The End of Science
Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age
By John Horgan
Abacus. 324 pages. £8.99
ISBN 0 349 10926 5
The role of science within general culture is an issue which continues to generate an atmosphere of conflict.
For optimists, science and technology still provide the main hope for the improvement of the dignity of humanity; for pessimists, they are leading us directly to the apocalypse. For post-modernity's more radical thinkers, scientific theories are mainly social constructs, whose 'truthfulness' does not extend beyond particular scholarly communities; for those who remain rooted in modernity, science represents the only valid path to complete knowledge of all phenomena, and a dualism between science and the rest of culture is asserted.
John Horgan has been a senior writer for Scientific American. His controversial book, now reprinted in paperback, challenges the idea that science will eventually provide answers - or 'The Answer' - to all the big questions, from a final theory of matter and energy to how and why the universe came to be. In a new Afterword, he states that: 'My end-of-science argument has been publicly repudiated by President Clinton's science adviser, the administrator of NASA, a dozen or so Nobel laureates, and scores of less prominent critics in every continent except Antarctica.' (p.267).
Ironic science
Horgan is not 'anti-science' (pp. 3, 269-271). Essentially, his thesis is that pure science has become a victim of its own success. By 'pure science', Horgan means 'the primordial human quest to understand the universe and our place in it', 'the search for knowledge for its own sake' (pp. 3, 6). Thus, he claims, if all the really interesting and soluble problems have been solved, or will be in a few years, there are only two options: either to accept our role as 'footnote-writers to scientific history', or 'to pursue science in a speculative, post-empirical mode that I call ironic science. Ironic science resembles literary criticism in that it offers points of view, opinions, which are, at best, interesting, which provoke further comment. But it does not converge on truth. It cannot achieve empirically verifiable surprises that force scientists to make substantial revisions in their basic description of reality' (p.7). Horgan divides practitioners of 'ironic science' into two types: 'naifs, who believe or at least hope they are discovering objective truths about nature..., and sophisticates, who realise that they are, in fact, practising something more akin to art or literary criticism than to conventional science' (p.154). The search for truth is what counts, not the truth itself. Thus, according to physicist Robert Pack: 'Horgan is warning [that] . . science has manned the battlements against the post-modern heresy that there is no objective truth, only to discover post-modernism inside the wall' (p.281).
Stimulated by predictions in Gunther Stent's The Coming of the Golden Age (1969) and attendance at symposia on the limits of scientific knowledge in 1989 and 1994, Horgan has explored his thesis in interviews with over 40 eminent specialists whose work has confronted these limits. While the presentation of these discussions is necessary skewed by Horgan's agenda, the quotations are of interest in their own right, and a variety of opinions are offered on the current situations in physics, cosmology, evolutionary biology, social science, neuroscience and 'chaos and complexity'. Each subject invites a review of its own!
Star-studded cast
Horgan's portraits are skilful and often entertaining. The most well-known figures include Richard Dawkins ('icy atheist and arch reductionist), Francis Crick ('Mephistopheles of materialism'), Stephen Hawking ('cosmic joker'), Sir Fred Hoyle ('maverick of mavericks'), Noam Chomsky, Stephen Jay Gould, the late Sir Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn (of 'paradigm shift' fame).
While physicists like superstring-theorist Ed Witten, and biologists like Crick and Dawkins, have a profound faith in the power of science to achieve absolute truth, others harbour an equally profound ambivalence and uneasiness concerning this notion. Physicist and mind-theorist Roger Penrose cannot decide whether his belief in a final theory is optimistic or pessimistic. Sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson is chilled by the thought that a final theory of human nature, which he has pursued for so long, might be attained. Similarly, a founder of artificial intelligence, Marvin Minsky, seems to fear 'The Answer'. Among physicists, John Wheeler and Andrei Linde, like the late David Bohm, appear to be tormented by mystical yearnings which physics alone cannot satisfy, and Steven Weinberg holds to his infamous comment that 'the more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless'. 'Chaoplexologist' Ilya Prigogine proclaims 'the end of certitude' and promises 'the re-enchantment of nature' through his new probabilistic approach.
Ironic theory
A current of 'God-talk' runs through the book. Many physicists have suggested that 'God is a Geometer': Steven Weinberg asks why we should be interested in a God who seems so little interested in us, however good he is at geometry (p.77). As is now well-known, Stephen Hawking has claimed that the attainment of a final theory would enable us to 'know the mind of God' - and exclude him, and all mystery, from the universe (p.94). Fred Hoyle suspects that the universe must be unfolding according to some intelligent, cosmic plan (pp. 109-110).
The final chapter, 'Scientific Theology, or The End of Machine Science', starts with J.D. Bernal's claim, in 1929, that science would soon give us the power to direct our own evolution, and follows this idea through the hysterical babblings of robotics engineer Hans Moravec, and Freeman Dyson's 'God is mind' musings, to Frank Tipler's Omega Point theory, 'in which the entire universe is transformed into a single, all-powerful, all-knowing computer' (p.256).
In the epilogue, 'The Terror of God', Horgan reiterates the old question: 'Why is there something rather than nothing?', suggests that 'the world is a riddle that God has created in order to shield himself from his terrible solitude and fear of death' (p.263), and discusses this (unfruitfully) with 'one of the century's most eminent theologians', the Socinian process theologian Charles Hartshorne (pp. 263-265). Post-modern irony is fully expressed in the conclusion that 'everything comes down to God chewing his fingernails' (p.265).
Strikingly, the Afterword finishes with the question: 'If there is a God, why has he created a world with so much suffering?' (p.281), which cries out for a biblical response.
Comments
A legitimate feature of post-modernity has been raised, awareness of the fact that all knowledge is conditioned by particular frameworks of belief. In some places, Horgan's book reflects the increased modesty in the claims made for science, exemplified by chaos theorist Otto Rossler, who sees two primary limits to knowledge: inaccessibility - we can never be sure about the origin of the universe, for example, because it is so distant from us in time and space; and (much worse) distortion - if we could stand outside the universe, we would know the limits to our knowledge, but we are trapped inside, so our knowledge of our own limits must remain incomplete (p.235). Furthermore, physicist Atlee Jackson states that to determine whether science has limits, you have to define science, and as soon as you define science, you impose limits on it (p.228). It seems that the limits of science, and whether we have reached them, can only be discovered in the doing of it.
Francis Schaeffer distinguished between 'early modern science', which arose in the Christian intellectual context of the 16th and 17th centuries and where humankind and God are not 'part of the machine', and 'modern modern science' which, decoupled from its theistic context, has become naturalistic, where 'the machine' now encompasses everything. Might the unease felt by Horgan and many of his interviewees reflect not 'the end of science' as such, but the end of 'modern modern' science?
The atmosphere of spiritual blindness pervading the book becomes rather depressing. Nobel Prize winners need to be called back to God through the gospel as much as anyone else, and the scientific enterprise needs to be called back to its proper place within a theistic worldview, including the biblical doctrine of creation and its application. However, another biblical tradition resonates with Horgan's message - the 'anti-wisdom' of the Book of Ecclesiastes, with its perspective from within the post-Genesis 3, fallen, condition of the created order. Verse 11.5 is particularly striking in this context: 'As you do not know the path of the wind, or how the body is formed in a mother's womb, so you cannot understand the work of God, the Maker of all things.' (NIV). 'Humanity's rebellion makes human beings experience the present cosmos as a locus of disorder . . . Ecclesiastes is thus the frontier-guard who leads wisdom back to an awareness of the limitations of her empirical approach - or is himself a danger signal on a dangerous road. Whatever of the ways of God can be perceived in his world, something beyond the witness of nature, reason, or everyday experience is needed if one is to perceive creation's deepest mystery or the creator's identity.' (J. Goldingay, Theological diversity and the authority of the Old Testament, Eerdmans, 1987, pp. 223, 225).
If we wish, rightly, to affirm the continuing legitimacy of the scientific enterprise, and to claim that it mediates true understanding of God's creation, we should nevertheless engage with this provocative book.
Dr. Philip Duce
