desire to find a purely naturalistic explanation for organic life, as, later in 1977, he decided to explore human consciousness at the SALK Institute in California. Neither choice, in other words, was a ‘neutral’ scientific one.

His memorable words in 1953 at the Eagle pub around the corner from the Cavendish Laboratory reflect this. He is reputed to have said, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen, we have discovered the secret of life.’ Organic life had now been physically explained in terms of the DNA molecule and its double-helix formation- so God was even more redundant than previously imagined. The fact of the matter, assuming Christianity to be true of course, is that Crick and Watson made a serious mistake at this point. As Michael Polanyi indicated at the time, when we find an explanation for the properties of an object and how they work, this remains still an inadequate explanation. A stove, for example, has much the same properties as a fridge (metal, electrical wires, switches, etc), but is in fact its opposite! Neither can be explained merely by physical elements for, if that were the case, the ‘explanation’ of the one would suffice for the other, which would be ridiculous: one functions to make things cold and the other to make them hot! The ‘meaning’ of a thing demands a ‘maker’.

Biblically speaking, therefore, it is not only proper but necessary to describe Crick as a ‘fool.’ The obvious conclusion of his discovery, namely, that all aspects of the universe ‘declare the glory of God’, escaped his attention. As all machines declare the ingenuity of their human makers, so the universe declares the ‘wisdom’ of its Maker. And since as the Psalmist says, this message goes out day after day through all the world, those who ignore or reject it constitute themselves “inexcusable” and “fools”
(Romans 1).

However, Crick illustrates something even more striking and ominous. For his rejection of God went further than mere intellectual dissent. His dislike of Christianity and of the evidences of a Christian heritage surrounding him in Cambridge became legendary. When it was decided that a chapel at Churchill College would be built, he resigned as a Founding Fellow. He also initiated an essay competition on the subject ‘What should be done with the college chapels’ His intolerance of the Christian faith, one might say, was a harbinger of the persecution beginning to become apparent today.

How often during his 30 odd years in the Cavendish Laboratory he must have passed the inscription of Psalm 111: 2 carved across the laboratory’s front door: ‘Great are the works of the Lord’. It was an inscription insisted upon by the Cavendish’s first director in 1874, James Clerk Maxwell, the illustrious discoverer of electro magnetism and outstanding Christian. With regret and sadness one wonders what Crick’s response might be now as he is reminded about the thousands of occasions, going in and out, when he disregarded its implicit admonition.

Ranald Macaulay, 03/09/2004