, or even chimpanzees, is measured in light years, and is a difference in kind, not merely in degree. That only human beings use language that employs universal and common terms like nouns and verbs should indicate that.
But is the difference reducible to previously existing material causes? Sir Francis Crick, the codiscoverer of DNA, is sure it is reducible: "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 a vast multitude of nerve cells and their associated molecules."
This is sheer reductionism. When I was in high school, it was considered sophisticated to say that a human being is nothing more than 98 cents worth of chemicals. Apparently nothing has changed since then except that, at today's inflated prices, the chemicals would cost $19.98 or perhaps even $49.98. All things can be explained by analyzing them down to their material parts and the evolutionary process by which they have come to be arranged. On his own terms, the very thoughts by which Francis Crick and his collaborator discovered DNA were "nothing more than" the firing of neurons in their brains.
Darwinists speak of higher species "emerging" from lower ones by random variation and natural selection. Any other explanation, as Dr. Eugenie C. Scott asserted in a letter to the Wall Street Journal, is not science but religion. "Science," she said, "is limited to only natural explanations. Yes, theoreticians in this area rely on materialist explanations; they are doing science." But if "natural" is a synonym for "materialist," she is assuming that matter, whatever it may be, is a stuff of such kind that from within itself, by a process of accidental change and adaptation, it can produce the entire range of living beings on earth. Her science, it seems, rests upon a belief in scientific materialism that could qualify, by some definitions, as a religious faith. For she implies that non-living matter has the potentiality, given enough time and the necessary series of accidental changes, to become living, growing, sentient, and intelligent beings. This suggests that there is no real and unbridgeable difference between the living and the non-living, the sentient and the non-sentient, the intelligent and the non-intelligent. They are all simply different forms of the same thing and reductively are on the same level because there is only one level. That may not be a theory of a flat earth, but it looks like a theory of a flat biological world.
The Rev. Francis Canavan, S.J., is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Fordham, and the author of several books, most recently The Pluralist Game.
© 1997 New Oxford Review. All Rights Reserved. April 1997, Volume LXIV, Number 3. Reprinted with permission of the New Oxford Review.