Thirty years ago, John Horgan had a dream—or rather a nightmare. Here and there, scientists were saying that all the major problems of the universe had essentially been solved, and that the work of the future was just going to be filling in the details of what we already knew.
But those voices were largely drowned out in the generation of scientists who came of age promoting radical new ideas that they claimed would push their disciplines far beyond what was then-currently known. Despite their creators’ claims, however, ideas like string theory, quantum consciousness, and chaos theory, were unable to generate actual testable ideas and inventions.
Had scientific progress stalled? Is it possible that there are real limits on what humans can ever know because of the type of beings that we are? This was the thesis of John’s book, The End of Science, which was published in 1996.
The book was instantly controversial, and he was fired from Scientific American because of it. And yet in the intervening 30 years, many of the exact same people he had profiled are still promoting the same unproductive ideas.
Is it accurate to say that science is stalled out though? That’s why I wanted to talk with John about the book, and where he sees things in 2026, especially now one of America’s two major parties has rebuilt itself around attacking science and secular knowledge.
The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.
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Audio Chapters
00:00 — Introduction
14:51 — Isn’t all science just a type of philosophy?
25:14 — Peter Thiel’s claim that scientific progress has stalled
31:33 — Why science has such difficulty understanding consciousness
38:08 — The tension some religious believers feel with consciousness research
49:02 — Jeffrey Epstein’s obsession with scientists
53:20 — The fragility of the postwar liberal consensuses, and why they were taken for granted
Audio Transcript
The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: You wrote a book that pissed off a lot of people 30 years ago, and that’s what we are here to talk about today, among other things. So how does it feel 30 years after the fact, and are you going to retract at all right now, John, here and now?
JOHN HORGAN: Well, no. I think I was onto [00:03:00] something. I’ve never stopped thinking about the End of Science. I’m delighted that people are still arguing about the book. I mean, books vanish without a trace. That didn’t happen in my book. It got a lot of attention when it first came out. It caused a lot of trouble was widely debated.
It got me in trouble at my magazine, Scientific American, and ultimately I was fired because of my book. but by the time I got fired, I wanted to go off on my own and be a freelancer and write books for a living. So that worked out fine. I. People have had all kinds of reactions to it, some of which are silly or trivial and dumb, sort of just knee jerk defenses of science that weren’t informed at all by the things I said in my book. But other people have had really interesting responses and I’ve been rethinking my thesis for decades now. Just recently, I’ve decided that if anything [00:04:00] wasn’t pessimistic enough that the end of science, which is predicting that this great enterprise of trying to understand reality that goes back thousands of years, that this might be ending.
I mean, I love science, that’s why I became a science writer. So this was tragic for me. But and so it was very pessimistic of me to say that this, kind of grand science is ending. Science is in even worse shape now than I could have anticipated 30 years ago for a lot of different reasons that we could could get into.
And yet at the same time, there are a couple of things that make me hopeful that there could be revolutionary advances in science in the future.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well, and we will come back to the why things are worse now toward the end. But yeah, like, let’s just kind of talk about the basic thesis for people. Because the main [00:05:00] title is very provocative, but your subtitle kind of, makes it a little bit less sweeping in the ambit. So walk us through that if you would please.
HORGAN: All right. So my core claim is that science’s attempt to understand the universe has been extremely successful, so successful, that it will be hard to improve upon it in any kind of dramatic way. So we’ve created this kind of map of the whole universe, a history of the universe starting with the Big Bang, formation of galaxies, formation of the solar system.
We’ve come up with a pretty good history of life on earth and a basic understanding of how life diversified through natural selection. We have an understanding of the molecular basis of life, that’s embodied by the double helix. And my claim was that we’re not going to [00:06:00] have any revolutions in the future that completely change our picture of reality, as dramatic as the big Bang theory, quantum mechanics, relativity evolutionary theory, uh, modern genetics and all that.
We’re going to be filling in details of this map of reality, and applying some of our knowledge. But at the era of really great profound discoveries, as I put it, revelations and revolutions is over. It’s going to be anticlimactic from here on in. I was really just talking about science, what I call “pure science,” it just tries to understand the universe– not applied science. I thought applied science would be difficult. predict. So I sort of left that off to the side it’s the pure science, just for the sake of understanding [00:07:00] that has always interested me a science journalist.
So that was that was my core thesis. But then I also said that science faces various limits: cognitive limits, physical limits, economic and political limits. And because of that, there are certain big questions that science will never be able to solve. Like, where did the universe come from in the first place? How did life begin on earth? How consciousness is produced by matter. I thought I said back then those mysteries would not be solved for various complicated reasons that I. That I could go into. so basically thesis in, in a nutshell.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it is, even if people disagree with you, I think the book is valuable as just a, run through of all of these different scientific fields at the time that you [00:08:00] were writing it. So it was published in 1996. And it, I mean, everybody’s there. You, you really did benefit from being a Scientific American employee when you were writing that.
I think you got literally all the biggest names, all these Nobel Prize winners and it’s all there. So In a large way, you thesis that people aren’t going to be coming up with any of these, really monumental theoretical inventions or, innovations.
all of the theories that are talked about in your book, we are still talking about them today and they’re not. And, and some of the people are, have died, but plenty of them are still going and they’re still saying the same stuff. Like give us a kind of overview of some of the people.
HORGAN: So I was really attracted to people who were very accomplished as as scientists, but also unafraid of making grand statements about the future of science and the limits of science. So, [00:09:00] some of people I talked to had predicted that, that their fields were converging on some kind of final theory.
So there were a bunch of physicists who said this, Steven Weinberg this, great particle physics physicist was one of them. He wrote a book called Dreams of a Final Theory that came out in the early nineties. And talked to him about that and so he was this sort of supreme reductionist, who thought that physics was going to provide the, fundamental knowledge that would ultimately help us explain everything else, including including life itself. Weinberg was a really smart guy, knowledgeable, just only about particle physics, but a wide range of other fields as well. I also talked to this guy John Wheeler, who was the ultimate physics poets. Physicist, really imaginative, [00:10:00] brilliant And he had this idea of there being at the end of the road for physics, a kind of revelation that would make everything clear.
So we look at the mystery of the universe and there’s some theory explanation, whatever that makes us go, oh my God, that’s it. Of course. And everything becomes clear. mystery is dispelled. I also met, I didn’t really interview him because he, couldn’t speak, but I hung out with Stephen Hawkin, who of course kicked a lot of this.
Talk about a final theory in physics off. a lecture he gave at Cambridge in 19, way back in 1980. He talked about a theory of everything that would explain all physical interactions in the universe. And so I started hearing these ideas when I first became a science writer in the 1980s. Ideas coming from physics about a [00:11:00] final theory, a unified theory a theory of everything. then I realized that there were people in biology who were saying the same thing. That in a way the theory of evolution by natural selection plus modern molecular biology based on DNA, we’re creating this final framework for biology within which all the mysteries about for example, how a single fertilized cell turns into like this, that all those would eventually be solved.
So the field was described as something sort of. Closed rather than open-ended. And there was this idea that we were converging on final solutions. One of the key figures I interviewed was was Francis Crick, the guy who cracked, with James Watson, cracked the structure of DNA, the double helix, and then went on to try to solve the the problem of consciousness made consciousness a [00:12:00] respectable scientific problem the late 1980s and and early 1990s.
And again, convinced a lot of people, including me, that with incremental, conventional research on animals and, some humans, we would figure out what consciousness is and how it’s produced by brains and maybe generalized from that to explaining how consciousness is produced by any physical thing. And so it was all these people talking about science as basically on the verge the world, explaining the universe, explaining existence, including our own existence. That’s what really got me. I started taking that seriously and thinking, wow, is that really going to happen? And and then I started, talked to all [00:13:00] these people about the limits of science and the obstacles to a final scientific picture of reality. And I came up with my own, thesis, which was that no science has already done it can, at least in a really sort of rough way to figure out reality. And then the. Future scientists trying to explain things once and for all are going to be bumping up against these fundamental limits. And so that is what led to the end of science.
But want to make the point that one reason why my book enraged scientists so much, is because I use their own words and ideas against them. I, my my argument that science one really important sense was [00:14:00] ending, or was already over in a way, is cobbled together from things that all these physicists and biologists were saying.
Richard Dawkins and The__ Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins, the great, religion bashing biologist in The Blind Watchmaker said that life was once a mystery, but it’s a mystery no more because Dar Darwin solved it. And, we have footnotes to add footnotes what Darwin said, but but that’s compared to what what Darwin achieved. Ernst Meyer, the great biologist, said something similar. So, it was these sorts of things that I was putting together to give this sense of science, having reached some kind of final state.
Isn’t all science just a type of philosophy?
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, a lot of people, well, maybe not a lot, but some people actually were making your argument. Let’s talk about these, limits that we’re [00:15:00] talking about. So, obviously humans we’re limited in terms of our size. So we can’t, we’re not as small as a, quark or a neutrino, or anything like that. So like, we can’t really see what they’re doing. But also we can’t see, what a, a black hole is doing. And we can’t go out there and watch it for a thousand years and make our findings about it.
So like, it’s all, it has to all be theoretical in some sense, and I think that’s kind of what you’re terming as ironic science.
HORGAN: Yeah. So the supreme example, I came up with idea of ironic science when I was about string theory. So string theory was already happening by the time I became a science writer in the 1980s. And so I started talking to people about it and it was upheld as this, it was the best candidate for a final theory of physics that would really explain. Everything. It would explain space and time. It would [00:16:00] tell us maybe how the universe came to be in the first place. Why the universe has one particular structure not a structure that allows for our existence and not some other didn’t take some other form. The problem with string theory, and this is all the unified theories that were being batted around in the 1980s and 1990s, is that they, hypothesize things happening at scales that are completely unaccessible to any possible And so string theory represented a discontinuity the history of physics where there had always been this interaction between theory and experiment. The string theorists were jumping off into a realm of total imagination. Constrained by mathematics, but that’s it. Not constrained by experiment. So I thought, what is this? it’s not really science. And, along with strength theory, there was a lot of [00:17:00] speculation about other universes, many worlds theory. There was a landscape theory. There are all these different inflation that had as a kind of side effect, the existence of infinite other universities, in addition to our own and physicists were taking that seriously. So I came up with this term ironic science to describe this strange state of affairs where you had these ideas coming from, very respectable, big time scientists, but that weren’t testable, verifiable, weren’t susceptible to experimentation. And of course, you’ve had a lot of theories that Karl Popper distinguished between testable and Untestable theories as the the line dividing pseudoscience from science. And he upheld Freudian psychoanalysis as kind of the epitome of pseudoscience. And pseudoscience is kind of a mean term. I prefer [00:18:00] ironic science. So it’s, science that can be awe inspiring and provocative and very stimulating to think about, but it doesn’t converge on the truth.
You can never say this theory is actually true, psychoanalysis or string theory.
SHEFFIELD: Well, although, I mean we, I want to consider that maybe you are being unfair, perhaps in the sense that philosophy is the parent of science. And so therefore, when science is up against the instrumentational limits or the metaphysical limits, in other words, the metaphysics of the scientists, if they have a bad metaphysics, that can also constrain what they can conceive of as a possible experimental theory.
So perhaps going [00:19:00] back to philosophy and going back to metaphysics, this is what they should do.
HORGAN: Yeah. I mean, I love philosophy and metaphysics, but I don’t want to confuse that with science. Science gets somewhere, and the mark good science is that it makes predictions that are born out. Or not born out. And it often leads to applications. So all these esoteric theories embodied by what you might call quantum physics that were emerging in the early 20th century, who cares really. But then that work led to, nuclear weapons. It led to technologies that have changed the course in of history and in the same way that biology has led to, advances in, in medicine. And if you just go back to metaphysics and philosophy, it can [00:20:00] be awe inspiring and, provocative, not getting a grip on, on the real world in the way that real science did.
So I thought it was important to make a distinction and, yeah, physics, you could say was going back to its roots with, with string theory and multiverse theories all of
SHEFFIELD: is like the Pre-Socratics, isn’t it, in a sense?
HORGAN: But the, physicists who were promoting those theories, that’s not what they were saying. They weren’t saying, well, physics, real physics, is gone as, as far as it can go. And so we’ve returned to our roots in philosophy. No, they were saying, this is real and we should accept it. And these theories are explaining where the universe came from, all of which was bullshit. It was like hand waving and marketing their ideas. So that’s what I was trying to point out in the end of science when I was being critical of string theory [00:21:00] and, some of these other things.
Yeah. Well, and I think, yeah, that there, there’s, going back to metaphysics is important sometimes when you’re stuck. But on the other hand, you have to actually be able to predict something. if, you’re not going to be able to create testable conclusions, then you’re just doing philosophy.
Well, remember, I, I, I don’t know if I said this before, but don’t think philosophy gets anywhere. I, philosophy I see as a kind of branch of literature a or fiction or poetry. I mean, good philosophy to me doesn’t present you with a problem and then solve it. And you go, oh, okay, so I, don’t have to worry about this.
The, how language maps onto the real world, whatever that is, because I know Saul Kripke or somebody solved it. No philosophy just says the same way that fiction does try looking at the world this way [00:22:00] See if, see how that works and compare it to the way that we used to look at things. it’s, something that is just kind of making the scales fall from, in our eyes, but it’s not helping us converge on what you might call a correct way of looking at the world, which science remarkably sometimes does.
Mm-hmm.
That’s the distinction I would make.
Yeah. Well, and maybe as a, just as a personal example is, the, looking at the general generalizability or applicability of, let’s say the, Ethics of Aristotle or The Politics, versus The__ Physics. Like nobody takes The Physics seriously, as a matter of, science.
SHEFFIELD: It’s just not, people don’t, and with good reason.
HORGAN: Well, it’s funny, so I’ve, thought a lot about, I, I used to be part of a philosophy salon in New York that was disbanded the by the [00:23:00] pandemic. And these are real professional philosophers. And sometimes I thought when I was speaking up, they’d go, who let this guy in anyway?
SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.
HORGAN: But we had, there were a lot of discussions about, about whether philosophy progresses and what problems it might have solved.
And would to, I was surprised that some of these philosophers denied that there was progress in philosophy. And I said, well, about progress in human rights? and what about our recognition of progress in human rights that you could say be attributed to some enlightenment thinkers? And then, I don’t know the arguments made for you caring about the suffering of animals made by Peter Singer and people like that. And the philosophers were like, eh, and, some of them were saying no, philosophy has demonstrated that there is no [00:24:00] coherent system of moral rules. That any ethics that you construct, I can demolish. And philosophy has had this record of construct. Kant, Aristotle builds a system of ethics. Kant has a system of ethics, and then somebody like Nietzsche comes and like smashes it to bits.
I, my impression is that’s a continued to the present day. Bernard Williams has, we read a paper by him in, our philosophy salon that basically said that there is no philosophical system of ethics that. That can withstand serious scrutiny. I mean, I, that doesn’t matter to me. I still think that I have moral principles, whether or not I can prove them axiomatic or, in some kind of mathematical proof sets. I, mean, I think it’s bad to incinerate [00:25:00] children, for example. But but it’s very hard to demonstrate that logically.
So I do still separate moral reasoning from, I don’t know what you might call scientific or logical or mathematical reasoning.
Peter Thiel’s claim that scientific progress has stalled
SHEFFIELD: speaking of Nietzsche, somebody who is a really big fan of him, Peter Thiel, it’s funny because he makes a lot of the same critiques that you do, John. and, I want to talk about that because like right now as we are recording, Peter Thiel is in Rome, or maybe he just finished.
Giving a series of lectures on the Antichrist from the Bible, and how the Antichrist is actually why we’re at a, stopping point in science. And that people like yourself who want to have more regulations on corporations and polluting and things like that, that you are actually to blame people like you are [00:26:00] why there’s an end of science, you and the Antichrist.
HORGAN: Who is Antichrist?
SHEFFIELD: Well, according to him, it’s, Greta Thunberg and, anyone else who wants regulations on technology and technology companies. And he literally says this but also, but he also, like him and he cronies are very big on, they don’t like string theory, and like one example he often gives is in the fifties we were promised flying cars, and now all we have is another another way to try to loot boxes on our mobile apps and where’s my flying car? And must be the Antichrist’s fault.
HORGAN: Well, I don’t know if I, mean, Peter Thiel is a mystery to me. I don’t know why people take him seriously except that he’s really rich, and that’s how a lot of people get taken seriously. If you’ve made a billion dollars, then you must be a serious person and a, serious intellect. But I know he has been sort of fretting over the stagnation [00:27:00] of applied science and science in general for a while now. My book, the End of Science, really didn’t talk about applied science as I said before, but I have been struck also by how little progress there’s been in in applied science since my book came out.
So I’ve been remarking on that, more and more. One is, quantum computing, which I find really fascinating. I as a kind of pandemic project at the beginning of 2020, started writing a book about quantum mechanics. I decided, I’ve been pontificating about physics forever without understanding any of the underlying math.
So I thought I’ll, finally learn a little bit of the math under quantum mechanics and then write a book about whether I had any insights because of that. So I had, I had to go back and learn calculus again. I learned linear algebra, I learned what complex numbers are, all that.
And then tried to understand some of the [00:28:00] basic principles of quantum theory. And as a result of that, I got really interested in in quantum computing and started taking it very seriously when I had thought it was just like very hypey and bullshitty. And it seems to me that quantum computing has the potential not only of some real profound, technologies. Including just the basic technology of quantum computing itself, but also, leading to breakthroughs in our understanding how quantum effects work. Like what is entanglement? What is superposition? These things are still very mysterious. Nobody’s ever really come up with a satisfying explanation of some of these fundamental quantum principles. And so this is one of the caveats that I attach to my end of science theory, or thesis which is that quantum computing might [00:29:00] have revolutionary consequences at some point in the future. I’m not saying that’s going to happen and it’s still very, hypey but I think possible.
One of the people I met while I was working on my, my quantum book, was a guy named, Rudolph, who happens to be the grandson, one of one of the grandchildren of of Schrodinger, the Schrodinger’s cat guy. And he had started a quantum computing company that, like it had a really viable technology. I’m not sure where it is now. I haven’t talked to Rudolph in, a few years, but Rudolph convinced me that this technology really could take off in a serious way.
I don’t know if Peter Thiel has talked about quantum computing, if he’s interested in it, but I’m definitely interested in it, in following it. I take quantum computing more seriously than I do just [00:30:00] large language models and all the artificial intelligences that had burst upon the scene over the last few years.
It might be irrational on my part. But I hate ai. I think it’s catastrophic for the whole, enterprise of human inquiry and intellectual work, like the kind that you do, the kind that I do, the kind that lots of people do. Just trying to figure out what it means to be a human being. What the universe is, what life is, all that kind of stuff.
Ai, I see this enormous distraction. It’s going to make us dumber. And I’m very poorly equipped even to argue about it because I’m trying to stay away from it, but it’s unavoidable. It’s just like in your face all the time. So ai, yeah, fuck that, but quantum computing, yeah, I’m still really intrigued by that. And of course then it, at some point we’re going to have [00:31:00] AI based on quantum computing, and I, god knows what that’s going to be like. I’m sure there are a lot of people working that on that already. I.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there certainly are. Although right now the applications, the actual applications of quantum computing are still quite a few years away it looks like just in terms of reliability. But yeah, there, there seems to be something there. Now there are some other alternatives of, at least in terms of miniaturization, like, DNA computing is another area people are, thinking about.
Why science has such difficulty understanding consciousness
SHEFFIELD: One of the other problems of science and which you do talk about extensively in the book and subsequently is this idea of, where, what are minds and where do they come from.
And it is uncanny, when I was reading it 30 years after the fact, in preparation for this discussion, that, all the same people, they’re all there. and one of them, he just only recently passed away, Daniel Dennett but, [00:32:00] so like pretty much everybody, in, in that you talked about in the book.
So, whether it’s, Roger Penrose or, well, I guess, Marvin Minsky, he, passed away as well. But you know, pretty much by and large all the people that, that were kicking around these ideas. They’re still now, and they’re kind of saying the same stuff. So you got David Chalmers in there as well.
So, let’s, can you walk us through kind of what the, so for people who don’t follow this stuff, walk us through kind of what the major theories are because they’ve been around for a while.
HORGAN: Yeah. So, when I wrote the End of Science, one of fields that I was really interested in was I dunno, consciousness studies, you could call it consciousness research, trying to understand how a brain produces conscious subjective states. And Francis Crick, and his sidekick, Christophe Koch were the leaders in this. Field starting [00:33:00] in the eighties, and they really drew a lot of people in. In the 1990s, you started to have these big conferences on consciousness in Tucson. I went to the, first one in, I think it was 1994, and I saw Roger Penrose give a talk and Christophe Koch and David Chalmers, and I forget if Daniel Dennett was there, but his ideas, were certainly circulating. There was this sense back then science was going to solve this thing. I mean, there was a lot of fringe, theorizing there, but there were, there was a core of people that were very serious and seemed to have a good plan for cracking the riddle of consciousness. So this was like 30 years ago, more than a little, more than 30 years ago.
I covered that in I wrote about that conference in the end of [00:34:00] science. So here we are 30 years later. What is the state of this research far from being far from converging on what looks like a pretty sensible theory of consciousness? There’s been this explosion, so, field, it looked like it was coalescing around a paradigm not, like a final theory, but a, kind of approach that could lead to a final theory back when I was first writing about consciousness research, and it just hasn’t happened. The opposite has happened. It’s, there’s been a, paradigm explosion. You have all these different competing theories, all of which I think are really bad. very implausible, even though there’s some that are couched in very scientific technical jargon. But some of them make. Absurd, conclusions [00:35:00] like Integrated Information Theory, which is very popular right now. It’s promoted by Christophe Koch I forget the the guy, oh, Tononi is the person who invented this Tononi, who’s mentor was Gerald Edelman, who I wrote about in the End of Science. So these are people with a really fancy pedigree. Roger Penrose is still had his Theory of consciousness back in the nineties.
He’s still peddling that with Stuart Hammeroff well. But then you have all these other different theories coming. From psychedelic studies, from people who are studying meditation and mindfulness and looking at mystical states induced with these practices. There are people who are looking to Buddhism for inspiration and coming up with of consciousness.
Deepak Chopra has been a, a player in in some of these conversations. So what the, what I’m trying to say is that it’s anti-progress. This is one reason [00:36:00] why I say my book was not pessimistic enough. Some fields have gone backwards. I mean, I love consciousness research because it’s so wild and crazy and it’s very entertaining. But if you wanted science to be sort of figuring things out, making slow, steady, incremental progress toward, I don’t know, the equivalent of a theory of photosynthesis or something, it’s just not there. and it just reinforces the feeling I had in the end of science that consciousness is not a solvable problem. The more we study it, the more baffling it’s going to be. And by the way, I have to mention that in the end of science, I ended the book.
I had a riff at the end just imagining what would happen if we created super intelligent machines, which people were thinking about. [00:37:00] More than 30 years ago, Freeman Dyson, the great physicist who I interviewed for the end of science, he had done a lot of thinking about the future of intelligence once we get rid of our mortal coils and become clouds of gas floating around the universe. Others also Hans Moravec and Frank Tipler were thinking along the same lines. And so I just imagined what it would be like to be one of these super intelligent entities. And I decided, and admit this was inspired in part by a drug trip that the more intelligent an entity becomes, the more baffled it will be by its own existence.
It won’t be able to figure out. Why it exists, why anything exists. It will be, so astonished and appalled at its own improbability that it [00:38:00] will go So I actually came up with a, the whole theory of creation based on this idea.
The tension some religious believers feel with consciousness research
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it is one of the things about consciousness studies, and so this is, as, my listeners will know by now that it’s, it is a personal research interest of mine. I think that one of the things that has maybe taken it back in some ways with some people is that, there’s always been this kind of tension between monists, there’s a monist single monist physical universe. And or there’s a dualist, quasi supernatural realm that ingress into the physical world somehow. and of course, if science ever did come up with a monist theory of mind that actually worked, that would be really bad for dualist religion.
And so, you [00:39:00] you see a lot of religious organizations flooding into this space and, one of them that does it a lot, are various institutions that you have written about interacting with, which is various Templeton foundations that have been trying to say, well, maybe we should take religion seriously in consciousness studies.
And and so, yeah. Yeah. Tell, us about that. For people who don’t know that story or those stories.
HORGAN: Well, I had. So I took money from the Templeton Foundation, which was founded by a Christian stock picker named John Templeton. It was one of the best stock pickers of all time and made a lot of money and thought that there should be more interaction between science and religion and created this foundation to promote that.
And I’ve always been interested sort of how science tends to kind of reach into [00:40:00] spiritual even mystical realms. And so I got a fellowship from Templeton Foundation in 2005. Went to university of Cambridge for several weeks, and I got some money and I got to hang out all these cool journalists and scientists including Richard Dawkins, who was kind of the token atheist and a bunch of other really smart, interesting people. And and it was really fun. and I think that talking about science and religion is great. I, as I told you before my Catholic upbringing informs the way I look at the world a lot and the way that I look at science. It’s just that I don’t think any of the answers supplied by religion so far are any good.
So I like the questions that religion poses like. Is there any purpose to the universe? What are we doing here? Do we, is there a special place for humans in the universe and all that sort of stuff? [00:41:00] Catholicism doesn’t answer those questions to my satisfaction, but the questions are really important and I ask them all the time myself.
So that’s where I see that dialogue as being, as having some benefit. The problem is that Templeton Foundation had it wanted more than that. It, wanted there to be some kind of reconciliation and more respect given to religion by science. And it was basically buying people off to say that by throwing a lot of money at them.
So I thought it had a, ultimately an unhealthy influence over. Over these discussions about what is the relationship between science and religion. So I wrote some really mean things about the Templeton Foundation after taking their money and and they got really mad, but then they kept giving me [00:42:00] money
SHEFFIELD: Oh, interesting. Yeah. I was wondering what happened after you wrote those columns.
HORGAN: well apparently the, Templeton, the, Jack Templeton, the son of John Templeton, who was running the foundation when I was writing my pieces, was outraged at my criticism. because I had pointed out that he was a right wing supporter of George Bush and anti-abortion. And, I thought he was not a good guy. And I had pointed that out in my pieces. nd so he wanted, tried to out, because I had quoted some people in the Templeton Foundation saying disparaging things about it, and he wanted to find out who my sources were and all this. But then he died and then, I ended up doing some other gigs for the Templeton Foundation for more money. So, that’s an odd situation, but
I
SHEFFIELD: They
got over it.
HORGAN: yeah, but religion is, I mean, because I [00:43:00] of my roots as an acid head, am, I’m, really interested in mystical states and, our intuitions of some kind of divine intelligence or God or whatever you might. it. I haven’t seen any explanation of God that makes sense to me, including the one that I came up with after this big trip I had like 40 years ago. And so all this is an ironic enterprise as well. In other words, it’s not going to lead to any final answers, true answers, but, I love it. I, it’s stimulating, to me. I love talking to other people no matter what their views are, if they’re smart and open-minded about what the hell we’re doing here.
Yeah. Well, and the reason that I mentioned or brought this up was that from my perspective religion is [00:44:00] just kind of a, it is an applied science, if you will, if you look at the way that they work. So, like, I was born and raised Mormon and one of, they have a doctrine that they call the Word of Wisdom.
SHEFFIELD: And the Word of Wisdom as Mormons interpreted or as it was written, it was very clearly a science inflected document. But they said that God gave it to him. But basically the God of Mormonism was a member of the cold water movement of the mid 19th century who thought that drinking hot water was bad for human bodies and that tobacco was bad for human bodies.
And that and so like, it was just the scientific consensus of that day put into a revelatory fashion. And then you look at the, like, Mormons also have a cosmology as well. It’s basically like a, just kind of a very frozen and amber post Copernican system in which the stars get their light from each other. And that was actually what a lot of [00:45:00] scientists, as you may probably know, like that’s what they thought for a long time.
And this was a 19th century scientific belief. So in a lot of ways religion is applied science, so science and religion and philosophy. There really are kind of about the same two basic questions, which is, what is the world and what are we, and, they both try to answer it in different ways and, are successful or more, less successful, I would say.
HORGAN: Yeah, that. What are we, so I wrote a one of my. Recent books is called mind-body Problems. And and it’s, a look at the mind-body problem, which according to some of my philosophical friends only goes back a few hundred years to Descartes, people like that. But I’ve, the ancient Greeks talked about it.
And I, think of it as the question of what we are and what’s the best way to think of humans. are we, matter ultimately? [00:46:00] Are we mind? Are we souls? I mortal souls are we clusters of genes or software programs or whatever? And, all right. And of course, religions. were our first set gave us our first set of answers to to these sorts of questions.
We’re children of God and if we do these sorts of things, then we’re going to get to go heaven after we die, or whatever. And then there are versions of Christianity like Mormonism that, that sort of riff those themes. And the idea there’s a final answer to this question of what we are, to me is just self-evidently absurd because keep coming up with new ways of looking at ourselves because of science and because of technology, because of new ideas.
So, yeah, Marx gave us new ways of looking at each at, ourselves. LSD [00:47:00] gives us new ways of looking at ourselves. Large language models now are really causing a lot of churn in our self understanding, and I don’t see any end to that. So theories or solutions to the mind body problem I see as really important.
And that we’re in this perpetual state self-exploration and self discovery will never end. So, and I think it, there’s a danger in thinking that there could be a final solution. To this question of what we really are and how we should think about ourselves even as moral agents. we’re desperate for certainty. We want this answer, and that’s why of the answers that people have given us [00:48:00] have inspired zealotry religious, not just religious, answers, but, Marxism has inspired a lot of destructive zealotry as well and eugenics. So I, every chance I get, I, preach this sort of seeing this question, this inquiry into what we are as having no end. Going on forever. And they’re also, I think we have to recognize some ideas are dead end. Some ideas are destructive, they’re harmful, like, I don’t know, white supremacy, let’s say. but others are enormously provocative and interesting. And even some of the religious ideas are still useful as goads to our thinking. yeah, so that’s, kind of where I am on mind body [00:49:00] solutions.
Jeffrey Epstein’s obsession with scientists
SHEFFIELD: and yeah, being open to hearing what every body has to say. I mean, ultimately about that, because like, and that’s. That is one of the things that you have written about discovering since writing the book. That especially in regards to Jeffrey Epstein. So, Jeffrey Epstein was somebody who, he was there and he personally knew as the, we’ve found out subsequently.
He personally knew a lot of the people in your book including Noam Chomsky and including Marvin Minsky and, Daniel Dennett and a lot of these people. They were on his airplanes, they were at his dinners. Some of them went to his island. Some of them, had even more unsavory dealings with him.
Like, Lawrence Krauss the physicist. So that as you wrote, you, had decided that maybe there were the term pure science. It was not such a good one.
HORGAN: Yeah. I, so I was like one degree of [00:50:00] separation from Epstein because my, book agent for about 10 years ending, I think in 2009, was this guy named John Brockman, was like a celebrity agent who represented a lot of big time, much bigger I am big time science book writers. and like Stephen Pinker and Lawrence Krauss and some others.
And, Brockman was, introduced Epstein, who was like a science groupie to a lot of these famous scientists. Murray Gell-Mann is one that you didn’t mention, one of the great physicists of the 20th century who was a, pretty important character in in the End of Science as well. And so I started hearing about this guy a while ago and Brockman was throwing these parties where he brought Epstein and some other really rich people together with some of the scientists and they mingled. And I [00:51:00] just wasn’t a-list enough to get invited to these parties. If I had been invited, I definitely would’ve gone. I mean, I’m a journalist, I am I’m always looking for a new experience to report on and I thought this was fascinating. But the Epstein files going through them and then also reading the coverage and seeing the degree to which some these people I admired hung out with this guy and were sort of exchanging I dunno, really sort of tawdry messages with him. This is part of why I said earlier, science is in worse shape than I would’ve expected it.
It just makes. I, part of me still saw science as this kind of noble endeavor, the quest for truth. And seeing that some of these scientists are [00:52:00] just like, sort of greedy, horny bastards, was pretty disillusioning. And it just makes me, it actually corroborates this feeling that I’ve had for a while that the quest for truth was never really an important part of science. That it’s always been about, primarily about power power of various kinds political power, financial power, and this sort, truth seeking is tolerated and sometimes funded pretty generously. It was funded very generously when I first became a science journalist in the 1980s and through the nineties. But now Trump administration is really cutting back on lot of, the classic, what I used to call pure science. And that actually is, has been the default [00:53:00] historically. Most societies haven’t really been interested in science for its own sake. That’s been a pretty fringe pursuit. It matters a lot to people like you and me. Most people don’t care about it. Most of my students don’t care about it most, they’re people who gobble up books by Stephen Hawking.
SHEFFIELD: do they actually read him? No.
The fragility of the postwar liberal consensuses, and why they were taken for granted
HORGAN: Yeah, I, And, science has been supported by governments and by rich, powerful patrons of various kinds. Elon Musk, mainly because it can generate profits and power a way to make money, to kill your enemies, to live longer, that sort of thing.
So that’s part of why I actually am more fearful for the future of science now than I was when I wrote the End of Science. I, mean, I’m not even sure about the future of democracy anymore. I sort of took democracy for granted in the 1990s [00:54:00] when I was writing the end of science and thought that us would continue to support science as a very important intellectual endeavor. Now,
SHEFFIELD: You’re not so sure.
HORGAN: yeah, I’m not so sure.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the, sobering thing that I think people who do support democracy have to realize is that World War II and that up till the end of the Cold War, this was a beautifully anomalous time in human history that it was, and, it has a political and epistological origin in this because when we look at the history of conservatism conservatism as an ideology, it can be extrinsically focused and interested in evidence and practicality.
Michael Oakeshott the philosopher, is a great [00:55:00] example of that. But it also can be reactionary. It can be hateful of intellectualism, can be hateful of science, can be hateful of democracy. And the lessons that were learned by conservatives globally after World War II was, we can’t help reactionaries.
They will destroy this world and destroy our everything we hold dear. And they learned that, and they really understood that, that baby boom generation and the World War II, GI Generation, a lot of those people understood that who were on the political right, but nobody who was in the center or the left bothered to understand what had happened.
They just thought, okay, well, everybody’s good now. Everybody is on board with science. Everybody loves democracy. Everybody loves human rights and women’s rights and, racial equality, they’re against segregation. No, it’s all good. Now we’re going to move [00:56:00] forward forever. And so they never bothered to, to teach what had happened, what they had learned in their bones, they never learned with their minds.
HORGAN: That I, think I’m one of those naive people that you’re talking about. I look back on the assumptions I had about, I mean, we’re really talking about what I would call civilization, caring about truth and caring about justice. And I don’t know, fairness as a kind of fundamental principle for the organization of a society.
And I just assumed, like we’d gotten to the point, you didn’t have to worry about challenges to those ideals anymore. But now I see that as very naive. And, I’m not sure where I, so it’s not. I’m not even that concerned about science anymore. I’m concerned about just sort of basic [00:57:00] freedoms and justice and things like that.
So, I once assumed that a lot of people shared my view of pure science, trying to understand the world for its own sake as like the best thing that humans can do. now I, realize that was silly of me to to feel that way. There’s some people who actually care about science for its own sake, but it’s kind of a, it’s like sort of a fringy thing. Like you find other people who are into it and you all convince each other that, this is really cool and it really matters. But I don’t know. Meanwhile, there are these giant forces, corporations and governments that are. Clashing and the true sinking seeking is just something that happens on the margins. So I’m actually, I’m pretty cheerful when it comes to my personal life, but I’m, pretty I’m pretty, [00:58:00] I pretty dark feelings about where the world is going. I wanna stick around, I’m old, I’m 72 years old. I, wanna see what happens next. So, I’m very curious to see how Trumpism unfolds, where things go right now, with science and with democracy, with basic human rights, with warfare, which is a big concern of mine also. Yeah, I’m, worried about the future for my children and my students and other
SHEFFIELD: Yeah, with good reason. And and I will say for people who are watching or listening or reading this episode that actually we, talked in the episode, the air before this one talk extensively about the future. So, we will, and I’ll send you the link as well, John, so you’ll, I won’t leave you in the dark, my friend.
But ultimately, I mean, yeah, from my standpoint, that was something that science was offering, is it was offering a vision of the [00:59:00] future. And that is essential to stopping this horrific imagined past, which is really what, Trump and Thiel and these Elon Musk. They’re talking about imposing the old values of the Gilded Age or, the Feudal Age. Like Peter Thiel. He wants to be a feudal lord, like that’s obvious at this point.
But in order to stop that, people who support democracy. And so this is why I think that, the solidly blue states and the liberal democracies of Europe, there, there has to be a reverse Marshall plan in the United States where you guys are spending billions of dollars every year on media, on science, on education.
Because, you have to make the argument. That beautiful moment of the 20th century, we can get it back if we understood why it was good. And explain it to the public [01:00:00] because, yeah, it, nobody really participated in that conversation. it just happened. People built something magnificent, and then they never realized why it was good or how it happened.
HORGAN: Yeah, how to maintain it.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah.
HORGAN: Well, I, what I worry listening to you is that. I mean, I’m in an position because I’ve been a very critical science journalist. I’m sort of like poking holes and, popular theories, and I’ve been accused of being anti-science. I, say I’m just doing my job.
My job is to distinguish genuine scientific advances or possible advances from bullshit. But now we’re in a genuinely anti-scientific era. I mean, Trump doesn’t give a shit about truth, Trump and his minions. He really only cares about power. And and so, my work [01:01:00] can be used by some of these science haters: “Oh, I see what this guy says, that like, psychiatry is bullshit string theory is, bullshit. And all these different things are, are pseudoscience, or ironic science or whatever.”
And so I’m in a weird position of to stick up for science that I never thought I would be in. I always took science for granted. Now all of a sudden, it’s genuinely endangered.
SHEFFIELD: And coming, possibly coming to an end for a very different reason than what you had theorized.
HORGAN: Yeah, I mean I knew that there were, I mean there, there were creationists who picked away at science going back in the nineties when I was writing. I never took them seriously. That wasn’t a genuine political force. But, now anti-science forces are quite powerful, and have already taken action against science that has [01:02:00] really, damaged it. So how we’re going to come out of this if we come out, I don’t know.
SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well. It begins with the will to power to, to paraphrase Nietzche there.
HORGAN: Yeah.
SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, John, this has been a, sobering but hopefully informative conversation to everybody. And but for people who wanna keep up with your work what’s your advice for them?
HORGAN: Oh just go to my website. I’m, I post my thoughts there pretty often johnhorgan.org. And and I also have a couple of books that, including Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment that I posted on the site for free. So you, can get more than enough John Horgan there.
SHEFFIELD: Okay. Sounds good. All right. Well, I encourage people to check that out. Thanks for being here.
HORGAN: Thank you. My pleasure.
SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the discussion for today. [01:03:00] I appreciate you joining us for the program, and if you want to get more video, audio, and transcripts of this episode and previous ones, you can go to theoryofchange.show, where we have it all there. And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have an unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your support.
So that’ll do it for this episode. I’ll see you next time.
