Love and Beauty as Clues

C. S. Lewis puts our fourth and final clue in rather stark terms: “You can’t be in love with a girl if you know (and keep on remembering) that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms, and that your own response to them is only a sort of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can’t go on getting very serious pleasure from music if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion, that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it. If there is no creator, the wonders of love and beauty are not wonders at all.  They have no inherent transcendent qualities and are simply instinctual reactions without significance or consequence beyond instinctive biological responses.”

Molecular biologist Francis Crick writes in his book The Astonishing Hypothesis:

“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 assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Francis Crick fathered three children and was gifted with six grandchildren (he died in 2004). Did he really believe that that they were nothing more than a bundle of nerve endings? That their personalities, their affection for him, their memories, their ambitions, their smiles and giggles were “no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules”? This seems to me at best an inadequate explanation for what is really a clue to the existence of something beyond our capacity to immediately perceive.  If one is convinced empirically that love and beauty are real, then see them for the refutation of Crick (and others) and the clues to a creator that they are.

Next Time: Wrap-up of the Clues to a Creator.  In Christ...