Of John Horgan – Addison-Wesley
A highly provocative assessment, written by John Horgan, former senior editor of the famed Scientific American magazine, after having exhaustively interviewed dozens of the most prominent scientists, cosmologists and empirical philosophers of the contemporary Western world (such as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Dawkins and Sir Roger Penrose). In this analytical essay, Horgan postulates with abundant journalistic rigor that the golden age of fundamental scientific discovery—those monumental revolutionary paradigms such as the Big Bang theory, general relativity, foundational quantum mechanics, and the discovery of the helical structure of DNA—has irrevocably reached its collapse and definitive end. He argues that pure, empirical science has collided with its own immanent epistemic limits. He argues that what dominates the current academic landscape is no longer verifiable physics, but rather a highly speculative 'ironic science', made up of unobservable, fantastical and post-empirical theories (such as mathematical string theory or infinite multi-verses) that logically resemble literary fiction criticism or an obscure theology rather than demonstrable and rigorous physical science.
Editorial rereading
The brutal clinical diagnosis made by John Horgan clearly constitutes an intellectual humiliation strictly necessary to crush once and for all the blind and pathological technological arrogance that infects the modern era. As humanity, we have reached and conquered the absolute pinnacle of mechanistic understanding of the visible universe; However, by peering over the abyss and looking into the interior of matter, the arrogant and noisy secular community has discovered with unspeakable horror that there are no more foundational answers hidden in the substrate of the organic material world. When the self-proclaimed avant-garde cosmologists and modern astrophysicists are forced to magically postulate 'infinite unobservable and abstract multiverses' with the sole and desperate goal of statistically evading the undeniable fine-tuning and teleology of this universe, they have formally stopped practicing noble empirical science to inaugurate the rites of a new feverish and irrational religion.
This inevitable and inexorable intellectual decline towards the confines of post-empirical 'ironic science' demonstrates, without leaving room for systematic doubt, an unbreakable ontological postulate: when the human being arbitrarily abandons the lights of higher Metaphysics and expels Theology from the public square, his organic intellect lacks the grip to understand the Infinite and ends up collapsing pitifully on itself. The end result of this existential void is the prolific invention of absurd mathematical fables (such as proposing that our immense reality is nothing more than a giant alien computer simulation, a theory that scientism itself defends with blind faith).
The glorious, golden age of purely empirical and foundational science has hit the ceiling of its own epistemological method. The great and majestic future revelations that the human intellect longs for will never come from building more immense particle colliders beneath the mountains of Europa, nor from sending faster probes to the far reaches of the galactic arms. The only genuine way out to avoid the collective madness of this era consists in the heroic return of humanity to the calm cultivation of Moral Philosophy, to the unrestricted assimilation of Natural Law, and to the profound contemplation of the immense and sacred teleological order that sustains and grounds the entire majestic scaffolding of existence itself. The matter has exhausted its explanatory capacity; It is the definitive turn to return to the creative Spirit and the Logos that orders the spheres.
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