Victor J. Stenger

Adjunct Professor of Philosophy, University of Colorado
Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy, University of Hawaii (retired in 2000)
Research Fellow, Center for Inquiry - Transnational CFI
Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry CSI

Please note that I now live in Lafayette, Colorado. If you wish a snail mail address or phone number, please contact me first by email at

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The material presented on these pages written by Victor J. Stenger  is copyrighted. Already published items  may be quoted or copied for non-commercial purposes with proper credit under usual copyright laws. Only quote or copy from the published version since what is linked here may not correspond exactly to the final, offical document. Draft material presented for comments is not final and should not be copied, quoted, or distributed. When in doubt, contact the author by email.

The New Atheism Cover

In press:

The New Atheism

Taking a Stand for Science and Reason

Go here for more information.

In 2004, Sam Harris published The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason that became a major bestseller. This marked the first of a series of series of bestsellers that took a harder line against religion than has been the custom among secularists: Letter to a Christian Nation by Harris (2006), The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett (2006), God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Goes Not Exist by Victor J. Stenger (2007), and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) by Christopher Hitchens. These authors have been recognized as the leaders of a movement called The New Atheism.

In The New Atheism, I review and expand upon the principles of New Atheism and answer many of its critics. I show how naturalism, the view that everything is matter an nothing more, is sufficient to explain all we observe in the universe from the most distant galaxies to the inner workings of the brain that result in the phenomenon of mind. Nowhere is it necessary to introduce God or the supernatural to understand the world. I dispute the claim that science has nothing to say about God and argue that absence of evidence is evidence of absence when evidence should be there and is not. In the case of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, as I show in God: The Failed Hypothesis, the lack of evidence is sufficient to conclude that he does not exist beyond a reasonable doubt.

In The New Atheism I argue that since faith is belief in the absence of evidence it should not be used to make any judgments about the world or personal life. I detail many of the horrors and terrors religion has produced over millennia and how this is all brought about by the folly of faith. I show how the Bible is unable to solve the problem of unnecessary suffering in the world. I discuss the approach to suffering in other religions. I then show how all religions teach a common morality that is not divine but of natural, human origins.

Finally I discuss the teachings of the ancient sages such as Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Confucius who 2500 years ago provided guidelines for the individual to cope with the problems of living, and dying, that did not depend on the existence of any supernatural forces in the universe. I call this “the natural way" as opposed to the supernatural monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These supernatural religions have poisoned the natural way by promising people life after death and encouraging the self-absorption that is so prominent both with the modern-day Christians comprising the “me” generation and Muslims who are willing to kill themselves along with thousands of others in order to guarantee highly unlikely eternal bliss.

Go here for more information.

Now available!

Quantum Gods

Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness

Foreword by Michael Shermer

Quantum Gods Cover

In God: The Failed Hypothesis I argued that science shows that a God who plays an important role in the universe and in human life does not exist. This still leaves open the possibility of other gods or spiritual realities. The recent popular documentary films What the Bleep Do We Know? and The Secret have promoted the claim that we can make our own reality just be thinking of it. For over thirty years now, New Age gurus have alleged that quantum mechanics has verified ancient teachings from the East that the human mind is part of a cosmic consciousness that pervades the universe.

In the meantime, Christian theologians have launched an intensive effort to find a way for God to act in the world that does not violate any laws of physics. While God can do whatever he wants, he would be acting against himself if he violated his own laws. Again quantum mechanics is proposed as a means for God to intervene. If he stays within the bounds of the quantum uncertainty principle, then his actions would not be detectable to humans. However such actions would not be an efficient way to control evens on the human scale. Chaos theory has been proposed as a mechanism for amplifying those actions.

Quantum mechanics is shown to provide no basis for cosmic consciousness or the belief that the human mind makes it own reality. It is also shown not to provide a viable basis for divine action, with or without chaos theory. Some theologians have proposed a new kind of deism in which God creates a universe with many possible pathways determined by chance. However, since the universe began in chaos it retains no memory of such a God. This leaves as the only possible God one who plays dice with the universe.



Scheduled 2009 appearances by Vic Stenger

Quantum gods don't deserve your faith. New Scientist  April 22, 2009 review by Amanda Gefter.

Go here for more information. 

Related article:
Where Can God Act? The New Quantum Theology. Article published in Free Inquiry. Vol 28 No. 5 August/September 2008, pp. 1-36. Note this is draft. Quote or copy only published version.

God: The Failed Hypothesis CoverNew York Times bestseller!
  No. 21 In March, 2007

God: The Failed Hypothesis

How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist

  In my 2003 book Has Science Found God? I provided a critique of contemporary claims that science supports the existence of God and found them inadequate.  In this book, I  go much further and argue that science makes a strong case against the existence a God with the traditional attributes of the Judaic-Christian-Islamic God. My argument is not  based simply on the gross absence of evidence for this God. Not only is there no evidence for God, I  argue that the evidence we have can be used to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that this God does not exist. Not only does the universe show no evidence for God, it looks exactly as it would be expected to look if there is no God. In a final chapter I  show why it is preferable to live in a Godless universe.

Slideshow. PowerPoint file of original Keynote presentation.

Reviews

Conspicuous by His Absence by David Ludden for eSkeptic.
Tour de Force by Tom Flynn, editor of Free Inquiry.
Review by Jonathan Levinson on the Secular Web.
Forum on Physics and Society, Americal Physical Society, review by Lawrence S. Lerner

Podcasts and interviews

You can watch, listen to or read interviews of Vic Stenger at these locations among others:

Future of Naturalism YouTube interview by Tom Flynn, editor of Free Inquiry.
Point of Inquiry
Thinking-critically
This has a You-Tube video of talk to CFI Toronto on April 5, 2007. Start at part 3. This site also has links to other relevent videos and podcasts.
Huntington News Column in West Virginia web newspaper.
IQ2 Debate in Sydney, Aug. 19, 2008.
Reasonable Doubts This podcast has the best summary of my views.

Paperback Edition

The paperback edition has a foreword by Christopher Hitchens and a new Postscript by the author.

Go here for more reviews and further information on God: The Failed Hypothesis.

New Project in the Works

The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning

How the Universe is Not Designed for Humanity

(Titles tentative)

Go here for more information and "Position papers" on various parameters that are supposed to be fine-tuned by have perfectly natural explanations.

Slide show (pdf)

2007 Book

The Comprehensible Cosmos

Where Do The Laws of Physics Come From?

The laws of physics were not handed down from above. Nor are they somehow built into the logical structure of the universe. They are human inventions, though not arbitrary ones. They are not restrictions on the behavior of matter. They are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behavior. In order to describe an objective reality, those descriptions cannot depend on the point of view of observers. They must be "point-of-view-invariant." When point-of-view invariance is implemented, the laws of physics follow with few additional assumptions. We live in a comprehensible cosmos.

Review in New Scientist

"V.J. Stenger . . . provides a scientific answer to the question, 'where do the laws of physics come from?' Remarkably, his elegant and mathematically detailed derivation of the laws is driven by the requirment that the models physicists develop to describe objective reality cannot depend on the standpoint of the observer."–Stephen Ames, History and Philosophy of Science Programme, The University of Melbourne (http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/archive/00004736/).

Go to Amazon.com for discount.
Go here for more information. 
Slideshow. PowerPoint 1.5 Mb. Original Keynote presentation. Fonts may not match.
Where Do The Laws Of Physics Come From? Paper based on book. 3.4 Mb pdf.
Shorter paper in philsci archive.

Reality Check

The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning.  Reality Check column in  Skeptical Briefs, Vol. 19, No. 2 June 2009.
For comment only. Do not quote, copy, or distribute.

To read earlier columns, go here.

A Scenario for a Natural Origin of Our Universe

Using a Mathematical Model Based on Established Physics and Cosmology

Published in Philo Vol. 9, No. 2, Fall-Winter 2006. pp. 93-102.

A mathematical model of the natural origin of our universe is presented. The model is based only on the well-established theories of general relativity and quantum mechanics. It is not unique and no claim is being made that this is actually how the universe came about. It is presented to counter the assertion that science cannot provide any plausible explanation for the origin of the universe.

Erratum: In equation 19 the range of the variable should be 0 < a< a0 and the exponent should be negative.

Also available on arXiv  arXiv:0710.3137 [pdf]

Previously Published Books


 Not By Design: The Origin of the Universe (1988)

Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses (1990)

The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (1995)

Timeless Reality:Symmetry, Simplicity and Multiple Universes (2000)

Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (2003)

Reviews of Books by Victor J. Stenger

Go here.

GENERAL TOPICS

The Hawaii Rational Inquirer

News and commentary on issues of interest to the academic community at the University of Hawaii as part of the local, national, and international academic communities. This was produced when I was at the University of Hawaii. This newsletter is no longer being produced. Link to archive.

Recommended links:

If you want to know a little more about me, go here for a short biography. If you want to see my complete CV, go here (pdf).  To see what I look like now, go here. To see what I looked like in 1982, finishing the Honolulu Marathon, go here. On the beach in Hawaii, December 2006.

Email: <vic.stenger#comcast.net>. Change # to @ before sending (anti-spam device).

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