String Theory → Theology

I enjoyed the recent Blogging Heads dialogue between John Horgan and George Johnson, in part because I could follow the whole thing without falling asleep. But the comments about string theory were really over the top and kind of disturbing. I enjoyed Lee Smolin's jeremiad against string theory, The Trouble With Physics, but at least he acknowledged that his own camp was in a definite minority. In the exchange Horgan deems string theory "pseudoscience" and analogizes it to theology. You'd expect the author of The End of Science and The Undiscovered Mind: How the Human Brain Defies Replication, Medication, and Explanation to pull no punches. Horgan is a Pyrrho for our age, but he makes himself a caricature with such statements, credibility is given to proportionate statements, not bombastic ones. Later on in the discussion Horgan dismisses the Christian theism of Simon Conway Morris, a prominent paleontologist, as medieval superstition, ...