Book Review: The End Of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age

Tuesday, 23 February 2010 10:16

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The End Of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age

by John Horgan

Published by Broadway Books 1997

 Reviewed by Craig R. Dumont

 I have recently visited the mind of a pagan (or rather, many pagans) and it is an extremely dark and depressing place. Although the visit took place by accident, it served, hopefully, a productive purpose as it provided a loud wake-up call, and perhaps even an intellectual call-to-arms for Christians to fend off a return to pre-Christian blindness with people groping in sheer and utter blackness of night.

 The basis for the above statements is a best-selling book by John Horgan entitled The End Of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age. I bought the book on the mistaken assumption that it was written by a Christian detailing the incredible crisises scientists are facing because they have built a foundation of “knowledge” upon false presuppositions. What I found was a pagan author who was in despair because to him the only purpose of life is “pure science, the search for knowledge for its own sake,” and “if the quest for knowledge ended, what would become of us? What would give our lives meaning?” His despair emanated from the belief that we’ve “entered an era of diminishing returns” and that there is not much left to discover, hence no meaning is left for our existence. Horgan summarizes the dire situation this way:

 Researchers have already mapped out physical reality, ranging from the microrealm of quarks and electrons to the macrorealm of planets, stars, and galaxies. Physicists have shown that all matter is ruled by a few basic forces: gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces.

 Scientists have also stitched their knowledge into an impressive, if not terribly detailed, narrative of how we came to be. The universe exploded into existence 15 billion years ago, give or take 5 billion years, and is still expanding outward. Some 4.5 billion years ago, the detritus of an exploding star, a supernova, condensed into our solar system. Sometime during the next few hundred million years, for reasons that may never be known, single-celled organisms bearing an ingenious molecule called DNA emerged on the still-hellish earth. these Adamic microbes gave rise, by means of natural selection, to an extraordinary array of more complex creatures, including Homo sapiens.

 My guess is that this narrative that scientists have woven from their knowledge, this modern myth of creation, will be as viable 100 or even 1,000 years from now as it is today. Why? Because it is true. Moreover, given how far science has already come, and given the physical, social, and cognitive limits constraining further research, science is unlikely to make any significant additions to the knowledge it has already generated. There will be no great revelations in the future comparable to those bestowed upon us by Darwin or Einstein or Watson and Crick (the co-discoverers of DNA—crd).

 To his list of “great discoverers of truth” he later adds Freud: “But science’s inability to move beyond the Freudian paradigm does not inspire much hope.” Why? “The reason psychologists, philosophers, and others still engage in protracted debates over Freud’s work is that no undeniably superior theory of or therapy for the mind—either psychological or pharmacological—has emerged to displace psychoanalysis once and for all.”

 Now let me point out that Horgan does not view himself as a pagan, but as a Darwinist (i.e., atheist). However, because of his self-proclaimed materialistic view of the universe, it is inevitable that he worships many gods, starting with himself as the arbitrator of good and evil, right and wrong. (His moralizing is blatant and comes through in almost every chapter!) In reality it wouldn’t be much cause for alarm if this world-view was held only by Horgan, but with clear writing and impeccable documentation—I never said pagans were totally useless—he exposes the entire scientific establishment as anti-Christ God-haters who have, whether they acknowledge it or not, come to the end of knowledge. The inescapable fact is that man never gets away from the knowledge of God, he just switches gods. This is pointedly stated by Mitchell Feigenbaum, a particle physicist who laughed off a “theory of everything” by saying, “A lot of my colleagues like the idea of final theories because they’re religious. And they use it as a replacement for God, which they don’t believe in. But they just created a substitute” (emphasis mine). Gerhard Edelman is clear about who he worships: himself. Horgan writes, “In a New York Times Magazine cover story in 1988, Edelman conferred divine powers upon himself. Discussing his work in immunology, he said that ‘before I came to it, there was darkness—afterwards there was light.’” Discussing a robot he created, he called it his “creation” and declared that he was its god. So goes it in the “truth seeking scientific community.”

 Frankly, the fact that scientists have come to the end of knowledge doesn’t surprise me. In fact, what does surprise me is that they could get this far at all! From a Christian perspective we know that anyone who tries to build upon the “truth” of Darwin (for more about the fallacies of Darwinism/evolution read the review on Darwin’s Black Box) and the “truth” of Freud (see our review on books about both Freud and Jung that exposes them as the frauds they are) has two problems: Building on a bad foundation from the start—a foundation of shifting sand, and then trying to build something intelligent upon false suppositions based upon false suppositions. Christians should know that everything about that building is shaky and extremely tenuous. To put it bluntly, they’re basing their so-called knowledge upon “lies and damn lies.”

 What struck me throughout the book, indeed with every interview with the most prominent scientists of the world, is the rampant hatred for God and the truly preposterous theories they construct to get free from Him and deceive the general public. The contradictions they espouse would be laughable if they didn’t have terrible real-life consequences and impact our culture in such a demonic way.

 For instance, the Bible tells us that “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’ . . . So God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them . . . And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life: and man became a living soul.” We find here God’s revelation that man is something more than just a chance happening and something more than an ordinary animal. He was created in the image of God and he was and is a living soul. However today’s scientist denies this fundamental truth and attempts to reduce man to nothing. Francis Crick, the discoverer of DNA, is seeking to find the origin and cause of human consciousness, but rather than seeking knowledge and truth to glorify God he seeks to invalidate God. As Horgan astutely observes, “Crick was obviously trying not to find the soul—that is, some spiritual essence that exists independently of our fleshly selves—but to eliminate the possibility that there was one.”

 Francis Crick possesses, from the world’s standpoint, a truly great scientific mind, but he long ago abandoned true greatness and now excels only as a God-hater. Crick goes to elaborate and hilarious lengths to deny the existence of God. He is a caricature of a fool with his cartoonish, not to say bafoonish theory of man being “planted” here by aliens who knew their planet was going to be destroyed. He thinks it likely that these aliens, knowing the rigors of space travel, placed microbes into a rocket and sent it speeding to earth where they could evolve back into beings such as themselves. (Sorry, Doctor. Superman beat you to that one!)

 Horgan goes on, chapter after chapter, scientist after scientist, discipline after discipline, pointing us to men and women who are optimistic that science will bring breakthroughs that will make the world perfect: A “social” scientist(!) named Edward O. Wilson “believes that findings from sociobiology”—he studies ants and how they interact—“would help to resolve political and moral issues,” (but if we’ve evolved, there are no political and moral issues, just raw power declarations) and Frank Tipler with his “Omega Point,” the quest to “construct heaven.” But, low-and-behold, Horgan discovers, no such scenario is playing out. Indeed, the opposite is occurring when you have men such as Roger Penrose moving into the (unacknowledged) realm of “mysterian inclinations.”

 Finally, at the end of the book, Horgan gives his own take on the universe: He likes Tipler’s “Omega Point” theory because it gives him the chance to play god and boy should we be glad he’s not!

 I was convinced that I had discovered the secret of existence: God’s fear of his own Godhood, and of his own potential death, underlies everything . . .

 As the Omega Point (Horgan’s “god”) approaches the final collapse of time and space and being itself, it will undergo a mystical experience. It will recognize with even greater force the utter implausibility of its existence. It will realize that there is no creator, no God, other than itself. It exists, and nothing else. The Omega Point must also realize that its lust for final knowledge and unification has brought it to the brink of eternal nothingness, and that if it dies, everything dies; being itself will vanish (but what is the “everything” as nothing exists except itself?—crd). The Omega Point’s terrified recognition of its plight will compel it to flee from itself, from its own awful aloneness and self-knowledge. Creation, with all its pain and beauty and multiplicity, stems from—or is—the desperate, terrified flight of the Omega Point from itself.

 So there you have it; God’s afraid of Himself! He’s lonely, terrified and still seeking the truth, which Horgan has arrived at before Him! The only good news here is that Horgan has “sought, in vain, a theologian sympathetic to this terror-of-God idea.” I guess he hasn’t had the opportunity to discuss it with any televangelist’s lately. However, he does find someone who understands his genius: “Freeman Dyson . . . discussed his theological views—namely the proposition that God is not omniscient or omnipotent but grows and learns as we humans grow and learn.” From Dyson, Horgan learns of a 16th century heretic named Socinus who taught that God was not immutable, that God changed, learned and evolved through time, just as we humans do. God doesn’t know the future because “there are no such things as future events. They can’t be known until they happen.”

 So a book on the end of science ends with the end of God. It’s ironic, but for the reprobate so predictable. By the way, Socinus was burned at the stake for heresy. Hmmm . . .