The Delusion of Scientific Omniscience

“Footprints on a beach, real original,” my girlfriend said when I showed her this photo. Yeah, but I’m hoping it somehow captures the absurdity of the idea that we can know everything.

August 13, 2023. This is an updated version of a paywalled column I posted on Scientific American a while back. I think it makes a nice follow-up to my recent post on pluralism. –John Horgan

Does anyone still think science can explain, well, everything? This belief was ascendant in the 1980s, when my career began. Bigshot scientists proclaimed they were solving the riddle of existence. They would explain why our universe exists and takes the form it does, and why we exist and are what we are.

For years I believed this claim, partly out of deference to the scientists propagating it, but also because the prospect of a final revelation thrilled me. Eventually I had doubts, which I spelled out in The End of Science and other writings. Now I see the vision of total knowledge as a laughable delusion, a pathological fantasy that should never have been taken seriously, even though brilliant scientists propagated it.

Stephen Hawking was the most influential know-it-all. In his 1988 mega-bestseller A Brief History of Time, Hawking predicted that physicists would soon find an “ultimate theory” that would explain how our cosmos came into being. He compared this achievement to knowing “the mind of God.” This statement was ironic. Hawking, an atheist, wanted science to eliminate the need for a divine creator.

I suspect Hawking, who had a wicked sense of humor, was goofing when he riffed on the ultimate theory. The success of Brief History nonetheless inspired copycat books by physicists, including Theories of Everything by John Barrow (1991), The Mind of God by Paul Davies (1992) and Dreams of a Final Theory (1993) by Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg.

Weinberg, a deadly serious man, was definitely not kidding when he envisioned a final theory. He argued that with the help of a new “supercollider” in Texas (which ended up being canceled), physicists might soon “bring to an end a certain kind of science, the ancient search for those principles that cannot be explained in terms of deeper principles.” 

Like Hawking, Weinberg hoped the final theory would crush, once and for all, our superstitious faith in an all-powerful, beneficent deity. “It would be wonderful to find in the laws of nature a plan, prepared by a concerned creator in which human being played some special role,” Weinberg wrote. “I find sadness in doubting that they will.”

Physicists were not the only scientists bewitched by the dream of omniscience. “I take the position that there is nothing that cannot be understood,” Peter Atkins, a religion-bashing British chemist, stated in his 1981 book The Creation. “Fundamental science may almost be at an end and might be completed within a generation.” He added, “Complete knowledge is just within our grasp. Comprehension is moving across the face of the Earth, like the sunrise.”

Then there was biologist Richard Dawkins, who declared in his 1986 bestseller The Blind Watchmaker that the mystery of life was already solved. Our existence “once presented the greatest of mysteries,” Dawkins wrote, but “it is a mystery no longer, because it is solved. Darwin and Wallace solved it, though we shall continue to add footnotes to their solution for a while yet.”

One of those “footnotes” concerns the problem of consciousness. In the late 1980s Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix (and another hard-core atheist), proposed that consciousness, the subject of interminable philosophical speculation, might be scientifically tractable. Science could “solve” consciousness by finding its “neural correlates,” processes in the brain that correspond to conscious states.

In his 1994 book The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick declared that “’you,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of neurons.” That statement might have been the highwater mark of scientism and its corollaries, materialism and reductionism. 

Meanwhile, researchers were claiming that advances in computers and mathematics were illuminating chaotic and complex phenomena that had resisted traditional scientific analysis. These scientists, whom I like to call chaoplexologists, were finding common principles underpinning brains, immune systems, ecologies and nation-states. Economics and other social sciences would soon become as rigorous as chemistry and nuclear physics. Supposedly.

All this hubris wasn’t entirely unjustified. After all, in the 1960s physicists confirmed the big bang theory and took steps toward a unified theory of all of nature’s forces, while biologists deciphered the genetic code. These and other successes, as well as advances in computers and other tools, persuaded optimists that total scientific knowledge was imminent.

But the concept of scientific omniscience was flawed from the start. Read Brief History and other books carefully and you realize that the quest for an ultimate theory had taken physicists beyond the realm of experiment. String theory and other major candidates for an ultimate theory of physics can be neither experimentally confirmed nor falsified. They are untestable and hence not really scientific. And more than century after discovering quantum mechanics, physicists still can’t agree on what the theory actually says about the world.

Plus, if physicists convince themselves they have found the fundamental laws from which nature springs, they must still explain where those laws came from, just as believers in God must explain where She/He/They/It came from. This is the problem of infinite regress, which bedevils all who try to explain why there is something rather than nothing.

As for life, Dawkins’s claim that it is no longer a mystery is absurd. We still don’t have a clue how life began, or whether it exists elsewhere in the cosmos. We don’t know whether our emergence was likely or a once-in-eternity fluke. 

Brain scientists have no idea how our brains make us conscious, and even if they did, that knowledge would apply only to human consciousness. It would not yield a general theory of consciousness, which determines what sort of physical systems generate conscious states. It would not tell us whether it feels like something to be a bat, nematode or smart phone.

There may still be a few true believers in scientific omniscience out there, but over the last decade or two, science has lost its mojo. The replication crisis has undermined scientists’ confidence--and that is a good thing. Because what if scientists somehow convince themselves, and the rest of us, that they have figured everything out? What a tragedy that would be. We’re better off in our current state of befuddlement, trying to comprehend this weird, weird world even though we know we’ll always fall short.

I’ll close with a quote from Philip Anderson (1923-2020), whom I called the “Gruff Guru of Physics and Complexity Research.” When I interviewed him in 1994, Anderson mocked the idea of scientific omniscience. “You never understand everything,” Anderson said. “When one understands everything, one has gone crazy.”

Further Reading:

On Pluralism: Beyond the One and Only Truth

Conservation of Ignorance: A New Law of Nature

Huge Study Confirms Science Ending! (Sort of)

My Encounter with Philosophical Anarchist Paul Feyerabend

My free, online books Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment critique the notion of scientific omniscience in more detail.