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God: The Failed Hypothesis
Throughout history, arguments for and against the existence of God have been largely confined to philosophy and theology, while science has sat on the sidelines. Despite the fact that science has revolutionized every aspect of human life and greatly clarified our understanding of the world, somehow the notion has arisen that it has nothing to say about the possibility of a supreme being, which much of humanity worships as the source of all reality. This book contends that, if God exists, some evidence for this existence should be detectable by scientific means, especially considering the central role that God is alleged to play in the operation of the universe and the lives of humans. Treating the traditional God concept, as conventionally presented in the Judeo-Christian and Islamic traditions, like any other scientific hypothesis, physicist Stenger examines all of the claims made for God's existence. He considers the latest Intelligent Design arguments as evidence of God's influence in biology. He looks at human behavior for evidence of immaterial souls and the possible effects of prayer. He discusses the findings of physics and astronomy in weighing the suggestions that the universe is the work of a creator and that humans are God's special creation. After evaluating all the scientific evidence, Stenger concludes that beyond a reasonable doubt the universe and life appear exactly as we might expect if there were no God. This paperback edition of the New York Times bestselling hardcover edition contains a new foreword by Christopher Hitchens and a postscript by the author in which he responds to reviewers' criticisms of the original edition.
310 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2007
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9343 people want to read
About the author
Victor J. Stenger
31 books216 followersVictor John Stenger was an American particle physicist, outspoken atheist and author, active in philosophy and popular religious skepticism.
He published 13 books for general audiences on physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, philosophy, religion, atheism, and pseudoscience. He popularized the phrase "Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings".
He published 13 books for general audiences on physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, philosophy, religion, atheism, and pseudoscience. He popularized the phrase "Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings".
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August 19, 2013
I have become very interested in the faith/science debate, and over the last couple of years have read a fair number of books about it. This one felt a little like the atheist version of Collins's The Language of God. The title suggests that you're going to get a rant, but Stenger is no ignorant ranter. He comes across as a charming retired scientist who loves his grandchildren, reads widely, and is justifiably a little proud of his distinguished career in physics. He has written this book to convince you of something he thinks is no more than common sense: modern science has demonstrated that the story of the Jewish/Christian/Islamic God fails to hold water. Quite reasonably, he approaches the subject from the point of view of a scientist, and treats it as another scientific hypothesis. If God existed, what would we expect to find?
If you've read things like The God Delusion or God is not Great, a fair part of the book will sound rather familiar. We learn for example that there is no good evidence for miracles or for many key stories in the Bible, that prayer has no effect when tested in controlled studies, and that atheists are no more immoral than Christians on obvious metrics of what constitutes morality. (Fun fact: 80% of the US prison population describe themselves as Christian, only 0.2% as atheist). In all these cases, Stenger says, what we see is exactly what we'd expect to see if there were in fact no God. Hence, there probably isn't one; but, as already noted, we've been here before.
So I probably wouldn't have read the book, if it hadn't been for the intriguing foreword from the late Christopher Hitchens. Hitch says that, in his opinion, the only really serious argument for the existence of God is the claim of cosmological "fine-tuning": the fundamental constants of physics seem miraculously to be set to exactly the right values for life to be possible, suggesting that Someone was responsible for doing the tuning. He goes on to say that Stenger comprehensively refutes the argument. I have read rather a lot about the fine-tuning argument, for example in Martin Rees's Before the Beginning and Susskind's The Cosmic Landscape , and was interested to learn more; I was expecting some version of the "multiverse", and wondered how he was going to make it so unusually convincing.
Well: I must say that I was rather surprised. Stenger's line is that there is no fine-tuning, and hence no case to answer. He claims that a wide range of settings could have resulted in a universe where life was capable of arising. I am not technically qualified to refute his arguments, but I do note that they are completely at variance with those given by Susskind, who states categorically that the constants are extremely carefully tuned. It seems quite impossible that both Stenger and Susskind can simultaneously be right.
As already mentioned, Hitchens, one of the leaders of the New Atheism movement, warmly recommends Stenger; if you look at the relevant section of The God Delusion, you will find Dawkins, another central figure, equally enthusiastically endorsing Susskind. Maybe I am being unkind, but an examination of the passages in question does leave me wondering just how much Dawkins and Hitchens actually know about cosmology. Hitchens, for example, refers to "the universe exploding away from its Big Bang starting point" (the Big Bang didn't start at any point), and a little later talks about "red light" when he evidently means red-shifted light. It seems fair to adapt Stenger's reasoning. If the New Atheist case against the fine-tuning argument were based on genuine scientific knowledge, we would expect a coherent line to be taken. In fact, we are getting at least two different and incompatible counter-arguments. One might thus feel justified in concluding that the New Atheist position here is not based on genuine scientific knowledge, but rather on uninformed prejudice.
There are times when I feel extremely tired of the New Atheism, and nostalgically look back at the Old Atheism that preceded it. What a shame Bertrand Russell is no longer with us. He would only have needed a couple of trenchant sentences to put these people in their place.
If you've read things like The God Delusion or God is not Great, a fair part of the book will sound rather familiar. We learn for example that there is no good evidence for miracles or for many key stories in the Bible, that prayer has no effect when tested in controlled studies, and that atheists are no more immoral than Christians on obvious metrics of what constitutes morality. (Fun fact: 80% of the US prison population describe themselves as Christian, only 0.2% as atheist). In all these cases, Stenger says, what we see is exactly what we'd expect to see if there were in fact no God. Hence, there probably isn't one; but, as already noted, we've been here before.
So I probably wouldn't have read the book, if it hadn't been for the intriguing foreword from the late Christopher Hitchens. Hitch says that, in his opinion, the only really serious argument for the existence of God is the claim of cosmological "fine-tuning": the fundamental constants of physics seem miraculously to be set to exactly the right values for life to be possible, suggesting that Someone was responsible for doing the tuning. He goes on to say that Stenger comprehensively refutes the argument. I have read rather a lot about the fine-tuning argument, for example in Martin Rees's Before the Beginning and Susskind's The Cosmic Landscape , and was interested to learn more; I was expecting some version of the "multiverse", and wondered how he was going to make it so unusually convincing.
Well: I must say that I was rather surprised. Stenger's line is that there is no fine-tuning, and hence no case to answer. He claims that a wide range of settings could have resulted in a universe where life was capable of arising. I am not technically qualified to refute his arguments, but I do note that they are completely at variance with those given by Susskind, who states categorically that the constants are extremely carefully tuned. It seems quite impossible that both Stenger and Susskind can simultaneously be right.
As already mentioned, Hitchens, one of the leaders of the New Atheism movement, warmly recommends Stenger; if you look at the relevant section of The God Delusion, you will find Dawkins, another central figure, equally enthusiastically endorsing Susskind. Maybe I am being unkind, but an examination of the passages in question does leave me wondering just how much Dawkins and Hitchens actually know about cosmology. Hitchens, for example, refers to "the universe exploding away from its Big Bang starting point" (the Big Bang didn't start at any point), and a little later talks about "red light" when he evidently means red-shifted light. It seems fair to adapt Stenger's reasoning. If the New Atheist case against the fine-tuning argument were based on genuine scientific knowledge, we would expect a coherent line to be taken. In fact, we are getting at least two different and incompatible counter-arguments. One might thus feel justified in concluding that the New Atheist position here is not based on genuine scientific knowledge, but rather on uninformed prejudice.
There are times when I feel extremely tired of the New Atheism, and nostalgically look back at the Old Atheism that preceded it. What a shame Bertrand Russell is no longer with us. He would only have needed a couple of trenchant sentences to put these people in their place.
June 18, 2020
How You Get There Is What Counts
I am in sympathy with Stenger’s project, the demonstration that the religious dogmatic idea of God is bad for human beings and other living things. But I can’t accept his logic which is tendentious and self-contradictory.
Stenger recognises, quite correctly, that neither theism nor science has a universally accepted meaning. So he defines the former in terms of the religions of the Book: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The obvious difficulty then is that even this restriction doesn’t reduce the conceptual variability of the idea of God very much. So he reduces it further to what he believes are its essentials: a consciousness that is responsible for existence and that regularly if unexpectedly involves itself in the course of that which exists. Fair enough. He captures the bulk of religious adherents in this net, even if some of the most modern outliers escape.
He’s got the same issue with science. There is no agreement about what constitutes scientific thinking, scientific method, or even a scientist. So Stenger defines science as the formulation and testing of conceptual, that is to say linguistic, models. Science, he believes, describes but does not interpret the world. While even his epigraph by the great Von Neumann contradicts this claim, it is possible to rationalise it by suggesting that what he intends to convey is that scientific models are always tentative. Unlike religious dogma, these models are debated, tested, and often discarded depending upon whether they work or not. A model works better than another if it effective in a wider range of practical or experimental circumstances.
And therein, according to Stegner, lies the fundamental difference between science and religion. Nothing about science is fixed; not its principles, its methods, or its conclusions. Science learns through experience and adapts itself to the world as it is. Science is inherently relativistic. Religion, on the other hand, imposes an experience and filters the world through a mesh of complex doctrines. Science is empirical and experimental; religion is rationalistic and dogmatic. What could be simpler or more obvious? Science explores reality; religion gropes for the source of existence. The former works; the latter doesn’t. Epistemology and ontology are on the side of science.
Stenger’s pragmatic criteria of ‘working,’ however, is itself problematic. Ultimately he means that which works is that which is beneficial to human life. What benefit does he have in mind? Longevity? Prosperity? Personal satisfaction? Surely he can’t mean horsepower, explosive yield, or giga-cycles per second. And if not, what are we to think when these bigger benefits are not correlated with one another? Nuclear physics works in correctly predicting the power contained in atomic structures. It fails in protecting us from radiation poisoning. The internet provides incredible knowledge and convenience. It also created Trump. Are these things working or not?
Clearly any consensus about the meaning of ‘working’ is as temporary and variable as everything else about science. To claim otherwise would be dogmatic. This is an issue of politics not morality; or, rather, political morality. Even the rules of scientific argument are unclear. But rules there are. Science is rarely a violent activity, other than perhaps the occasional conference punch-up by rivals. Certainly no one has suggested warfare as a response to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, despite the intense emotions its can generate. Science is a kind of politics which in fact seeks to establish what ‘better’ means. When it stops doing this, it is termed Scientism and has effectively become a religion.
And this it seems to me is the real distinction between science and religion - the nature of their politics. The politics of science is ‘open’ in the sense that disagreement is tolerated, sometimes grudgingly but always eventually. There are certainly scientific schools of thought, cliques, and movements which believe each other to be misguided, misinformed, or lacking intelligence. But they unavoidably remain together in the attempt to discover not only what works better but what working better means. There is perhaps no better example of this than in the debate about climate change, which is essentially about what is good not just for human beings but for the entire planet.
Religion stops this search for the criterion of the good either by defining some abstract end point to human existence (the presence of God) or by prescribing some universal rules for behaviour (morals) which are hidden rationalisations for institutional self interest. Once established, these are then beyond debate. Consequently dogmatic religion is subject to heresy, schism, and alienation. The alternative to debate is often violence which is never good for human beings. More damaging, however, is the destruction of the kind of political community that constitutes science. This is a community that is in a sense pre-religious. That is, it doesn’t allow itself to become fixated on what anything means, especially God.
I am in sympathy with Stenger’s project, the demonstration that the religious dogmatic idea of God is bad for human beings and other living things. But I can’t accept his logic which is tendentious and self-contradictory.
Stenger recognises, quite correctly, that neither theism nor science has a universally accepted meaning. So he defines the former in terms of the religions of the Book: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. The obvious difficulty then is that even this restriction doesn’t reduce the conceptual variability of the idea of God very much. So he reduces it further to what he believes are its essentials: a consciousness that is responsible for existence and that regularly if unexpectedly involves itself in the course of that which exists. Fair enough. He captures the bulk of religious adherents in this net, even if some of the most modern outliers escape.
He’s got the same issue with science. There is no agreement about what constitutes scientific thinking, scientific method, or even a scientist. So Stenger defines science as the formulation and testing of conceptual, that is to say linguistic, models. Science, he believes, describes but does not interpret the world. While even his epigraph by the great Von Neumann contradicts this claim, it is possible to rationalise it by suggesting that what he intends to convey is that scientific models are always tentative. Unlike religious dogma, these models are debated, tested, and often discarded depending upon whether they work or not. A model works better than another if it effective in a wider range of practical or experimental circumstances.
And therein, according to Stegner, lies the fundamental difference between science and religion. Nothing about science is fixed; not its principles, its methods, or its conclusions. Science learns through experience and adapts itself to the world as it is. Science is inherently relativistic. Religion, on the other hand, imposes an experience and filters the world through a mesh of complex doctrines. Science is empirical and experimental; religion is rationalistic and dogmatic. What could be simpler or more obvious? Science explores reality; religion gropes for the source of existence. The former works; the latter doesn’t. Epistemology and ontology are on the side of science.
Stenger’s pragmatic criteria of ‘working,’ however, is itself problematic. Ultimately he means that which works is that which is beneficial to human life. What benefit does he have in mind? Longevity? Prosperity? Personal satisfaction? Surely he can’t mean horsepower, explosive yield, or giga-cycles per second. And if not, what are we to think when these bigger benefits are not correlated with one another? Nuclear physics works in correctly predicting the power contained in atomic structures. It fails in protecting us from radiation poisoning. The internet provides incredible knowledge and convenience. It also created Trump. Are these things working or not?
Clearly any consensus about the meaning of ‘working’ is as temporary and variable as everything else about science. To claim otherwise would be dogmatic. This is an issue of politics not morality; or, rather, political morality. Even the rules of scientific argument are unclear. But rules there are. Science is rarely a violent activity, other than perhaps the occasional conference punch-up by rivals. Certainly no one has suggested warfare as a response to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, despite the intense emotions its can generate. Science is a kind of politics which in fact seeks to establish what ‘better’ means. When it stops doing this, it is termed Scientism and has effectively become a religion.
And this it seems to me is the real distinction between science and religion - the nature of their politics. The politics of science is ‘open’ in the sense that disagreement is tolerated, sometimes grudgingly but always eventually. There are certainly scientific schools of thought, cliques, and movements which believe each other to be misguided, misinformed, or lacking intelligence. But they unavoidably remain together in the attempt to discover not only what works better but what working better means. There is perhaps no better example of this than in the debate about climate change, which is essentially about what is good not just for human beings but for the entire planet.
Religion stops this search for the criterion of the good either by defining some abstract end point to human existence (the presence of God) or by prescribing some universal rules for behaviour (morals) which are hidden rationalisations for institutional self interest. Once established, these are then beyond debate. Consequently dogmatic religion is subject to heresy, schism, and alienation. The alternative to debate is often violence which is never good for human beings. More damaging, however, is the destruction of the kind of political community that constitutes science. This is a community that is in a sense pre-religious. That is, it doesn’t allow itself to become fixated on what anything means, especially God.
July 25, 2017
دوستانِ گرانقدر، این کتابِ از 338 صفحه و 10 بخش تشکیل شده است که بدین شرح است: الگوها و روش ها- توهمِ پوچِ طراحی- در جستجویِ جهانی فراتر از ماده- شواهدِ کیهانی- جهانی ناخوشایند- کاستی هایِ وحی- تعیینِ ارزش هایِ انسانی- استدلالِ بشر- خدایان- زندگی در جهانی بدونِ خدا
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این کتاب به بررسی وجودِ خدا در جهان از دیدگاهِ علم و دانش پرداخته است
دوستانِ گرامی، ما در آسمانِ بالای سرِ خود هیچگاه و در هیچ جایی رخدادی ندیده ایم که در جایی یا زمانی دیگر تکرار نشده باشد و دربارۀ آن با دانشِ طبیعتگرا، تجربی نتوانیم روشنگری کنیم. هنوز به پدیدۀ آسمانیِ قابلِ رصدی برخورد نکرده ایم که ناچار شویم برایِ توضیحِ آن عنصری فراطبیعی به الگو یا مدل بیفزایم. در واقع، ما انسانها هیچ پدیدۀ کیهانی نداریم که دارایِ همۀ معیارهایِ معجزه باشد... اگر قرار باشد بتِ <اللهِ اکبرِ> تازیانِ بیابان نشین عربستان و اسامی دیگر سامی را خدا بدانیم، که کاملاً اشتباه و نادرست است، در نوشتنِ ریویو و نقد مجبوریم تا از نام او استفاده کنیم تا ساکنان ایران زمین، بهتر درک کنند... اللهی که به اصطلاح دارایِ نقشِ فعالی در رخدادهای معجزه آسایِ کیهان است، با بهترین ابزارهایِ به روزِ ستاره شناسیِ ما، حتی برای یک لحظۀ کوتاه نیز دیده نشده است. رصدهایِ کیهانی از لحاظِ علمی و بر گرفته از خردِ انسانی، ما را به این نتیجه رسانده است که الله وجود ندارد
دوستانِ عزیزم، چرا فکر میکنید، دگرگونی از «هیچ» به «چیزی»، حتماً نیازمندِ یک کارگزار و عامل است؟؟ دانه هایِ برف را در نظر بگیرید، الگوهایِ شش پرِ زیبایِ بلورهای یخ که در نتیجۀ یخ زدنِ مستقیمِ بخار آب در جو تشکیل میشوند. تجربه به ما میگوید که این دانه هایِ برف، بسیار ناپایدار بوده و با شتاب، آب شده و به مایع دگرگون میشود، که ریخت واره هایِ بسیار کمتری را به
نمایش میگذارد... و این را نیز میدانیم که گرما چیدمانِ شکنندۀ بلورها را به مایعی ساده تر دگرگون میسازد
این نمونه، نشان میدهد که بسیاری از سامانه هایِ ساده از ذراتِ ناپایدار هستند، یعنی، دورانِ کوتاهی بوده و خود بخود به ساختارهایِ پیچیده تر با انرژیِ پایین تر دگرگون میشوند... زیرا «هیچ چیز» به همان سادگی است که نشان میدهد، و ما نمیتوانیم آن را بسیار پایدار بدانیم. احتمال خواهد داشت که خودبخود به مرحله ای برایِ دگرگون شدن به چیزی پیچیده تر، مانندِ جهانی دارای ماده، وارد شود... پس دوستانِ خردمند، دگرگونی از «هیچ» به «چیزی» طبیعی بوده و هیچ نیازی به کارگزار و عامل ندارد... همانطور که فیزیکدانِ بزرگ و برندۀ جایزۀ نوبل «فرانک ویلزک» گفت: «هیچ چیز» هیچگاه پایدار نیست و پایدار نمی ماند
دوستانِ گرامی، همانطور که همۀ شما میدانید، در تورات و قرآن، یهوو و یا بتِ اللهِ اکبرِ به اصطلاح ازلی و فرضی، جهان را در شش روز می آفریند!!. که بسیار ساده لوحانه و خنده دار است... بر پایۀ گفته هایِ این کتاب ها، زمین در نخستین روز آفریده شده، چهار روز پس از آن الله خورشید، ماه و ستارگان را می آفریند.... اما دانش و خردِ انسانها ثابت کرده که این اطلاعات و آمار و ارقام همه و همه نادرست است و چیزی جز توهمات و موهومات بیش نیست، اما افرادِ بی خرد کماکان به این کتب پایبند هستند
با برآوردهایِ کنونیِ ستاره شناسی، ماده ای قابلِ دیدن که در دهها میلیارد کهکشانِ غول پیکر و در اندازۀ بسیار بزرگتر نادیدنی «انرژی تاریک» و «ماده تاریک» یافت میشود، از یک خرده فضایِ کوچک در حدود 7/13 میلیارد سالِ پیش برخاسته است.... زمین تا نه میلیارد سال، پس از آغازِ مهبانگ یا همان بینگ بنگ، ساخته نشده است، و این اطلاعاتی که با علم و دانشِ روز بدست می آید، به طورِ چشمگیری با آمار و ارقام و زنجیرۀ رخ داده ای که در این کتبِ به اصطلاح آسمانی آمده کاملاً متناقض است. افزون بر این، در این کتابها، دربارۀ آفرینش جوری گفتگو کرده که انگار به تازگی- کمابیش نزدیک به ده هزار سال پیش این رخ داد روی داده است و بدتر آنکه این پیامبران عمرِ زمین را 6000 سال تا 6500 سال تخمین زده اند، که بیشتر به یک جوکِ بی مزه شباهت دارد... از بیخردها و نادان هایی که تصور میکردند قطره هایِ باران بر دوش فرشتگان به سوی زمین حمل میشود، انتظاری بیش از این نمیرود
این کتبِ دینی میگویند، همۀ گونه هایِ موجوداتِ زنده در آن هنگام همزمان آفریده شده!!! و پس از آن هیچگونه دگرگونی دیگری نداشته اند، که این موضوع کاملاً غیر علمی و غیرِ عقلانی است و با «انگاره فرگشت»، در تناقض است
ما در جستجویِ بوتۀ شعله ور یا ستونِ دود نیستیم... نه- ما آرزو داریم که الله را ببینیم. آیا الله می تواند روبروی ما بایستد؟ آیا این الله می تواند چهرۀ رنج دیدۀ انسان ها را ببیند و زنده بماند؟؟... عزیزانم، ما از کودکی آموخته ایم، که مدام موجودی به نام شیطان یا ابلیس و اهریمن در تعقیبِ ماست تا ما را از خدایی به دور کند، که هیچ زمان او را نه دیده ایم و نه خواهیم دید
و جالب اینجاست، که آن خدا نه تنها همه کاره و قَیّمِ همهٔ امور ما انسانهاست، بلکه موجودی است که کسی توانِ دخالت در دستوراتِ نامربوطِ او را ندارد، اما همگان موظف هستند، تا همهٔ گفته ها و دستوراتِ این موجودِ نادیده را که متولیانش اعلام میکنند، بی چون و چرا باور کنند
این خدایِ خیالی، با تمامِ آن تعاریفی که متولیانِ ادیانش از او میکنند، توانِ مقابله با شیطان که مخلوقِ خودش است ندارد، بعد انتظار دارد منِ انسان به هر بدبختیِ ممکن در مقابلِ این موجودِ نامرئی بایستم و مبارزه کنم؟ گویا این خدا مرا یک بیمارِ روان گسیخته فرض کرده است...در آن داستانِ موهوم، این شیطان زیرِ بارِ سجده کردن نرفته، و خدا او را رانده است، بعد چگونه سر از بهشت درآورده و توانسته آدم و حوا را گول بزند؟؟؟ شعور هم خوب چیزیست. خوب کمی به خردتان رجوع کنید... این شیطان با چه زبانی با آنها سخن گفته؟!! عبری یا عربی؟؟ وقتی زبانِ این نادان ها در حدود 4000 سال و حتی کمتر است که ساخته شده، این شیطانِ بی پدر و مادر به چه زبانی سخن گفته؟؟ یعنی نمیخواهید کمی بیاندیشید؟ وای بر شما
عزیزانم،قبل از فهم خدا و شیطان و موجوداتِ نامرئیِ دیگر، به خودِ انسانیتان که پای بر این خاک نهاده توجه کنید... بر طَبَقِ این خاک بیاندیشید که پای در آن نهاده اید، نه به طبقاتِ آسمان که شما را به آن نوید می دهند... کلیدِ فهمِ شما، همان خردِ شماست
وقتی خالقی از روزِ نخستِ خلقت، مخلوقِ خویش را دچارِ نقصِ شعور برای فهمِ امور میکند، دیگر تحتِ هیچ شرایطی به جبر و تنبیه نمیشود نقایصِ چنین مخلوقی را درمان کرد
دوستانِ عزیزم، آن خالقی که برایِ تفهیمِ خواسته ها و نیاتِ خود به شعور انسانیِ شما، واسطه ای تراش میکند، در کمالِ هویتش تردید کنید، که چنین خدایی دلّالی است که به معامله با منزلتِ انسانیِ شما قد عَلَم کرده است
بله... تا زمانی که این مردمِ بیخرد، باور دارند که همهٔ امورِ اخلاقی بدون حضورِ خدایِ نادیده و نامرئی در آسمانها، نمی تواند به سامان بنشیند جنایات بشری، تمام نخواهد شد
این خدایِ نامرئی یک معامله گر است و سوداگر... این خدا دکّانی و حجره ای باز کرده است و با من و شما بر سرِ فروشِ کالایِ بهشت و جهنمِ خود به معامله نشسته است، تا حیاتِ نقد ما را بستاند و کالایِ بُنجل مَمات را به من و شما بفروشد
عزیزان، خدا در اصل «خود آیی» است و انواری است که صحنِ تعقل را نورانی میکند. اگر این نور را فهم کردید خود را خواهید شناخت. که در اصل فهمِ خود توست از خود تو
تقویتِ شعورِ انسان را ، با وعد هایِ بیهوده نمی توان پرورش داد... پاداشی که خدا می خواهد به من بدهد ارزانیِ آنهایی باشد که او را میبینند و با او حرف میزنند ... آنهایی که این خدا را قبول دارید و فکر میکنید، با خم و راست شدن و به کار بردنِ وردهایِ بی معنی و جملاتِ عربی، با او سخن میگویید، اگر راستی و درستی در کارِ او فهم می کنید، به او بفرمایید، تا اشکِ چشمِ گرسنگان و دردمندان و زخمِ جانِ طفلانِ گرسنه را، که طعمۀ کرکسان و لاشه خورها می شوند، چاره کند... برود و پول و سرمایهٔ مردم بیچاره و برشکسته را از دزدانِ حرام زاده ای بگیرد که مالِ مردم را خورده اند و به آن سوی آبها گریخته و در شادی زندگی میکنند.. نمی خواهد به من، وعدهٔ بهشتی را مرحمت فرمایند، که در آن حوریان همیشه باکره با آلتِ تناسلیشان در انتظارِ من نشسته اند، و پسرانِ کون سفید و خوشگل یا همان غلمان ها منتظرند که من به آنجا بروم و همچون عرب هایِ کثیف و حرامی برایِ لواط و غلام بارگی با آن بدبختها همخوابگی کنم. آن فاحشه خانه ارزانیِ شمایی که با این خدایِ نامریی سخن میگویید
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امیدوارم زمانی برسد که فرزندانِ این سرزمینِ پاک، کمی از خردِ خویش استفاده کرده و پی به دروغ های کثیف این عرب پرستان ببرند و کمی ارزش برای کرامت انسانی خویش قائل باشند
«پیروز باشید و ایرانی»
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این کتاب به بررسی وجودِ خدا در جهان از دیدگاهِ علم و دانش پرداخته است
دوستانِ گرامی، ما در آسمانِ بالای سرِ خود هیچگاه و در هیچ جایی رخدادی ندیده ایم که در جایی یا زمانی دیگر تکرار نشده باشد و دربارۀ آن با دانشِ طبیعتگرا، تجربی نتوانیم روشنگری کنیم. هنوز به پدیدۀ آسمانیِ قابلِ رصدی برخورد نکرده ایم که ناچار شویم برایِ توضیحِ آن عنصری فراطبیعی به الگو یا مدل بیفزایم. در واقع، ما انسانها هیچ پدیدۀ کیهانی نداریم که دارایِ همۀ معیارهایِ معجزه باشد... اگر قرار باشد بتِ <اللهِ اکبرِ> تازیانِ بیابان نشین عربستان و اسامی دیگر سامی را خدا بدانیم، که کاملاً اشتباه و نادرست است، در نوشتنِ ریویو و نقد مجبوریم تا از نام او استفاده کنیم تا ساکنان ایران زمین، بهتر درک کنند... اللهی که به اصطلاح دارایِ نقشِ فعالی در رخدادهای معجزه آسایِ کیهان است، با بهترین ابزارهایِ به روزِ ستاره شناسیِ ما، حتی برای یک لحظۀ کوتاه نیز دیده نشده است. رصدهایِ کیهانی از لحاظِ علمی و بر گرفته از خردِ انسانی، ما را به این نتیجه رسانده است که الله وجود ندارد
دوستانِ عزیزم، چرا فکر میکنید، دگرگونی از «هیچ» به «چیزی»، حتماً نیازمندِ یک کارگزار و عامل است؟؟ دانه هایِ برف را در نظر بگیرید، الگوهایِ شش پرِ زیبایِ بلورهای یخ که در نتیجۀ یخ زدنِ مستقیمِ بخار آب در جو تشکیل میشوند. تجربه به ما میگوید که این دانه هایِ برف، بسیار ناپایدار بوده و با شتاب، آب شده و به مایع دگرگون میشود، که ریخت واره هایِ بسیار کمتری را به
نمایش میگذارد... و این را نیز میدانیم که گرما چیدمانِ شکنندۀ بلورها را به مایعی ساده تر دگرگون میسازد
این نمونه، نشان میدهد که بسیاری از سامانه هایِ ساده از ذراتِ ناپایدار هستند، یعنی، دورانِ کوتاهی بوده و خود بخود به ساختارهایِ پیچیده تر با انرژیِ پایین تر دگرگون میشوند... زیرا «هیچ چیز» به همان سادگی است که نشان میدهد، و ما نمیتوانیم آن را بسیار پایدار بدانیم. احتمال خواهد داشت که خودبخود به مرحله ای برایِ دگرگون شدن به چیزی پیچیده تر، مانندِ جهانی دارای ماده، وارد شود... پس دوستانِ خردمند، دگرگونی از «هیچ» به «چیزی» طبیعی بوده و هیچ نیازی به کارگزار و عامل ندارد... همانطور که فیزیکدانِ بزرگ و برندۀ جایزۀ نوبل «فرانک ویلزک» گفت: «هیچ چیز» هیچگاه پایدار نیست و پایدار نمی ماند
دوستانِ گرامی، همانطور که همۀ شما میدانید، در تورات و قرآن، یهوو و یا بتِ اللهِ اکبرِ به اصطلاح ازلی و فرضی، جهان را در شش روز می آفریند!!. که بسیار ساده لوحانه و خنده دار است... بر پایۀ گفته هایِ این کتاب ها، زمین در نخستین روز آفریده شده، چهار روز پس از آن الله خورشید، ماه و ستارگان را می آفریند.... اما دانش و خردِ انسانها ثابت کرده که این اطلاعات و آمار و ارقام همه و همه نادرست است و چیزی جز توهمات و موهومات بیش نیست، اما افرادِ بی خرد کماکان به این کتب پایبند هستند
با برآوردهایِ کنونیِ ستاره شناسی، ماده ای قابلِ دیدن که در دهها میلیارد کهکشانِ غول پیکر و در اندازۀ بسیار بزرگتر نادیدنی «انرژی تاریک» و «ماده تاریک» یافت میشود، از یک خرده فضایِ کوچک در حدود 7/13 میلیارد سالِ پیش برخاسته است.... زمین تا نه میلیارد سال، پس از آغازِ مهبانگ یا همان بینگ بنگ، ساخته نشده است، و این اطلاعاتی که با علم و دانشِ روز بدست می آید، به طورِ چشمگیری با آمار و ارقام و زنجیرۀ رخ داده ای که در این کتبِ به اصطلاح آسمانی آمده کاملاً متناقض است. افزون بر این، در این کتابها، دربارۀ آفرینش جوری گفتگو کرده که انگار به تازگی- کمابیش نزدیک به ده هزار سال پیش این رخ داد روی داده است و بدتر آنکه این پیامبران عمرِ زمین را 6000 سال تا 6500 سال تخمین زده اند، که بیشتر به یک جوکِ بی مزه شباهت دارد... از بیخردها و نادان هایی که تصور میکردند قطره هایِ باران بر دوش فرشتگان به سوی زمین حمل میشود، انتظاری بیش از این نمیرود
این کتبِ دینی میگویند، همۀ گونه هایِ موجوداتِ زنده در آن هنگام همزمان آفریده شده!!! و پس از آن هیچگونه دگرگونی دیگری نداشته اند، که این موضوع کاملاً غیر علمی و غیرِ عقلانی است و با «انگاره فرگشت»، در تناقض است
ما در جستجویِ بوتۀ شعله ور یا ستونِ دود نیستیم... نه- ما آرزو داریم که الله را ببینیم. آیا الله می تواند روبروی ما بایستد؟ آیا این الله می تواند چهرۀ رنج دیدۀ انسان ها را ببیند و زنده بماند؟؟... عزیزانم، ما از کودکی آموخته ایم، که مدام موجودی به نام شیطان یا ابلیس و اهریمن در تعقیبِ ماست تا ما را از خدایی به دور کند، که هیچ زمان او را نه دیده ایم و نه خواهیم دید
و جالب اینجاست، که آن خدا نه تنها همه کاره و قَیّمِ همهٔ امور ما انسانهاست، بلکه موجودی است که کسی توانِ دخالت در دستوراتِ نامربوطِ او را ندارد، اما همگان موظف هستند، تا همهٔ گفته ها و دستوراتِ این موجودِ نادیده را که متولیانش اعلام میکنند، بی چون و چرا باور کنند
این خدایِ خیالی، با تمامِ آن تعاریفی که متولیانِ ادیانش از او میکنند، توانِ مقابله با شیطان که مخلوقِ خودش است ندارد، بعد انتظار دارد منِ انسان به هر بدبختیِ ممکن در مقابلِ این موجودِ نامرئی بایستم و مبارزه کنم؟ گویا این خدا مرا یک بیمارِ روان گسیخته فرض کرده است...در آن داستانِ موهوم، این شیطان زیرِ بارِ سجده کردن نرفته، و خدا او را رانده است، بعد چگونه سر از بهشت درآورده و توانسته آدم و حوا را گول بزند؟؟؟ شعور هم خوب چیزیست. خوب کمی به خردتان رجوع کنید... این شیطان با چه زبانی با آنها سخن گفته؟!! عبری یا عربی؟؟ وقتی زبانِ این نادان ها در حدود 4000 سال و حتی کمتر است که ساخته شده، این شیطانِ بی پدر و مادر به چه زبانی سخن گفته؟؟ یعنی نمیخواهید کمی بیاندیشید؟ وای بر شما
عزیزانم،قبل از فهم خدا و شیطان و موجوداتِ نامرئیِ دیگر، به خودِ انسانیتان که پای بر این خاک نهاده توجه کنید... بر طَبَقِ این خاک بیاندیشید که پای در آن نهاده اید، نه به طبقاتِ آسمان که شما را به آن نوید می دهند... کلیدِ فهمِ شما، همان خردِ شماست
وقتی خالقی از روزِ نخستِ خلقت، مخلوقِ خویش را دچارِ نقصِ شعور برای فهمِ امور میکند، دیگر تحتِ هیچ شرایطی به جبر و تنبیه نمیشود نقایصِ چنین مخلوقی را درمان کرد
دوستانِ عزیزم، آن خالقی که برایِ تفهیمِ خواسته ها و نیاتِ خود به شعور انسانیِ شما، واسطه ای تراش میکند، در کمالِ هویتش تردید کنید، که چنین خدایی دلّالی است که به معامله با منزلتِ انسانیِ شما قد عَلَم کرده است
بله... تا زمانی که این مردمِ بیخرد، باور دارند که همهٔ امورِ اخلاقی بدون حضورِ خدایِ نادیده و نامرئی در آسمانها، نمی تواند به سامان بنشیند جنایات بشری، تمام نخواهد شد
این خدایِ نامرئی یک معامله گر است و سوداگر... این خدا دکّانی و حجره ای باز کرده است و با من و شما بر سرِ فروشِ کالایِ بهشت و جهنمِ خود به معامله نشسته است، تا حیاتِ نقد ما را بستاند و کالایِ بُنجل مَمات را به من و شما بفروشد
عزیزان، خدا در اصل «خود آیی» است و انواری است که صحنِ تعقل را نورانی میکند. اگر این نور را فهم کردید خود را خواهید شناخت. که در اصل فهمِ خود توست از خود تو
تقویتِ شعورِ انسان را ، با وعد هایِ بیهوده نمی توان پرورش داد... پاداشی که خدا می خواهد به من بدهد ارزانیِ آنهایی باشد که او را میبینند و با او حرف میزنند ... آنهایی که این خدا را قبول دارید و فکر میکنید، با خم و راست شدن و به کار بردنِ وردهایِ بی معنی و جملاتِ عربی، با او سخن میگویید، اگر راستی و درستی در کارِ او فهم می کنید، به او بفرمایید، تا اشکِ چشمِ گرسنگان و دردمندان و زخمِ جانِ طفلانِ گرسنه را، که طعمۀ کرکسان و لاشه خورها می شوند، چاره کند... برود و پول و سرمایهٔ مردم بیچاره و برشکسته را از دزدانِ حرام زاده ای بگیرد که مالِ مردم را خورده اند و به آن سوی آبها گریخته و در شادی زندگی میکنند.. نمی خواهد به من، وعدهٔ بهشتی را مرحمت فرمایند، که در آن حوریان همیشه باکره با آلتِ تناسلیشان در انتظارِ من نشسته اند، و پسرانِ کون سفید و خوشگل یا همان غلمان ها منتظرند که من به آنجا بروم و همچون عرب هایِ کثیف و حرامی برایِ لواط و غلام بارگی با آن بدبختها همخوابگی کنم. آن فاحشه خانه ارزانیِ شمایی که با این خدایِ نامریی سخن میگویید
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امیدوارم زمانی برسد که فرزندانِ این سرزمینِ پاک، کمی از خردِ خویش استفاده کرده و پی به دروغ های کثیف این عرب پرستان ببرند و کمی ارزش برای کرامت انسانی خویش قائل باشند
«پیروز باشید و ایرانی»
September 10, 2016
في أول وهلة وأنا أقرأ عنوان الكتاب، كنت أستعد لخوض معركة كبيرة سأواجه فيها زلزال مدمر سيجتاح كياني وقلبي، فالعلم مرعب ومخيف ومهدد بعقلانيته وحساسيته وتجرده وجبروته المادي العظيم، كنت أظن أنه عليّ تجهيز كامل عتادي واسلحتي لخوض هذه الحرب الطاحنة مع المادة. ومع أول جولات الحرب التي لم أتخيلها في عقلي أبدا، تفجائت بأنني أواجه جيش من النمل لا حول ولا قوة له سوى محاولات الصمود التي تنتهي ببعض العصرات بالاصابع، محاولات يائسة، وتقلبات فكرية مهزومة تحاول أن تجد مفرا لعقبات بديهية، لا استطيع وصف اسلوب الكاتب سوى أنه "احتضار عقل يحاول التشبث بالحياة". لا تقرأوه.
February 16, 2017
In one word: Weak.
It's quite obvious that Stenger isn't an author per se, which I suppose could excuse his horrible prose. He doesn't have much of an excuse however for taking the time to write this book and yet not taking the time to honestly study at least the basics of classical theology as to familiarize himself enough with the subject matter to be able to avoid conjuring up an army of strawmen to defeat.
I don't know why I put myself through this to be quite honest. I take the time to read the books that modern popular level atheism recommend but I should learn my lesson to at least stick to philosophers.
Reading page after page of Stenger's attempt to apply scientific method to his impoverished and woefully inadequate understanding of what classical theism means when speaking of "God" left me cringing the entire time I wasted reading through this book. If I were an atheist, one with an accurate understanding of classical theism, I'd be embarrassed for the atheist community that this book had even been published, and even worse, had been given a good reception.
Victor Stenger, as with all of his ilk, should stick with what he knows and avoid the temptation to stray into the unknown (to him) territories of theology and philosophy.
To give an example of the evidence of Stenger's intellectual sloth; he quotes St.Thomas Aquinas at some point in the last quarter of the book and he does so in order to attempt to support one of his assertions and yet the entire book attests to the fact that he certainly hasn't taken any time to acquaint himself with Aquinas's work in terms of understanding what is meant by "God". Clearly he just picked up this Aquinas quote somewhere but never could I believe he ever actually read, much less studied, any of Aquinas's theology.
I suppose this all does make some sense. He is, after all, a scientist who surely is fairly busy. Also he holds to atheism, albeit seemingly a shallow and critically unexamined kind, and as such I can understand his lack of interest in committing to taking the time needed to thoroughly examine his object of criticism. All this makes some sense. What doesn't make much or even any sense, is that despite his lack of honest interest in the subject matter, he will take the time to write 258 pages of drivel about a topic he is unwilling to study beforehand, not even study it as much as is needed to make sure he understands it accurately enough to avoid erecting endless strawmen.
It was just more Dawkins really. The only difference is that Dawkins can write decent prose.
It's quite obvious that Stenger isn't an author per se, which I suppose could excuse his horrible prose. He doesn't have much of an excuse however for taking the time to write this book and yet not taking the time to honestly study at least the basics of classical theology as to familiarize himself enough with the subject matter to be able to avoid conjuring up an army of strawmen to defeat.
I don't know why I put myself through this to be quite honest. I take the time to read the books that modern popular level atheism recommend but I should learn my lesson to at least stick to philosophers.
Reading page after page of Stenger's attempt to apply scientific method to his impoverished and woefully inadequate understanding of what classical theism means when speaking of "God" left me cringing the entire time I wasted reading through this book. If I were an atheist, one with an accurate understanding of classical theism, I'd be embarrassed for the atheist community that this book had even been published, and even worse, had been given a good reception.
Victor Stenger, as with all of his ilk, should stick with what he knows and avoid the temptation to stray into the unknown (to him) territories of theology and philosophy.
To give an example of the evidence of Stenger's intellectual sloth; he quotes St.Thomas Aquinas at some point in the last quarter of the book and he does so in order to attempt to support one of his assertions and yet the entire book attests to the fact that he certainly hasn't taken any time to acquaint himself with Aquinas's work in terms of understanding what is meant by "God". Clearly he just picked up this Aquinas quote somewhere but never could I believe he ever actually read, much less studied, any of Aquinas's theology.
I suppose this all does make some sense. He is, after all, a scientist who surely is fairly busy. Also he holds to atheism, albeit seemingly a shallow and critically unexamined kind, and as such I can understand his lack of interest in committing to taking the time needed to thoroughly examine his object of criticism. All this makes some sense. What doesn't make much or even any sense, is that despite his lack of honest interest in the subject matter, he will take the time to write 258 pages of drivel about a topic he is unwilling to study beforehand, not even study it as much as is needed to make sure he understands it accurately enough to avoid erecting endless strawmen.
It was just more Dawkins really. The only difference is that Dawkins can write decent prose.
September 8, 2022
"Darwin chased God out of his old haunts in biology, and he scurried for safety down the rabbit hole of physics. The laws and constants of the universe, we were told, are too good to be true: a setup carefully tuned to allow the eventual evolution of life. It needed a good physicist to show us the fallacy, and Victor Stenger lucidly does so"
Richard Dawkins
"So, when I use uppercase G, I mean the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God"
In page 12 of the book's Preface
"In the Dover trial Judge John E. Jones III ruled that teaching intelligent design (I.D.) in the public-school science classes is an unconstitutional violation of church and state." Page 59
From the very beginning Stenger shows us he doesn't like the Hebrew God of the Old Testament: a not-good God. However, Stenger doesn't show the good things that God provided to the Hebrew people. Not even the good deeds (say, miracles for example) of the God of the New Testament.
Stenger's scientific effort to "show" God doesn't exist is remarkable. He tries to "show" that God didn't create the world, the biblical historical record is poor and not reliable and some of the main religious figures in Christianity are but/even myths. (Although he enjoys pieces of religious music and art)
"However , I am not ready for nothingness. I am willing to trade Nirvana for the joy and anguish of life for at least a few more years."
I'm glad he didn't PROVE God doesn't exit. He ends up alluding Buddhism as a way out. But even Nirvana doesn't suit Stenger. That's sad. Stenger is, for sure, an existentialist.
RECOMMENDED ALTERNATIVE VIEWS:
The Existence of God by Richard Swinburne
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
UPDATE
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-ba...
FOR DISCUSSION AND REFLECTION:
https://medium.com/illumination/if-go...
October 2, 2013
بداية تذكرت أن قبل ٥٠٠ عام لم يكن بالإمكان إثبات وجود الجراثيم فهل هذا يعني أن الجراثيم لم تكن موجودة في ذلك الوقت وهذا مدخل غبي ان الله بما انه لا يمكن تحديده فهو غير موجود ولا يخضع للأولويات في البحث العلمي.
أخذ أقوال الفلاسفة بأن الله غير كامل ان كانت صنعته غير كاملة مضحك وليس مجال لنقاش علمي وكذلك خلق صخرة لا يحملها لا اعتبره تفكيرا وإنما فسططة وهو لا يتبع مباديء المنطق الذي يدعي اتباعها بل نتائج يريد الوصول إليها ومنها يخترع تصنيفات يدعي أنها منطقية توصله للنتيجة التي لا يقبل غيرها.
الحجة الأقدم بعدم وجود العدالة هي دليل على عدم وجو الله تفتقر للمنطق فعدم عدله لا يعني عدم وجوده وهذه يدركها الطفل الصغير وإنما تستعمل للتأثير النفسي على القاريء .
لا اعلم لماذا يرفض الملحد فكرة ان المعجزات يمكن ان تقوم بناء على قواعد علمية فمثلا التلقيح الصناعي للرحم بدلا عن المعاشرة المباشرة تشابها في كل شيء ما عدا البدايات .
ليس في النظريات التي أوردها رفض لفكرة وجد الله إلا بلوي عنقها وحتى انه في تكراره لمثل آلية ا��عين وتكونها لم يوضح كيف ان الجزء الذي تكونت منه العين كونها وبناء على أي حاجة وكيف تمكن من خلقها من طبقات وقرنية وعملية الوصل بينهم وكيف عرف انه يجب ان يكون هناك جفن ودموع للترطيب وتطهيرها وكيف تصل بالأعصاب وصولا للدماغ وتفسيرها ومن اين اتتها فكرة ضرورة وجود العين .
اعلم اني صاحب هوى في رأيي ولكني توقعت مستويا علميا أرقى من ذلك في الطرح.
التجارب التي أقامها على الصلاة شملت أديانا دون غيرها ودون توضيح أصلا لمعايير الأبحاث من العدد والفترة الزمنية وغيرها بالإضافة إلى ان هناك أبحاث بنتائج مناقضة لما توصل له الكاتب.
أخذ أقوال الفلاسفة بأن الله غير كامل ان كانت صنعته غير كاملة مضحك وليس مجال لنقاش علمي وكذلك خلق صخرة لا يحملها لا اعتبره تفكيرا وإنما فسططة وهو لا يتبع مباديء المنطق الذي يدعي اتباعها بل نتائج يريد الوصول إليها ومنها يخترع تصنيفات يدعي أنها منطقية توصله للنتيجة التي لا يقبل غيرها.
الحجة الأقدم بعدم وجود العدالة هي دليل على عدم وجو الله تفتقر للمنطق فعدم عدله لا يعني عدم وجوده وهذه يدركها الطفل الصغير وإنما تستعمل للتأثير النفسي على القاريء .
لا اعلم لماذا يرفض الملحد فكرة ان المعجزات يمكن ان تقوم بناء على قواعد علمية فمثلا التلقيح الصناعي للرحم بدلا عن المعاشرة المباشرة تشابها في كل شيء ما عدا البدايات .
ليس في النظريات التي أوردها رفض لفكرة وجد الله إلا بلوي عنقها وحتى انه في تكراره لمثل آلية ا��عين وتكونها لم يوضح كيف ان الجزء الذي تكونت منه العين كونها وبناء على أي حاجة وكيف تمكن من خلقها من طبقات وقرنية وعملية الوصل بينهم وكيف عرف انه يجب ان يكون هناك جفن ودموع للترطيب وتطهيرها وكيف تصل بالأعصاب وصولا للدماغ وتفسيرها ومن اين اتتها فكرة ضرورة وجود العين .
اعلم اني صاحب هوى في رأيي ولكني توقعت مستويا علميا أرقى من ذلك في الطرح.
التجارب التي أقامها على الصلاة شملت أديانا دون غيرها ودون توضيح أصلا لمعايير الأبحاث من العدد والفترة الزمنية وغيرها بالإضافة إلى ان هناك أبحاث بنتائج مناقضة لما توصل له الكاتب.
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December 7, 2019
Read about ten years ago.
I remember struggling with quite a bit of it, probably due to my lack of knowledge of physics.
When I am suitably enthused, I will re-read, ie, 'listen' to this on audiobook.
In the meantime, I am about to listen to Stenger's more recent audiobook:
"God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion".
I think I am a bit of a glutton for "physics" punishment!
I remember struggling with quite a bit of it, probably due to my lack of knowledge of physics.
When I am suitably enthused, I will re-read, ie, 'listen' to this on audiobook.
In the meantime, I am about to listen to Stenger's more recent audiobook:
"God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion".
I think I am a bit of a glutton for "physics" punishment!
June 13, 2015
If anything, the title is disingenuous.
Stenger is not trying to disprove the concept of a supreme being - just the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. And he starts with the premise that we can use science to discern supernatural phenomena. But by definition wouldn't supernatural things not follow natural laws and so not be testable by the scientific method? He lays out 5 conditions to evaluate "extraordinary" (supernatural) claims. I'm not sure if he made these up or what. For someone so dedicated to science he gives no explanation of how he came up with those or where he got them.
But, come to find out, what he wants to do is define God in a specific way, and disprove that God.
"The thesis of this book is that the supernatural hypothesis of God is testable, verifiable, and falsifiable by the established methods of science."
That's a damn bold claim, even if you are narrowing your definition.
But as you read the beginning of the book, rather than disproving the existence of God, he is disproving the Judeo-Christian-Islamic model of God. He doesn't explicitly make that point.
It seems like there's a difference between "science has disproved a God that did something specific" and "science has disproved that God did that same something". As an example, take evolution. I would say that science has disproved that God created humans as a distinct life form, and instead used evolution; Stenger uses this phrasing: certain discoveries "falsify the hypothesis of a God who created humans as a distinct life form." Is it semantics? Is he disproving something God did - or disproving the God that did it? Again, he's trying to disprove a specific type of God.
Chapter 2 suggests that God isn't needed to explain our world. That's still a long way from the hypothesis he is attempting to disprove.
Chapter 3: ESP does not exist, ergo God does not exist. Come on, Stenger; you are better than that. Oh, also, prayer and the existence of a soul has been disproven. While I'm tracking that there has been no science to support the idea that God answers prayers, I'm still a bit fuzzy on the scientific proof that there is no soul. I suspect so is Stenger.
Chapter 4: If we can describe the origin of the universe with natural means, God does not exist.
Chapter 5: Life and the universe does not require that a God existed to create it.
Chapter 6 examines biblical veracity. First questioning prophecies, then questioning historical facts. I have the same issues with the former (which hurts evidence for an "inerrant" Word only, IMO) and will have look in more depth at the latter. Either way, this does not disprove anything, but does question what theists posit as "proof".
Chapter 7 is a discussion of arguments for the existence of God based on morality.
This is all just poking holes in the current arguments for the existence of God. Which is different from disproving it. So far, there's nothing new here. It's all been done before.
In chapter 8, he finally attempts to do what he sets out to do - disprove God (though still not using science). He does this by bringing up the problem of evil and suffering. I'll admit this is one of the biggest concerns with the existence of a benevolent God. But of course, this is one of the shortest chapters in the book, and he doesn't address it very well. But it seems to be the best he's got.
In chapter 9, he finally attempts to pull it all together. Using the arguments in previous chapters he tries to weave a cohesive argument against the hypothesis that God exists. Ultimately, he fails. This might be a great primer on the weaknesses of the arguments for a benevolent omnipotent personal God, but it falls way short of what it purports to be: a scientific treatise proving God does not exist.
Stenger is not trying to disprove the concept of a supreme being - just the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. And he starts with the premise that we can use science to discern supernatural phenomena. But by definition wouldn't supernatural things not follow natural laws and so not be testable by the scientific method? He lays out 5 conditions to evaluate "extraordinary" (supernatural) claims. I'm not sure if he made these up or what. For someone so dedicated to science he gives no explanation of how he came up with those or where he got them.
But, come to find out, what he wants to do is define God in a specific way, and disprove that God.
"The thesis of this book is that the supernatural hypothesis of God is testable, verifiable, and falsifiable by the established methods of science."
That's a damn bold claim, even if you are narrowing your definition.
But as you read the beginning of the book, rather than disproving the existence of God, he is disproving the Judeo-Christian-Islamic model of God. He doesn't explicitly make that point.
It seems like there's a difference between "science has disproved a God that did something specific" and "science has disproved that God did that same something". As an example, take evolution. I would say that science has disproved that God created humans as a distinct life form, and instead used evolution; Stenger uses this phrasing: certain discoveries "falsify the hypothesis of a God who created humans as a distinct life form." Is it semantics? Is he disproving something God did - or disproving the God that did it? Again, he's trying to disprove a specific type of God.
Chapter 2 suggests that God isn't needed to explain our world. That's still a long way from the hypothesis he is attempting to disprove.
Chapter 3: ESP does not exist, ergo God does not exist. Come on, Stenger; you are better than that. Oh, also, prayer and the existence of a soul has been disproven. While I'm tracking that there has been no science to support the idea that God answers prayers, I'm still a bit fuzzy on the scientific proof that there is no soul. I suspect so is Stenger.
Chapter 4: If we can describe the origin of the universe with natural means, God does not exist.
Chapter 5: Life and the universe does not require that a God existed to create it.
Chapter 6 examines biblical veracity. First questioning prophecies, then questioning historical facts. I have the same issues with the former (which hurts evidence for an "inerrant" Word only, IMO) and will have look in more depth at the latter. Either way, this does not disprove anything, but does question what theists posit as "proof".
Chapter 7 is a discussion of arguments for the existence of God based on morality.
This is all just poking holes in the current arguments for the existence of God. Which is different from disproving it. So far, there's nothing new here. It's all been done before.
In chapter 8, he finally attempts to do what he sets out to do - disprove God (though still not using science). He does this by bringing up the problem of evil and suffering. I'll admit this is one of the biggest concerns with the existence of a benevolent God. But of course, this is one of the shortest chapters in the book, and he doesn't address it very well. But it seems to be the best he's got.
In chapter 9, he finally attempts to pull it all together. Using the arguments in previous chapters he tries to weave a cohesive argument against the hypothesis that God exists. Ultimately, he fails. This might be a great primer on the weaknesses of the arguments for a benevolent omnipotent personal God, but it falls way short of what it purports to be: a scientific treatise proving God does not exist.
September 26, 2014
Much better than I expected.
I was prepared for a humanist rant. No doubt that's exactly how many people will receive this title--particularly those who don't bother to read it. (The same goes for this review, since the four stars are plainly visible above.)
Rather than fulminating, retired physicist Stenger proposes to undertake a scientific exploration of the God concept, and consider the evidence for or against this proposition.
George H. Smith, who wrote Atheism: The Case Against God decades ago, cautioned atheists against getting into existence arguments about God with believers before the essential question of defining one's terms was disposed of.
So it is with this author. Stenger does not propose to refute all God concepts, past, present, and future. The God concept he challenges has specific attributes which distinguish it from other conceivable gods.
But neither does he set himself too small a task. The God he undertakes to disprove is no less than the one most popularly believed in the Western tradition, that being the personal God who created the universe for the benefit of human beings, who controls all events, who knows your innermost thoughts, who does not hide his existence from those open to evidence, and who will intercede on your behalf, given sufficiently earnest prayer and satisfactory achievements in piety.
It is this God, and not the gods of deists, animists, or Buddhists, that Stenger claims is subject to scientific scrutiny and found wanting.
Stenger's central thesis is a simple one, and he identifies himself as holding a minority viewpoint even among scientists in frankly stating it: if God's influence can be discerned in the material world, be it through the fine-tuning of the cosmos to permit us, the creator's most beloved creation, to flourish, or through the alteration of physical events--such as the ravages of disease or natural disaster--then such interventions should be empirically measurable. After all, a God whose influence is indistinguishable from random chance is not one who intervenes in any meaningful sense. A devoutly Christian craps-shooter who meticulously measures every throw of his dice over thousands of throws and finds a Gaussian distribution in the sums of the tosses has not benefited from divine influence, no matter how earnest his prayers, because an atheist or worshiper of the wrong god will find the same result in his own craps games (assuming "fair" dice used by all involved, of course).
Stenger's approach is academically scrupulous and heavy on citations. While small, unreproduced medical studies about the positive effects of intercessory prayers on patient outcomes make headlines in the English-speaking press, subsequent, larger-scale studies with more controls which show no such effect fail to make the news. Stenger brings both sorts to the reader's attention here.
For me, the centerpiece of the book is a sequence of chapters aiming to disprove on physical grounds the miraculous creation of the universe. This material will no doubt be the most challenging to most readers, as despite the author's careful explanations for the lay reader, and complete avoidance of equations, it is still somewhat heavy going. For example, the discussion relies heavily upon the reader's grasp of the concept of entropy, which is something even many engineering students struggle with in their thermodynamics courses. Nevertheless, I myself have just enough background in physics to follow his argument, and it is a very neat one.
I do think his explanation of "why there is something rather than nothing" was hasty. I would liked to have seen more depth. It seemed to boil down to a bare assertion that the amount of entropy in an empty system is necessarily zero, so the second law of thermodynamics necessitates the spontaneous creation of energy (perhaps as a single pair of virtual particles). Put another way (and if my lay understanding of these Big Concepts is accurate), a zero-energy universe is subject to a vacuum metastability event--see Wikipedia for fascinating reading. Of course that on its face violates energy conservation, a law which Stenger otherwise recognizes as sacrosanct, so I'm not seeing how he squares this circle.
It is a nifty thought, but it sorely needs more development. As it stands, a believer can simply retort that one has "merely" identified the mechanism of miraculous creation. When the rest of Stenger's arguments are brought into play, I don't think this is the case, but the burden of parrying this thrust should fall upon the writer, not the reader.
In any case, such a weakness is not fatal to Stenger's enterprise. Why? Because one has to, at all times, be wary of a bait-and-switch attempted by all too many believers. I've participated in many theist-vs.-atheist arguments in my life, and witnessed many more, and hardly a one has gone by without an extraction of an admission of the possibility, however remote, of some creator God, at which point the Bible-believing interlocutor races to force the substitution of *their* God, with Abraham, Noah's flood, the Exodus, the Ten Commandments, the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, salvation exclusive to those who exhort John 3:16, and so forth.
In short, the contra argument "if there is a possibility of any god existing, then my God must exist, and you'd do well to get right with Him right away" is a colossal non-sequitur for what should be reasons obvious to anyone practiced in elementary reasoning in any other context.
In fact, and in an admission I found very interesting, one of the species of gods that Stenger claims not to have refuted is the "hidden" God of some strains of evangelical Christianity. This is the God of John Calvin, who is omnipotent, who manipulates all sensory perceptions and instrument readings (if necessary) to eradicate evidence of his own presence, and refuses to reveal himself except to those who abandon evidence-based reasoning and are willing to proclaim themselves in his thrall as an act of blind faith. This God solves the problem of Evil by being not only indifferent to the fates of agnostics or liberal Christians, but by permitting disaster to befall even his own elect so as not to give away the game to those who will infer the existence of a God only from evidence.
This God concept runs into major problems with the Cartesian theological argument, which holds that God is not a deceiver. Such a God would, you'd think, be a problem for writers like Karen Armstrong, who wants to rally all believers under one big ecumenical flag.
Stenger offers no comfort for such efforts. As he points out, theologians have never reconciled the Problem of Evil with the traditional traits of a Supreme Being who loves humanity--omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. That is, unless, one redefines one's notion of "goodness" to permit a literally cosmic campaign of deceit deliberately aimed at one's own supposedly favorite children.
And, as Stenger argues in his final chapter (and consistently with Christopher Hitchens et al.), it is precisely this variety of fervent religious belief which leads people to break from the universal ethical principles that humans uphold when not excessively entangled with religion, and deliberately slaughter innocents in the belief that one is serving a higher power that perfectly conceals itself from all objective observation, and whose moral code works in mysterious ways.
Stenger's project is bad news for those who follow in the footsteps of Stephen Jay Gould and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and proclaim that there need be no conflict between the domains of reflection and study considered by religion and those considered by science. Stenger contends that there is no phenomenon not ultimately subject to being reasoned about, though he admits that in many domains we lack both the tools to do so and a clear program for developing them. But to leave to religion only those areas science has not yet penetrated is cold comfort for many believers, and rightfully so. They do not want to see their God boxed into ever-smaller partitions as human knowledge grows without bound.
While he does not consider the subject himself, I would regard the evolution of the relationship between science and religion, and the shift of confessional affiliations, over the past couple of generations, as indicative that his thesis has explanatory power. One doesn't need to be a physicist to learn a little bit about the vastness of the universe and the difficulty humans have in surviving beyond the confines of our planet. One doesn't need to be a statistician to understand that prayers to alleviate the sufferings of the innocent, or prevent the deaths of the undeserving, often go unanswered--but not so often that the effects of prayer can be distinguished from random chance. The concept of an all-powerful God who loves all of humanity is hard to square with even the most fleeting glimpse at the evidence. At the same time, our culture prides itself on its theistic and Christian heritage (despite the deliberate efforts of many of the founding fathers, who permitted no allusion to Christian doctrine in the Declaration of Independence nor even mention of God in the federal Constitution). It's easy to identify as a "soft" Christian, and almost as easy to identify as agnostic ("leave me alone, and I won't trouble you to examine your beliefs").
With soft infidelity growing in popularity, it is no surprise that growing minorities, particularly in America, find themselves having to choose between fire-breathing, Calvinistic evangelicalism and a rejection of religious belief altogether. At first glance it is an irony that one of the gods Stenger doesn't claim to be able to refute is the one believed in by the most obnoxious of Christians (and, not coincidentally, those most hostile to scientific teachings where these conflict with scripture or the policy objectives of their political allies).
However, I think that further reflection reveals that this is not an irony, but rather a great opportunity. The Calvinistic evangelical tradition asks for blind faith in a large, complex tangle of propositions (usually including Biblical literalism, itself a pickle when one encounters mutually contradictory elements of scripture). This tradition bankrolls extreme politicians and supports the bombing of abortion clinics, preaches holy war against Muslims, and wants to enroll the apparatus of the government in inspecting your bed to ensure you're not engaging in forbidden forms of intercourse. (Or, in recent years, wants to prove that gay and lesbian pair-bonds are less stable than hetero ones by prohibiting such couples from explicitly and legally entering into those very forms of stable relationship.) Moreover, this tradition simultaneously claims that we are all miserable sinners, ghastly in our inadequacies, and that we can have perfect knowledge about anything, thanks to divine revelation.
The alternative tradition--Stenger's tradition--asks that you have faith only in the human capacity to reason. Granted, it does ask that you credit this ability to some of your fellow human beings some of the time--we can't all be experts in everything. It acknowledges that we are fallible beings who may have to change our minds or expand our perspectives; it furthermore, in some of its more esoteric niches (ask me in comments), actually forecloses the possibility of knowledge to certain levels of detail. But it asks little else, and in return, it makes our current level of civilization possible.
Stenger spends a book explaining why this choice isn't a false one; the God concept which permits us to grant pluralistic lip service to both traditions evaporates in the light of reason.
In this book, Victor Stenger makes a strong case that cafeteria Christianity, and other modern religious traditions like it, are incompatible with careful reasoning based on our present level of knowledge about the universe. If you find the remaining alternatives--outright atheism; a God who is separate and apart from the universe, does nothing for humans, and does not respond to their prayers; or the vengeful, deceptive, hidden God of John Calvin--all distasteful, then the fact that you're faced with a difficult choice is yet further evidence that God is not inclined to give you a lifetime of easy decisions.
And that may be because God simply doesn't exist.
I was prepared for a humanist rant. No doubt that's exactly how many people will receive this title--particularly those who don't bother to read it. (The same goes for this review, since the four stars are plainly visible above.)
Rather than fulminating, retired physicist Stenger proposes to undertake a scientific exploration of the God concept, and consider the evidence for or against this proposition.
George H. Smith, who wrote Atheism: The Case Against God decades ago, cautioned atheists against getting into existence arguments about God with believers before the essential question of defining one's terms was disposed of.
So it is with this author. Stenger does not propose to refute all God concepts, past, present, and future. The God concept he challenges has specific attributes which distinguish it from other conceivable gods.
But neither does he set himself too small a task. The God he undertakes to disprove is no less than the one most popularly believed in the Western tradition, that being the personal God who created the universe for the benefit of human beings, who controls all events, who knows your innermost thoughts, who does not hide his existence from those open to evidence, and who will intercede on your behalf, given sufficiently earnest prayer and satisfactory achievements in piety.
It is this God, and not the gods of deists, animists, or Buddhists, that Stenger claims is subject to scientific scrutiny and found wanting.
Stenger's central thesis is a simple one, and he identifies himself as holding a minority viewpoint even among scientists in frankly stating it: if God's influence can be discerned in the material world, be it through the fine-tuning of the cosmos to permit us, the creator's most beloved creation, to flourish, or through the alteration of physical events--such as the ravages of disease or natural disaster--then such interventions should be empirically measurable. After all, a God whose influence is indistinguishable from random chance is not one who intervenes in any meaningful sense. A devoutly Christian craps-shooter who meticulously measures every throw of his dice over thousands of throws and finds a Gaussian distribution in the sums of the tosses has not benefited from divine influence, no matter how earnest his prayers, because an atheist or worshiper of the wrong god will find the same result in his own craps games (assuming "fair" dice used by all involved, of course).
Stenger's approach is academically scrupulous and heavy on citations. While small, unreproduced medical studies about the positive effects of intercessory prayers on patient outcomes make headlines in the English-speaking press, subsequent, larger-scale studies with more controls which show no such effect fail to make the news. Stenger brings both sorts to the reader's attention here.
For me, the centerpiece of the book is a sequence of chapters aiming to disprove on physical grounds the miraculous creation of the universe. This material will no doubt be the most challenging to most readers, as despite the author's careful explanations for the lay reader, and complete avoidance of equations, it is still somewhat heavy going. For example, the discussion relies heavily upon the reader's grasp of the concept of entropy, which is something even many engineering students struggle with in their thermodynamics courses. Nevertheless, I myself have just enough background in physics to follow his argument, and it is a very neat one.
I do think his explanation of "why there is something rather than nothing" was hasty. I would liked to have seen more depth. It seemed to boil down to a bare assertion that the amount of entropy in an empty system is necessarily zero, so the second law of thermodynamics necessitates the spontaneous creation of energy (perhaps as a single pair of virtual particles). Put another way (and if my lay understanding of these Big Concepts is accurate), a zero-energy universe is subject to a vacuum metastability event--see Wikipedia for fascinating reading. Of course that on its face violates energy conservation, a law which Stenger otherwise recognizes as sacrosanct, so I'm not seeing how he squares this circle.
It is a nifty thought, but it sorely needs more development. As it stands, a believer can simply retort that one has "merely" identified the mechanism of miraculous creation. When the rest of Stenger's arguments are brought into play, I don't think this is the case, but the burden of parrying this thrust should fall upon the writer, not the reader.
In any case, such a weakness is not fatal to Stenger's enterprise. Why? Because one has to, at all times, be wary of a bait-and-switch attempted by all too many believers. I've participated in many theist-vs.-atheist arguments in my life, and witnessed many more, and hardly a one has gone by without an extraction of an admission of the possibility, however remote, of some creator God, at which point the Bible-believing interlocutor races to force the substitution of *their* God, with Abraham, Noah's flood, the Exodus, the Ten Commandments, the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, salvation exclusive to those who exhort John 3:16, and so forth.
In short, the contra argument "if there is a possibility of any god existing, then my God must exist, and you'd do well to get right with Him right away" is a colossal non-sequitur for what should be reasons obvious to anyone practiced in elementary reasoning in any other context.
In fact, and in an admission I found very interesting, one of the species of gods that Stenger claims not to have refuted is the "hidden" God of some strains of evangelical Christianity. This is the God of John Calvin, who is omnipotent, who manipulates all sensory perceptions and instrument readings (if necessary) to eradicate evidence of his own presence, and refuses to reveal himself except to those who abandon evidence-based reasoning and are willing to proclaim themselves in his thrall as an act of blind faith. This God solves the problem of Evil by being not only indifferent to the fates of agnostics or liberal Christians, but by permitting disaster to befall even his own elect so as not to give away the game to those who will infer the existence of a God only from evidence.
This God concept runs into major problems with the Cartesian theological argument, which holds that God is not a deceiver. Such a God would, you'd think, be a problem for writers like Karen Armstrong, who wants to rally all believers under one big ecumenical flag.
Stenger offers no comfort for such efforts. As he points out, theologians have never reconciled the Problem of Evil with the traditional traits of a Supreme Being who loves humanity--omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. That is, unless, one redefines one's notion of "goodness" to permit a literally cosmic campaign of deceit deliberately aimed at one's own supposedly favorite children.
And, as Stenger argues in his final chapter (and consistently with Christopher Hitchens et al.), it is precisely this variety of fervent religious belief which leads people to break from the universal ethical principles that humans uphold when not excessively entangled with religion, and deliberately slaughter innocents in the belief that one is serving a higher power that perfectly conceals itself from all objective observation, and whose moral code works in mysterious ways.
Stenger's project is bad news for those who follow in the footsteps of Stephen Jay Gould and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and proclaim that there need be no conflict between the domains of reflection and study considered by religion and those considered by science. Stenger contends that there is no phenomenon not ultimately subject to being reasoned about, though he admits that in many domains we lack both the tools to do so and a clear program for developing them. But to leave to religion only those areas science has not yet penetrated is cold comfort for many believers, and rightfully so. They do not want to see their God boxed into ever-smaller partitions as human knowledge grows without bound.
While he does not consider the subject himself, I would regard the evolution of the relationship between science and religion, and the shift of confessional affiliations, over the past couple of generations, as indicative that his thesis has explanatory power. One doesn't need to be a physicist to learn a little bit about the vastness of the universe and the difficulty humans have in surviving beyond the confines of our planet. One doesn't need to be a statistician to understand that prayers to alleviate the sufferings of the innocent, or prevent the deaths of the undeserving, often go unanswered--but not so often that the effects of prayer can be distinguished from random chance. The concept of an all-powerful God who loves all of humanity is hard to square with even the most fleeting glimpse at the evidence. At the same time, our culture prides itself on its theistic and Christian heritage (despite the deliberate efforts of many of the founding fathers, who permitted no allusion to Christian doctrine in the Declaration of Independence nor even mention of God in the federal Constitution). It's easy to identify as a "soft" Christian, and almost as easy to identify as agnostic ("leave me alone, and I won't trouble you to examine your beliefs").
With soft infidelity growing in popularity, it is no surprise that growing minorities, particularly in America, find themselves having to choose between fire-breathing, Calvinistic evangelicalism and a rejection of religious belief altogether. At first glance it is an irony that one of the gods Stenger doesn't claim to be able to refute is the one believed in by the most obnoxious of Christians (and, not coincidentally, those most hostile to scientific teachings where these conflict with scripture or the policy objectives of their political allies).
However, I think that further reflection reveals that this is not an irony, but rather a great opportunity. The Calvinistic evangelical tradition asks for blind faith in a large, complex tangle of propositions (usually including Biblical literalism, itself a pickle when one encounters mutually contradictory elements of scripture). This tradition bankrolls extreme politicians and supports the bombing of abortion clinics, preaches holy war against Muslims, and wants to enroll the apparatus of the government in inspecting your bed to ensure you're not engaging in forbidden forms of intercourse. (Or, in recent years, wants to prove that gay and lesbian pair-bonds are less stable than hetero ones by prohibiting such couples from explicitly and legally entering into those very forms of stable relationship.) Moreover, this tradition simultaneously claims that we are all miserable sinners, ghastly in our inadequacies, and that we can have perfect knowledge about anything, thanks to divine revelation.
The alternative tradition--Stenger's tradition--asks that you have faith only in the human capacity to reason. Granted, it does ask that you credit this ability to some of your fellow human beings some of the time--we can't all be experts in everything. It acknowledges that we are fallible beings who may have to change our minds or expand our perspectives; it furthermore, in some of its more esoteric niches (ask me in comments), actually forecloses the possibility of knowledge to certain levels of detail. But it asks little else, and in return, it makes our current level of civilization possible.
Stenger spends a book explaining why this choice isn't a false one; the God concept which permits us to grant pluralistic lip service to both traditions evaporates in the light of reason.
In this book, Victor Stenger makes a strong case that cafeteria Christianity, and other modern religious traditions like it, are incompatible with careful reasoning based on our present level of knowledge about the universe. If you find the remaining alternatives--outright atheism; a God who is separate and apart from the universe, does nothing for humans, and does not respond to their prayers; or the vengeful, deceptive, hidden God of John Calvin--all distasteful, then the fact that you're faced with a difficult choice is yet further evidence that God is not inclined to give you a lifetime of easy decisions.
And that may be because God simply doesn't exist.
March 15, 2015
Ok, let me put this as simply as possible. I have been an Atheist for the last four years, ever since I was an adorable 14 year-old with long beautiful hair, and as I was reading this book, taking the Atheist stance - which is now second nature to me - I was not convinced by what he was saying.
Seriously. Then how about a theist?
The arguments were very brief, not elaborated, not justified and not even given enough examples. Most of the examples are even a mention of someone else's book or essay, or even sometimes his books and essays (the author's) without quotes or elaboration of the person's idea. Just a quick mention. To tell you the truth, the book felt like a miniature advertisement electronic board.
I can sometimes move from Atheist stance, to theist stance (since I was one myself and since I have a big fat skeptical brain in that cute skull of mine and because I suspect I have multiple characters disorder), and I could tell sufficiently that it was not a book that could convince a theist. It was too brief, and his very frequent mention of the two words "In short" three times every single page while not even providing a long argument in the first place made me want to bitch slap his old face.
The arguments were good, and I could see a handful (NOT MORE) of new ideas that I have not heard of before. These could come in handy on the long term, maybe if as an Atheist I want to debate someone, and that means I have to find ways of elaborating his ideas. But on the short term, the book seemed like a poor job of organizing jumbled ideas that we see everyday on social networks and blogs and even ideas mentioned in other Atheist books.
Let me put the last idea simply. Imagine the book was a text book and it was taught, just as it is in a university course, and then a test about the book was given to students. They have a few days to prepare and study the book. I can tell you, if the book was presented as a science course, no one will pass.
The book was very poorly written and poorly elaborated, and poorly justified that a person who doesn't a prior knowledge of things of this kind will have a very very hard job understanding the book due to the lack of explanations.
And I want to bitch slap his old face another time because of the amount of times he said "in short, our universe would look exactly the same if our universe did not have a creator". Seriously. It is like he made up for the lack of explanation and elaboration and the poorly presented arguments by saying this sentence at the end of every SUB CHAPTER .
Seriously. Then how about a theist?
The arguments were very brief, not elaborated, not justified and not even given enough examples. Most of the examples are even a mention of someone else's book or essay, or even sometimes his books and essays (the author's) without quotes or elaboration of the person's idea. Just a quick mention. To tell you the truth, the book felt like a miniature advertisement electronic board.
I can sometimes move from Atheist stance, to theist stance (since I was one myself and since I have a big fat skeptical brain in that cute skull of mine and because I suspect I have multiple characters disorder), and I could tell sufficiently that it was not a book that could convince a theist. It was too brief, and his very frequent mention of the two words "In short" three times every single page while not even providing a long argument in the first place made me want to bitch slap his old face.
The arguments were good, and I could see a handful (NOT MORE) of new ideas that I have not heard of before. These could come in handy on the long term, maybe if as an Atheist I want to debate someone, and that means I have to find ways of elaborating his ideas. But on the short term, the book seemed like a poor job of organizing jumbled ideas that we see everyday on social networks and blogs and even ideas mentioned in other Atheist books.
Let me put the last idea simply. Imagine the book was a text book and it was taught, just as it is in a university course, and then a test about the book was given to students. They have a few days to prepare and study the book. I can tell you, if the book was presented as a science course, no one will pass.
The book was very poorly written and poorly elaborated, and poorly justified that a person who doesn't a prior knowledge of things of this kind will have a very very hard job understanding the book due to the lack of explanations.
And I want to bitch slap his old face another time because of the amount of times he said "in short, our universe would look exactly the same if our universe did not have a creator". Seriously. It is like he made up for the lack of explanation and elaboration and the poorly presented arguments by saying this sentence at the end of every SUB CHAPTER .
June 3, 2016
That's the first time that I read a book written by an atheist and it was really enjoyable, this book makes your mind wonder and think.
I loved the chapter about the problem of evil and the qualities of God in which he discussed the contradictions of the qualities of omnipotence and benevolence attributed to God (at least the abrahamic one) with the existence of suffering and evil (espeacially the unnecessary one).
I also liked the chapter about our place in the universe which adresses the question whether the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of humanity or not, Stenger answers the question with a big NO with great arguments.
I still believe that the question of existence of God cannot and will never be answered neither bu religion nor by science, because they are still debating the question and don't seem to accept a final solution. But Stenger's work is a big step towards solving the God puzzle.
I loved the chapter about the problem of evil and the qualities of God in which he discussed the contradictions of the qualities of omnipotence and benevolence attributed to God (at least the abrahamic one) with the existence of suffering and evil (espeacially the unnecessary one).
I also liked the chapter about our place in the universe which adresses the question whether the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of humanity or not, Stenger answers the question with a big NO with great arguments.
I still believe that the question of existence of God cannot and will never be answered neither bu religion nor by science, because they are still debating the question and don't seem to accept a final solution. But Stenger's work is a big step towards solving the God puzzle.
March 25, 2020
Not only discusses the traditional arguments for and against the existence of God but also the more recent fine tuned Universe argument for God's existence.. I believe that he convincingly disproves the existence of God. He writes clearly.
June 25, 2011
God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist by Victor Stenger
God: The Failed Hypothesis is a provocative book that contends that if God exists science should find objective evidence for it. Physicist Victor Stenger uses his background in science to create a hypothesis based on claims of God's existence. This 310-page book is composed the following ten chapters: 1. Models and Methods, 2. The Illusion of Design, 3. Searching for a World beyond Matter, 4. Cosmic Evidence, 5. The Uncongenial Universe, 6. The Failures of Revelation, 7. Do Our Values Come from God?, 8. The Argument from Evil, 9. Possible and Impossible Gods, and 10. Living in the Godless Universe.
Positives:
1. Well-written, accessible, fascinating and thought-provoking.
2. A scientific approach to God!
3. Great use of logic and thinking outside the box. Great overall approach.
4. Scientific method explained and applied.
5. Great quotes and lucid explanations.
6. Argument of design properly debunked.
7. A series of well laid out God hypotheses falsified, very interesting.
8. Physicalism explained. Dualism debunked.
9. Does prayer work? Great historical cases presented, fascinating stuff.
10. The best physics explained for the masses. Worth the price of the book, bravo!
11. Cosmological argument debunked.
12. Fine-tuning argument debunked.
13. Failures of scripture revealed.
14. Logical explanation of values.
15. The problem of evil is a theist's worst nightmare.
16. The hiddenness problem is compelling.
17. Each chapter ends with notes that include reference materials.
18. A bibliography worthy of a library.
Negatives
1. Let's be honest some concepts of physics are complex no matter how well it is explained.
2. The chapter of divine revelation may be the weakest of the book but even then I'm just being nitpicky.
In summary, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's unique, fascinating, thought-provoking and a page turner. Mr. Stenger maintains a respectful air of discourse throughout the book. I highly recommend this book.
Further reading: "Atheist Universe..." by David Mills, "The Christian Delusion..." by John Loftus, "50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God" by Guy P. Harrison, "Decoding the Language of God" by George C. Cunningham, and "Atheism Explained" by David Ramsay Steele.
God: The Failed Hypothesis is a provocative book that contends that if God exists science should find objective evidence for it. Physicist Victor Stenger uses his background in science to create a hypothesis based on claims of God's existence. This 310-page book is composed the following ten chapters: 1. Models and Methods, 2. The Illusion of Design, 3. Searching for a World beyond Matter, 4. Cosmic Evidence, 5. The Uncongenial Universe, 6. The Failures of Revelation, 7. Do Our Values Come from God?, 8. The Argument from Evil, 9. Possible and Impossible Gods, and 10. Living in the Godless Universe.
Positives:
1. Well-written, accessible, fascinating and thought-provoking.
2. A scientific approach to God!
3. Great use of logic and thinking outside the box. Great overall approach.
4. Scientific method explained and applied.
5. Great quotes and lucid explanations.
6. Argument of design properly debunked.
7. A series of well laid out God hypotheses falsified, very interesting.
8. Physicalism explained. Dualism debunked.
9. Does prayer work? Great historical cases presented, fascinating stuff.
10. The best physics explained for the masses. Worth the price of the book, bravo!
11. Cosmological argument debunked.
12. Fine-tuning argument debunked.
13. Failures of scripture revealed.
14. Logical explanation of values.
15. The problem of evil is a theist's worst nightmare.
16. The hiddenness problem is compelling.
17. Each chapter ends with notes that include reference materials.
18. A bibliography worthy of a library.
Negatives
1. Let's be honest some concepts of physics are complex no matter how well it is explained.
2. The chapter of divine revelation may be the weakest of the book but even then I'm just being nitpicky.
In summary, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It's unique, fascinating, thought-provoking and a page turner. Mr. Stenger maintains a respectful air of discourse throughout the book. I highly recommend this book.
Further reading: "Atheist Universe..." by David Mills, "The Christian Delusion..." by John Loftus, "50 Reasons People Give for Believing in a God" by Guy P. Harrison, "Decoding the Language of God" by George C. Cunningham, and "Atheism Explained" by David Ramsay Steele.
April 30, 2009
If you have more than a basic understanding of science you will not learn anything new from this book. If you have already read a couple of books on atheism and science then you will probably find no arguments that you haven't already been exposed to. However, some of these arguments are presented so clumsily that I became skeptical of a conclusion that I already agreed with prior to reading the book. I can only recommend this book to people who have never read anything on the subject before. Reluctantly, at that.
February 2, 2023
I've read a number of books about whether gods exist or not, but this is the first complete book I've read written by a physicist. In addition to having a long career as a particle physicist, the late Victor Stenger went on to write a plethora of books about science, philosophy, skepticism, and atheism. I've seen his works in the Prometheus Books catalog and this was the first one I've purchased. Another well-know physicist you may have heard of, Stephen Hawking, addressed the existence of gods in his last book Brief Answers to the Big Questions (READ THIS!) but this is the first full length book written by a physicist examining gods and god-related subject matter which form the basis of our modern religions.
This is not a long book- 302 pages, but there is 20 page bibliography, a handy 10 page index, and each chapter is followed by pages of notes. Plus, there is a Foreword written by none other than the late, great Christopher Hitchens. This book is very thoroughly researched. The chapters are not long and Stenger gets right to the point and elaborates just enough to make his point, and refers the reader to other works which expand on the subject he happens to be addressing. The notes are full of these related works and full of interesting comments about the main text. Stenger does a nice job explaining some of the more difficult scientific subject matter down to simpler terms, I never felt lost.
The primary point Stenger makes in this book is that if there is a god there should be some scientific evidence to prove its existence. But there isn't. He uses science to debunk the arguments of design, the fine tuning of the universe, the effectiveness of prayer (many studies have been done - some by believers - did not know that), biblical revelations and history, and a number of other commonly held beliefs of proponents of the supernatural. His strongest arguments are made in the subjects he knows best about, particularly pertaining to the physical laws of the universe , found in the chapters Searching For a World Beyond Matter, Cosmic Evidence, and The Uncongenial Universe. He does a nice job debunking intelligent design and explaining the origins of ethics, but I've read books by Dawkins and Hitchens (and others) that take a deeper dive in to these subjects. There are many ways a god could reveal itself but it appears that it hasn't, based on any proof, and if you have paid attention to scientific discoveries in your life you know that the "god of the gaps" is shrinking virtually every day.
This would be a good book for someone interested in a scientific look a the supernatural and religious views of how the world works but hasn't read a lot of Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, etc. Some of this was review to me. Stenger isn't as smooth a writer as the aforementioned authors but he effectively makes his points and this book will give the reader a number of great options if they desired to go down the rabbit hole on any number of subjects presented.
One of my favorite quotes, from the chapter The Uncongenial Universe: "In short, if God created the universe as a special place for humanity, he seems to have wasted and awfully large amount of space where humanity will never make an appearance. He wasted a lot of time, too. Instead of six days, he took nine billion years to make Earth, another billion years or so to make life, and then another four billion years to make humanity. Humans have walked on Earth for less than one-hundredth of one percent of Earth's history."
This is not a long book- 302 pages, but there is 20 page bibliography, a handy 10 page index, and each chapter is followed by pages of notes. Plus, there is a Foreword written by none other than the late, great Christopher Hitchens. This book is very thoroughly researched. The chapters are not long and Stenger gets right to the point and elaborates just enough to make his point, and refers the reader to other works which expand on the subject he happens to be addressing. The notes are full of these related works and full of interesting comments about the main text. Stenger does a nice job explaining some of the more difficult scientific subject matter down to simpler terms, I never felt lost.
The primary point Stenger makes in this book is that if there is a god there should be some scientific evidence to prove its existence. But there isn't. He uses science to debunk the arguments of design, the fine tuning of the universe, the effectiveness of prayer (many studies have been done - some by believers - did not know that), biblical revelations and history, and a number of other commonly held beliefs of proponents of the supernatural. His strongest arguments are made in the subjects he knows best about, particularly pertaining to the physical laws of the universe , found in the chapters Searching For a World Beyond Matter, Cosmic Evidence, and The Uncongenial Universe. He does a nice job debunking intelligent design and explaining the origins of ethics, but I've read books by Dawkins and Hitchens (and others) that take a deeper dive in to these subjects. There are many ways a god could reveal itself but it appears that it hasn't, based on any proof, and if you have paid attention to scientific discoveries in your life you know that the "god of the gaps" is shrinking virtually every day.
This would be a good book for someone interested in a scientific look a the supernatural and religious views of how the world works but hasn't read a lot of Dawkins, Hitchens, Sam Harris, etc. Some of this was review to me. Stenger isn't as smooth a writer as the aforementioned authors but he effectively makes his points and this book will give the reader a number of great options if they desired to go down the rabbit hole on any number of subjects presented.
One of my favorite quotes, from the chapter The Uncongenial Universe: "In short, if God created the universe as a special place for humanity, he seems to have wasted and awfully large amount of space where humanity will never make an appearance. He wasted a lot of time, too. Instead of six days, he took nine billion years to make Earth, another billion years or so to make life, and then another four billion years to make humanity. Humans have walked on Earth for less than one-hundredth of one percent of Earth's history."
April 23, 2017
God: The Failed Hypothesis is the most provocative book I’ve read proving the non-existence of God!
Author Stenger brilliantly base his conclusions using math and scientific models.
What I liked about God: The Failed Hypothesis is how the author first teaches us how science works so that we aren’t confused about what we’ve read. The author, unlike most authors who expect readers to have some knowledge of the subject they’re writing about before picking up their books, Stenger doesn’t make this assumption or mistake thus making the book an easy, uncomplicated and non-threatening read.
The following quotes were impressive.
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion."—Steven Weinberg
Still, any God model remains a human invention, formulated in terms of human qualities that we can comprehend, such as love and goodness. Indeed, the gods of ancient mythology—including the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God-are clearly models contrived by humans in terms people could understand. What is amazing is that in this sophisticated modern age so many still cling to primitive archaic images from the childhood of humanity.
Author Stenger brilliantly base his conclusions using math and scientific models.
What I liked about God: The Failed Hypothesis is how the author first teaches us how science works so that we aren’t confused about what we’ve read. The author, unlike most authors who expect readers to have some knowledge of the subject they’re writing about before picking up their books, Stenger doesn’t make this assumption or mistake thus making the book an easy, uncomplicated and non-threatening read.
The following quotes were impressive.
With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion."—Steven Weinberg
Still, any God model remains a human invention, formulated in terms of human qualities that we can comprehend, such as love and goodness. Indeed, the gods of ancient mythology—including the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God-are clearly models contrived by humans in terms people could understand. What is amazing is that in this sophisticated modern age so many still cling to primitive archaic images from the childhood of humanity.
Stenger also proves how statements in the Bible were taken from other sources like The Doctrine of the Mean13, written about 500BCE, Isocrates (c.375 SCE), The Hindu Mahabharata, written around 150 BCE, Taoism. Taote Ching 49, Buddhism Dhammapada 223, Hinduism, Ramayana, and Yuddha Kandall 115 just to name a few sources. This can serve to prove that the Bible is made up of many books.
Stinger was also able to prove how many things stated in the Bible never happened: Isaish 17:1, Jeremiah 49:33, Zechariah 10:11 and Ezekiel 29, 30.
If you only read a handful of non-fiction books a year let God: The Failed Hypothesis be one of those non-fiction books you read in 2012.
January 2, 2011
This book is an excellent addition to the literature by the "New Atheists". Stenger is a physicist, and he brings a lot of credibility to his arguments. Rather than simply summarizing the debate as stated by others, Stenger brings some new ideas and developments to the debate.
The anthropic principle states that the fundamental physical parameters that govern the laws of physics seem to be fine-tuned, to be "just right" for the development of life. Previous authors have stated that if the parameters had been just a little bit different, then life would not be sustainable anywhere in the universe. Some authors have claimed that this is an argument in favor of a creator, who deliberately chose these particular values of the physical parameters in order for life to exist.
The anthropic principle has long bothered me, because the argument has been echoed by many people in this debate. However, Victor Stenger has looked into this principle in more detail. He showed that most of the fundamental parameters are dependent on one another--only four of the parameters are truly independent. He relates the results of his own calculations, where he allowed the parameters to change, but required the dependent parameters to change together. He found that even when changed over orders of magnitude, the structure of the universe still would have allowed for stars to live long enough to generate heavier elements, and thus be favorable to the development of life.
In addition, Stenger describes how the creation of matter "from nothing" does not contradict the laws of physics. The rest mass of the universe, when concentrated at a single point, has a certain positive energy (E=mc2) that could be exactly balanced by its negative gravitational energy. Moreover, the generation of this mass does not require a "causation"--many examples from quantum mechanics show how random events on the quantum scale are probabilistic, and do not require an outside "cause". Also, Stenger argues that the so-called "big bang" need not have been the beginning of the universe. There is no observational evidence that the big bang that occurred 13.7 billion years ago must have been the first and only big bang.
Stenger makes it clear that his arguments disprove only the existence of a Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, with theistic or deistic attributes. Stenger reiterates that his arguments do not necessarily disprove the existence of a god with other attributes. (But he does make such an argument in his later book, Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness.)
The anthropic principle states that the fundamental physical parameters that govern the laws of physics seem to be fine-tuned, to be "just right" for the development of life. Previous authors have stated that if the parameters had been just a little bit different, then life would not be sustainable anywhere in the universe. Some authors have claimed that this is an argument in favor of a creator, who deliberately chose these particular values of the physical parameters in order for life to exist.
The anthropic principle has long bothered me, because the argument has been echoed by many people in this debate. However, Victor Stenger has looked into this principle in more detail. He showed that most of the fundamental parameters are dependent on one another--only four of the parameters are truly independent. He relates the results of his own calculations, where he allowed the parameters to change, but required the dependent parameters to change together. He found that even when changed over orders of magnitude, the structure of the universe still would have allowed for stars to live long enough to generate heavier elements, and thus be favorable to the development of life.
In addition, Stenger describes how the creation of matter "from nothing" does not contradict the laws of physics. The rest mass of the universe, when concentrated at a single point, has a certain positive energy (E=mc2) that could be exactly balanced by its negative gravitational energy. Moreover, the generation of this mass does not require a "causation"--many examples from quantum mechanics show how random events on the quantum scale are probabilistic, and do not require an outside "cause". Also, Stenger argues that the so-called "big bang" need not have been the beginning of the universe. There is no observational evidence that the big bang that occurred 13.7 billion years ago must have been the first and only big bang.
Stenger makes it clear that his arguments disprove only the existence of a Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, with theistic or deistic attributes. Stenger reiterates that his arguments do not necessarily disprove the existence of a god with other attributes. (But he does make such an argument in his later book, Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness.)
March 13, 2010
The debate would appear to be settled. There is no God. Now, perhaps we can all get on with the business of building as just a society we can in a world with immeasurable natural beauty without looking for fear or inspiration from a non-existent deity.
Stenger calls on a huge volume of sources to make his case. He tries very hard to find something, anything in the Universe that would require the supernatural to describe. He finds nothing. No serious study has ever been able to find anything. At some point, rational creatures must conclude that God, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, is a human invention.
According to the National (US) Bureau of Prisons, 80% of inmates are Christian while .2% are atheist. Born again Christians are more likely than the general population to divorce. Prayer has never been shown to produce a positive effect. Ergo, you can't even really claim that religion makes us live better.
Stenger calls on a huge volume of sources to make his case. He tries very hard to find something, anything in the Universe that would require the supernatural to describe. He finds nothing. No serious study has ever been able to find anything. At some point, rational creatures must conclude that God, like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, is a human invention.
According to the National (US) Bureau of Prisons, 80% of inmates are Christian while .2% are atheist. Born again Christians are more likely than the general population to divorce. Prayer has never been shown to produce a positive effect. Ergo, you can't even really claim that religion makes us live better.
March 27, 2013
يحاول الكاتب من خلاله ان يثبت بالعلم وبالفيزياء التى هو استاذ فيها انه لا يوجد اله لهذا الكوكب ولكونه متمكن في هذه الجزئيه فقد وهب لها اكثر من ثلثه ارباع الكتاب والتى ارى انه ليس من اختصاصنا الرد عليها لاننا لسنا متخصصين ف هذا المجال
ولكن الاهم هو باقي الادله التى ذكرها والتى يحاول من خلالها التشكيك من وجود الله ويستند الى الكليات وهو ان الله كلي العلم كلى القدره كلي الخير ويسرد ادله عن ان الدين هو السبب في جميع حروب العالم وفي الحقيقه هو انهم يستغلون الدين في قياده الجهلاء من اجل تحقيق اهداف شخصيه والحروب الصليبيه اكبر دليل
ويتحدث ايضا عن الشر ولماذا اوجده الاله ان كان كله خير ثم يأتى الكتاب على بيان المتناقضات في التوراه والانجيل وبالعلم
ولكن ما يعيب الكتاب انه فند الاسانيد العلميه وقارن بينها وبين التوراه والانجيل في حين انها كتب لا يرد فيها علم ويراها المسلمين انها محرفه وفي المقابل لم يأتى على ذكر الاسانيد العلميه ولم يحققها في القرأن
ولكن الاهم هو باقي الادله التى ذكرها والتى يحاول من خلالها التشكيك من وجود الله ويستند الى الكليات وهو ان الله كلي العلم كلى القدره كلي الخير ويسرد ادله عن ان الدين هو السبب في جميع حروب العالم وفي الحقيقه هو انهم يستغلون الدين في قياده الجهلاء من اجل تحقيق اهداف شخصيه والحروب الصليبيه اكبر دليل
ويتحدث ايضا عن الشر ولماذا اوجده الاله ان كان كله خير ثم يأتى الكتاب على بيان المتناقضات في التوراه والانجيل وبالعلم
ولكن ما يعيب الكتاب انه فند الاسانيد العلميه وقارن بينها وبين التوراه والانجيل في حين انها كتب لا يرد فيها علم ويراها المسلمين انها محرفه وفي المقابل لم يأتى على ذكر الاسانيد العلميه ولم يحققها في القرأن
June 18, 2017
In an even more effective manner than Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Russell, Harris, etc., this book provides the most damning arguments against the existence of the traditional monotheist Judeo-Christian-Muslim notion of God. It is one giant, scientific mic drop.
August 3, 2023
Third rate physicist, Ninth rate philosopher
Physics World
So what justifies the book’s bold subtitle? What the book in fact contains is a melange of homespun philosophy, amateur biblical interpretation and a smattering of scientific data served up under the pretence of being a proof.
All this despite the fact that Immanuel Kant and David Hume emphasized two centuries ago that attempts to conclusively prove either the existence or non-existence of God by such reasoning could not work.
The author is thus committing a category error in trying to use scientific proof in areas where it simply does not apply.
'The mind is determined by physical processes; there is no scientific evidence for a soul'. This is the strongest argument the author puts forward for the non-existence of God as it relates directly to a number of religious claims and is plausible in terms of present-day neuroscience. However, it is certainly not a scientific proof, as we have not solved the hard problem of consciousness, and do not even know how to begin tackling it.
Stenger claims that it is a scientific fact that evil exists, and that this is incompatible with the usual monotheistic idea of God. So what is the experiment that establishes evil as a scientific fact?
Stenger puts forward his own debatable and unproven model of the creation of the universe, based on ideas from James Hartle and Stephen Hawking. This speculative theory, which apparently presumes that the laws of physics existed in some Platonic domain before space and time came into being, does not deal with the ultimate issues of creation or existence, and is certainly not proven science.
Stenger does not take seriously the arguments of John Barrow, Martin Rees, Steven Weinberg and others that only a very small region of the physical parameter space allows life to exist, which many scientists feel requires an explanation.
Despite Stenger’s disclaimer that he is not propounding moral relativism, [saying "Humans define morals and values for themselves"] is indeed a moral-relativist position.
Overstating what science can do is bad for science, as it undermines both its integrity and its believability. It is also a mistake to present the public with a false dichotomy between science and religion, because this will unnecessarily tend to fuel an antiscientific backlash in wider society.
The aim of the book is to apply scientific-like reasoning to issues of ultimate reality. But this is not new: it has been developed in depth by philosopher-theologians such as Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne and Nancey Murphy, whose writings on this topic are ignored by the author. Indeed these individuals have developed such an approach to a much more sophisticated level than is apparent in Stenger’s book. The author quotes Hume’s advice to be sceptical in all things, but does not take this advice to heart in relation to his own overblown claims for the power of science.
---
Amazone
Disappointed by the reasoning flaws and fallacies
Stenger is an improvement over Ross in his reasoning skills, but still has many faults in this book. He does correctly argue:
a. Science can be applied to the spiritual (he cites peer-reviewed articles on healing prayer)
b. There are testable consequences to the God hypothesis
c. f the most reasonable deduction from an assumption proves false, that makes the assumption unlikely to be true
Since most evaluators of religious hypotheses do not accept these basic truths, Stenger is a step up form most writers on the subject right from the start.
However, he makes two very common errors:
a. Demands "extraordinary" evidence for the spiritual
b. He dismisses evidence which is not "extraordinary"
c. From which he concludes there is no evidence
d. He then asserts that there is no evidence for the spiritual, and they are therefore refuted
e. This is all a variant of the Burden of Proof fallacy, in which one claims one's own ideas have some sort of inherent advantage over another set, and the lack of evidence for the other leads to accepting one's own by default.
The correct approach to deciding between two competing hypotheses is to evaluate all the evidence for both of them. Editorializing one hypothesis as "extraordinary" and it compeditor as "ordinary" and therefore to be preferred is not a valid technique in science, or any pursuit of truth.
Rather than an unprejudiced evaluation of competing hypotheses, his continual insistance of a Burden of Proof fallacy in nearly every discussion is an irredemable flaw in the book.
He also leans heavily on the Burden of Proof fallacy again relative to the origin of the universe. Basically, he argues that if it is possible to question of whether the universe needed a divine cause, this is a disproof of the need for a divine cause.
So he argues that causation is not universal (it does not apply to elementary particles), and that there are possible non-spiritual mechanisms for the universe to have formed (he proposes quantum tunneling from some other universe).
So by doubting causation, and presenting a possible physical process, he argues that Godly causation is refuted.
Since science is essentially the process of asking "why", which assumes there is an answer (a cause), he has abandoned science in this chapter of supposedly "scientifically" debunking the God hypothesis.
Then he discusses Fine Tuning of the universe, saying it is illusory. He argues that the 60 or so Fine Tuned constants are mostly coupled, and reducible to a handful (he never states a number, and only provides a few examples of some coupling).
He argues that of this handful, our universe is not fine-tuned, citing studies that show carbon formation, and star lifespans, are each compatible with a moderate range of sets of 3 or so of these terms.
From what I recall of other references, some of the most sensitive terms are the relative strength of gravity, and the size and expansion rate of the universe, neither of which he addresses at all, and both of which have very narrow viable bands.
The ultimately most convincing term for Leonard Susskind was the very small but positive Cosmological Constant. Stenger denies that the Cosmological Constant is non-zero, citing as evidence one of his own books.
Studies published since this book have all pretty much absolutely confirmed a non-zero Cosmological Constant for the universe.
Since he seems to admit his argument relies upon the Cosmological Constant being zero, he should have abandoned the pont here, but instead asserts that the rest of the world's physicists are wrong, without providing any substantiation.
Stenger therefore appears to be wrong on the facts here: most fine tune constants are not coupled, most are actually fine tuned, and the CC is non-zero.
He does correctly point out the universe is not well-suited for human habitation, which IS a valid critique of the second part of the "fine tuned FOR HUMANS" hypothesis.
But this whole chapter is very non-convincing, and comes across as a dogmatist trying to convince himself.
Overall, the book really didn't take an empirical approach to the God hypothesis. Primarily it argued based on the logical fallacy that if he can imagine ANY possible alternatives to the God Hypothesis, that they are prefferable independent of the evidence.
The lack of a human focus to the universe, and the flaws of the Bible, ended up being the only valid points I found.
I later read his older work: Has Science Found God, and discovered that while the content was very similar, he avoided his Burden of Proof fallacies there. Although it is less well organzed, it was a far better reasoned, and much more interesting book.
dcleve
---
Waste Of Money
I was not thrilled with this book at all.
I will leave it to that, it is short and offers little insight.
Alexander
---
A total waste of money for a poorly-written, pseudo-scientific pronouncent-filled book.
Stenger sets up a straw-God and "proves" such a God doesn't exist using what he calls science, which is self-consistency (whether or not true) as long as it is "not proven to be incorrect"
D. Johnson
--
Where Angels Fear To Tread
This book by Victor Stenger is another case of a scientist using Science for a private, alien, unrelated and personal purpose, having nothing to do with Science, but everything to do with religious bigotry.
That is because Science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God; Science can only give you more Science, and I don't question at all the Science in this book.
What I question is the conclusion that he draws from Science: as if Science as Science could reveal anything beyond the seeable, feelabe, hearable and touchable.
Victor Stenger shows himself to be an atheist in scientists clothing, but, like Little Red Riding Hood, we can recognize the wolf in grammma's clothing. What is peeking out from all that Science is an atheist, trying to justify his atheism by wrapping it in the appearance of Science.
A I have said before in reviewing another of his books: his error is in the basic premise with which he examines empirical data: only that is true that I can perceive with my senses: only that is real that I can perceive with my senses. If that were true, Sherlock Holmes would be out of business.
"Elementary, My Dear Watson, I know who the villain is even though I have not seen him.
This is another book in a long list of witnesses to atheism that have come off the presses ever since Richard Dawkins wrote his "The God Delusion" and it seems a whole generation of atheists want to get on the bandwagon.
Victor Stenger is one of the easiest to see through because he reveals by the very title of his books what his true intent and purpose is: to knock God out of His Heaven and proclaim that all is well with world.
His book turns out to be just another atheist diatribe against the God of the Bible and Christianity. The Science is superb, wonderful and almost breathtaking - but the conclusion that he draws from his Science is pure fiction, almost childish fantasy and an exercise in futility.
Clifford J. Stevens
---
This Time He Cited Wrongly Even the US Declaration of Independence
I fully sympathize with Stenger's motives in writing this book.
However, Stenger's approach to this delicate social and scientific issue is, to put it mildly, counterproductive and disastrous.
Not to mention, highly misinformed and immature.
Wrong citations et. al.:
#1 Stenger says (page 10): "In a poll...in 1998, only 7% of...the elite of the American scientists (US NAS) said they believed in a personal God." (Larson, 1998 - Nature).
Wrong. These scientists did not say this, because this was not the question they were asked. Stenger only took a brief look at the title, table, and first lines of the article. Just like Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer have done too...
Not satisfied, Stenger decided to worsen what was already bad
#2 Stenger says (page 21) "the overwhelming majority of prominent American scientists has concluded that God does not exist" (again, Larson 1998).
Believe it or not, but, by "overwhelming majority," what Stenger means is exactly: 36.1% ! (if he had read Larson's two-page article, he would know why... - by the way, three of the six columns in the table of Larson's article sum up more than 100%!
Definitely an authoritative and reliable source of information... The article also has three big lies, in light of its own data...definitely balanced nformation.
#3 Stenger says, commenting on a text by the Pope (page 84): "a wealth of empirical data now strongly suggests that mind is in fact a 'mere epiphenomenon of this matter'."
Now, either Stenger did not understand what the Pope said, or Stenger does not know what an epiphenomenon is (professor of philosophy...). Many current neurological views of mind take it as an *emergent* phenomenon, but one that is *meaningful* to the organism, therefore not being an epiphenomenon.
#4 Stenger says (page 247): "Although American Christians have been led to believe that the 'Creator' mentioned here (Declaration of Independence) is their God, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote these words, was not a Christian but a deist."
Here Stenger "forgot" to mention that we can also read on this very same document that "We... ...appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions," and also that "with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence."
Definetely this is not the God of deism... Not to mention that we cannot say of a deist God that "He *creates* all men equal" ("all men are created equal," by their Creator, of course), because this implies the constant presence of God in this world (theist God).
#5 Stenger says (page 200): "the US Constitution... (has) no reference to God, Jesus, Christianity, salvation, or *any other religious teaching*." (the emphasis is mine).
However, we read at the Preamble of the Constitution: "in order to... secure the Blessings of Liberty" (with capital letter!) The word "blessings" may be used figuratively, but hardly so if on a document co-signed by highly religious States.
Even the most "liberal" of the original 13 colonies, Pennsylvania, which was the first State to stop state-supported religion (in 1790), had in its constitution of 1776 the following phrase (that members of the House of Representatives should say): "I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked."
This looks hardly deist to my eyes.
His definition of matter vs supernatural (actually the scientific core of the book) is utterly flawed.
Stenger, with his poor and faulty knowledge of history, sociology and politics, joins the bandwagon of those who believe religion is responsible for the September 11 attack and for countless similar situations.
He forgets that atheist-materialists, too, have a long and hideous tradition of massive slaughter, mostly (but not only) during Stalinism, Maoism and the Khmer Rouge.
Stenger concludes: "an atheist lacks any compulsion to blow himself up."
Perhaps he should have added: "and also lacks any regret for having blown up someone else."
Julio Barros
Physics World
So what justifies the book’s bold subtitle? What the book in fact contains is a melange of homespun philosophy, amateur biblical interpretation and a smattering of scientific data served up under the pretence of being a proof.
All this despite the fact that Immanuel Kant and David Hume emphasized two centuries ago that attempts to conclusively prove either the existence or non-existence of God by such reasoning could not work.
The author is thus committing a category error in trying to use scientific proof in areas where it simply does not apply.
'The mind is determined by physical processes; there is no scientific evidence for a soul'. This is the strongest argument the author puts forward for the non-existence of God as it relates directly to a number of religious claims and is plausible in terms of present-day neuroscience. However, it is certainly not a scientific proof, as we have not solved the hard problem of consciousness, and do not even know how to begin tackling it.
Stenger claims that it is a scientific fact that evil exists, and that this is incompatible with the usual monotheistic idea of God. So what is the experiment that establishes evil as a scientific fact?
Stenger puts forward his own debatable and unproven model of the creation of the universe, based on ideas from James Hartle and Stephen Hawking. This speculative theory, which apparently presumes that the laws of physics existed in some Platonic domain before space and time came into being, does not deal with the ultimate issues of creation or existence, and is certainly not proven science.
Stenger does not take seriously the arguments of John Barrow, Martin Rees, Steven Weinberg and others that only a very small region of the physical parameter space allows life to exist, which many scientists feel requires an explanation.
Despite Stenger’s disclaimer that he is not propounding moral relativism, [saying "Humans define morals and values for themselves"] is indeed a moral-relativist position.
Overstating what science can do is bad for science, as it undermines both its integrity and its believability. It is also a mistake to present the public with a false dichotomy between science and religion, because this will unnecessarily tend to fuel an antiscientific backlash in wider society.
The aim of the book is to apply scientific-like reasoning to issues of ultimate reality. But this is not new: it has been developed in depth by philosopher-theologians such as Arthur Peacocke, John Polkinghorne and Nancey Murphy, whose writings on this topic are ignored by the author. Indeed these individuals have developed such an approach to a much more sophisticated level than is apparent in Stenger’s book. The author quotes Hume’s advice to be sceptical in all things, but does not take this advice to heart in relation to his own overblown claims for the power of science.
---
Amazone
Disappointed by the reasoning flaws and fallacies
Stenger is an improvement over Ross in his reasoning skills, but still has many faults in this book. He does correctly argue:
a. Science can be applied to the spiritual (he cites peer-reviewed articles on healing prayer)
b. There are testable consequences to the God hypothesis
c. f the most reasonable deduction from an assumption proves false, that makes the assumption unlikely to be true
Since most evaluators of religious hypotheses do not accept these basic truths, Stenger is a step up form most writers on the subject right from the start.
However, he makes two very common errors:
a. Demands "extraordinary" evidence for the spiritual
b. He dismisses evidence which is not "extraordinary"
c. From which he concludes there is no evidence
d. He then asserts that there is no evidence for the spiritual, and they are therefore refuted
e. This is all a variant of the Burden of Proof fallacy, in which one claims one's own ideas have some sort of inherent advantage over another set, and the lack of evidence for the other leads to accepting one's own by default.
The correct approach to deciding between two competing hypotheses is to evaluate all the evidence for both of them. Editorializing one hypothesis as "extraordinary" and it compeditor as "ordinary" and therefore to be preferred is not a valid technique in science, or any pursuit of truth.
Rather than an unprejudiced evaluation of competing hypotheses, his continual insistance of a Burden of Proof fallacy in nearly every discussion is an irredemable flaw in the book.
He also leans heavily on the Burden of Proof fallacy again relative to the origin of the universe. Basically, he argues that if it is possible to question of whether the universe needed a divine cause, this is a disproof of the need for a divine cause.
So he argues that causation is not universal (it does not apply to elementary particles), and that there are possible non-spiritual mechanisms for the universe to have formed (he proposes quantum tunneling from some other universe).
So by doubting causation, and presenting a possible physical process, he argues that Godly causation is refuted.
Since science is essentially the process of asking "why", which assumes there is an answer (a cause), he has abandoned science in this chapter of supposedly "scientifically" debunking the God hypothesis.
Then he discusses Fine Tuning of the universe, saying it is illusory. He argues that the 60 or so Fine Tuned constants are mostly coupled, and reducible to a handful (he never states a number, and only provides a few examples of some coupling).
He argues that of this handful, our universe is not fine-tuned, citing studies that show carbon formation, and star lifespans, are each compatible with a moderate range of sets of 3 or so of these terms.
From what I recall of other references, some of the most sensitive terms are the relative strength of gravity, and the size and expansion rate of the universe, neither of which he addresses at all, and both of which have very narrow viable bands.
The ultimately most convincing term for Leonard Susskind was the very small but positive Cosmological Constant. Stenger denies that the Cosmological Constant is non-zero, citing as evidence one of his own books.
Studies published since this book have all pretty much absolutely confirmed a non-zero Cosmological Constant for the universe.
Since he seems to admit his argument relies upon the Cosmological Constant being zero, he should have abandoned the pont here, but instead asserts that the rest of the world's physicists are wrong, without providing any substantiation.
Stenger therefore appears to be wrong on the facts here: most fine tune constants are not coupled, most are actually fine tuned, and the CC is non-zero.
He does correctly point out the universe is not well-suited for human habitation, which IS a valid critique of the second part of the "fine tuned FOR HUMANS" hypothesis.
But this whole chapter is very non-convincing, and comes across as a dogmatist trying to convince himself.
Overall, the book really didn't take an empirical approach to the God hypothesis. Primarily it argued based on the logical fallacy that if he can imagine ANY possible alternatives to the God Hypothesis, that they are prefferable independent of the evidence.
The lack of a human focus to the universe, and the flaws of the Bible, ended up being the only valid points I found.
I later read his older work: Has Science Found God, and discovered that while the content was very similar, he avoided his Burden of Proof fallacies there. Although it is less well organzed, it was a far better reasoned, and much more interesting book.
dcleve
---
Waste Of Money
I was not thrilled with this book at all.
I will leave it to that, it is short and offers little insight.
Alexander
---
A total waste of money for a poorly-written, pseudo-scientific pronouncent-filled book.
Stenger sets up a straw-God and "proves" such a God doesn't exist using what he calls science, which is self-consistency (whether or not true) as long as it is "not proven to be incorrect"
D. Johnson
--
Where Angels Fear To Tread
This book by Victor Stenger is another case of a scientist using Science for a private, alien, unrelated and personal purpose, having nothing to do with Science, but everything to do with religious bigotry.
That is because Science can neither prove nor disprove the existence of God; Science can only give you more Science, and I don't question at all the Science in this book.
What I question is the conclusion that he draws from Science: as if Science as Science could reveal anything beyond the seeable, feelabe, hearable and touchable.
Victor Stenger shows himself to be an atheist in scientists clothing, but, like Little Red Riding Hood, we can recognize the wolf in grammma's clothing. What is peeking out from all that Science is an atheist, trying to justify his atheism by wrapping it in the appearance of Science.
A I have said before in reviewing another of his books: his error is in the basic premise with which he examines empirical data: only that is true that I can perceive with my senses: only that is real that I can perceive with my senses. If that were true, Sherlock Holmes would be out of business.
"Elementary, My Dear Watson, I know who the villain is even though I have not seen him.
This is another book in a long list of witnesses to atheism that have come off the presses ever since Richard Dawkins wrote his "The God Delusion" and it seems a whole generation of atheists want to get on the bandwagon.
Victor Stenger is one of the easiest to see through because he reveals by the very title of his books what his true intent and purpose is: to knock God out of His Heaven and proclaim that all is well with world.
His book turns out to be just another atheist diatribe against the God of the Bible and Christianity. The Science is superb, wonderful and almost breathtaking - but the conclusion that he draws from his Science is pure fiction, almost childish fantasy and an exercise in futility.
Clifford J. Stevens
---
This Time He Cited Wrongly Even the US Declaration of Independence
I fully sympathize with Stenger's motives in writing this book.
However, Stenger's approach to this delicate social and scientific issue is, to put it mildly, counterproductive and disastrous.
Not to mention, highly misinformed and immature.
Wrong citations et. al.:
#1 Stenger says (page 10): "In a poll...in 1998, only 7% of...the elite of the American scientists (US NAS) said they believed in a personal God." (Larson, 1998 - Nature).
Wrong. These scientists did not say this, because this was not the question they were asked. Stenger only took a brief look at the title, table, and first lines of the article. Just like Richard Dawkins and Michael Shermer have done too...
Not satisfied, Stenger decided to worsen what was already bad
#2 Stenger says (page 21) "the overwhelming majority of prominent American scientists has concluded that God does not exist" (again, Larson 1998).
Believe it or not, but, by "overwhelming majority," what Stenger means is exactly: 36.1% ! (if he had read Larson's two-page article, he would know why... - by the way, three of the six columns in the table of Larson's article sum up more than 100%!
Definitely an authoritative and reliable source of information... The article also has three big lies, in light of its own data...definitely balanced nformation.
#3 Stenger says, commenting on a text by the Pope (page 84): "a wealth of empirical data now strongly suggests that mind is in fact a 'mere epiphenomenon of this matter'."
Now, either Stenger did not understand what the Pope said, or Stenger does not know what an epiphenomenon is (professor of philosophy...). Many current neurological views of mind take it as an *emergent* phenomenon, but one that is *meaningful* to the organism, therefore not being an epiphenomenon.
#4 Stenger says (page 247): "Although American Christians have been led to believe that the 'Creator' mentioned here (Declaration of Independence) is their God, Thomas Jefferson, who wrote these words, was not a Christian but a deist."
Here Stenger "forgot" to mention that we can also read on this very same document that "We... ...appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions," and also that "with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence."
Definetely this is not the God of deism... Not to mention that we cannot say of a deist God that "He *creates* all men equal" ("all men are created equal," by their Creator, of course), because this implies the constant presence of God in this world (theist God).
#5 Stenger says (page 200): "the US Constitution... (has) no reference to God, Jesus, Christianity, salvation, or *any other religious teaching*." (the emphasis is mine).
However, we read at the Preamble of the Constitution: "in order to... secure the Blessings of Liberty" (with capital letter!) The word "blessings" may be used figuratively, but hardly so if on a document co-signed by highly religious States.
Even the most "liberal" of the original 13 colonies, Pennsylvania, which was the first State to stop state-supported religion (in 1790), had in its constitution of 1776 the following phrase (that members of the House of Representatives should say): "I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the wicked."
This looks hardly deist to my eyes.
His definition of matter vs supernatural (actually the scientific core of the book) is utterly flawed.
Stenger, with his poor and faulty knowledge of history, sociology and politics, joins the bandwagon of those who believe religion is responsible for the September 11 attack and for countless similar situations.
He forgets that atheist-materialists, too, have a long and hideous tradition of massive slaughter, mostly (but not only) during Stalinism, Maoism and the Khmer Rouge.
Stenger concludes: "an atheist lacks any compulsion to blow himself up."
Perhaps he should have added: "and also lacks any regret for having blown up someone else."
Julio Barros
September 19, 2014
ვ.სტენგერის წიგნმა "ღმერთი, - არ შემდგარი ჰიპოთეზები" ალბათ ათეისტის წიგნების თაროზე მნიშვნელოვანი ადგილი უნდა დაიკავოს. ეს ის იშვიათი შემთხვევაა როცა ავტორი ღმერთს განიხილავს როგორც მეცნიერულ ჰიპოთეზას და შემდეგ მეცნიერულივე მეთოდით აჩვენებს რომ სულ ცოტა სამი უდიდესი მონოთეისტური რელიგიის ღმერთი (იუდაიზმის, ქრისტიანული ისლამური) არ არსებობს. გავრცელებული რწმენით მეცნიერება ვერაფერს იტყვის ზებუნებრივზე, მას არ შეუძლია ღმერთის არსებობა ან არარსებობა დაამტკიცოს. ფართო პუბლიკის გარდა, ამ მოსაზრებას მეცნიერთა დიდი ნაწილიც ეთანხმება. მაგრამ სტენგერის აზრით ეს მოსაზრება მცდარია იმ შემთხვევაში თუ რომელიმე ღმერთი, ან ზებუნებრივი ძალა მოქმედებს სამყაროს მუშაობასა და ადამიანთა ქცევაზე. სამი უდიდესი რელიგიის მონოთეისტური ღმერთი უნდა პასუხობდეს ლოცვებს. ცვლიდეს ადამიანთა მოქმედებას,ფიზიკურ მოვლენებს, სამყაროში უნდა არსებობდეს მისი არსებობის დამადასტურებელი ნიშნები. მაგრამ ყოველი ჰიპოთეზა მის შესახებ კრახს განიცდის. ტრადიციული მონოთეისტური რელიგიების ღმერთის არსებობა უნდა აისახებოდეს ემპირულ მტკიცებულებებში. მაგრამ ეს ასე არაა. სტენგერის დასკვნით ექსტრაორდინალური მტკიცება (რისკიანი მტკიცება) უნდა გამყარდეს ფაქტით, თუ არადა მაშინ ასეთ მტკიცებას არანაირი ძალა არ აქვს. ის კარლ სეიგანის ცნობილ სიტყვებს ასეთ ფორმულირებას უკეთებს. ამ შემთხვევაში საბუთის არ არსებობა უდრის არ არსებობას.
ღმერთის არსებობა არ დასტურდება ლოცვის ექსპერიმენტებიდან. არც სიცოცხლის წარმოშობა განვითარება ითხოვს ზებუნებრივ შემოქმედს (ალტერნატივა - ბუნებრივი კანონზომიერებები) არც თავად სამყაროს და ბუნებრივი კანონზომიერებების შექმნას სჭირდება ვინმე ყოვლისშემძლე. და ა.შ. ტრადიციული მონოთეისტური ღმერთის მრავალგზის "ჩავარდნის" შემდეგ სტენგერი აღნიშნავს - "რათქმაუნდა მორწმუნეს შეუძლია თავისუფლად შემეკამათოს რომ - არც ერთი მათგანია ჩემი ღმერთი, -არსად დამიჩემებია რომ ყველა ღმერთს გავაბთლებდი - მხოლოდ მათ,[ვაბათილებ] ვისაც გააჩნიათ ემპირულად გამოვლენადი თვისებები. თუ რომელიმე მორწმუნის ღმერთს ეს თვისებები არ გააჩნია მაშინ მასთან არ ვდაობ. მაგალითად, ვინმეს შეუძლია წარმოიდგინოს, ღმერთი რომელმაც შექმნა სამყარო და მის მცხოვრებლებთან არ ურთიერთქმედებს" სტრენგერი დიესტურ ღმერთზე ამახვილებს ყურადღებას. ღმერთზე რომელმაც შემქნა სამყარო და აღარ ერევა მის მოქმედებაში. მისცა მას თავისი დამოუკიდებელი კანონზომიერებები, ამავე დროს არ დატოვა თავისი არსებობის არანაირი ემპირული კვალი. ასეთი ღმერთი ფაქტიურად შესაძლებელია - მაგრამ, ამ შემთხვევაში მისი არსებობა ექვივალენტურია მისი არ არსებობის. (კარლ სეიგანის დრაკ���ნის ამბავში) ასეთ შემოქმედზე საუბარს აზრი არ აქვს, რადგან მისი კვალის აღმოჩენა ფაქტიურად შეუძლებელია. სტენგერი კიდევ ერთი პრობლემას ასახელებს. ასეთ ღმერთის სამყარო დეტერმინირებული უნდა იყოს. თუმცა დღევანდელი ცოდნის მიხედვით მატერია ფუნდამენტში განუსაზღვრელია. (ჰეიზენბერგის განუსაზღვრელობის პრინციპი) მოკლედ ჩემი შეფასებით ამ წიგნის წაკითხვა ღირს. განსაკუთრებით მათთვის ვინც ეძებთ კითხვებზე პასუხებს და არ ხართ რწმენაზე ორიენტირებული. ამ წიგნში პრინციპულად ახალი და რევოლუციური არაფერია, თუმცა კი თავმოყრილია საინტერესო არგუმენტები და მეცნიერული ფაქტები.
რაც შეეხება ნაკლს - მომეჩვენა რომ ზოგიერთი საკითხი მწირი სახითაა წარმოდგენილი. მსჯელობის გაშლა და მაგალითები აკლია. ზოგან შესამჩნევია რომ ავტორი საკითხებს თავის წინა წიგნებისკენ ამისამართებს ნაცვლად იმისა რომ მკითხველს აქვე შესტავაზოს მდიდარი მასალა. თუმცა საერთო ჯამში სწორი მიმართულებით მიყავს მსჯელობა. მე ვისურვებდი რომ ასტროფიზიკურ და ბიოლოგიურ საკითხებზე მეტი წამეკითხა. თუმცა საერთო ჯამში წიგნი კარგია და ნამდვილად ღირს წაკითხვა. განსაკუთრებით მათ ვურჩევ, ვისაც მოატყუეს და დააჯერეს თითქოს მეცნიერება და რელიგია სრულ ჰარმონიაში იყვნენ. და კიდევ უარესი თითქოს მეცნიერება ღმერთის არსებობას ამტკიცებდეს. ეს რელიგიური პროპაგანდაა და მეტი არაფერი. ის კი რის გამოც მეცნიერული საზოგადოებები ამბობენ რომ თითქოს მეცნიერებას ზებუნებრივი არ ეკითხება - (არ ეკითხება მანამ სანამ ამ ზებუნებრივს ბუნებრივ მოვლენებზე არ აქვს გავლენა) მხოლოდ იმის გამოა რომ არ მოხდეს რელიგიური გადამხდელების განრისხება. ყველა ფრთხილობს და ერიდება რელიგიის და მეცნიერების დაპირისპირებას. ზოგისთვის ეს ფაქიზი საკითხია. ზოგისთვის გადამხდელის დაკარგვა და ა.შ. ერთი სიტყვით, საკითხით დაინტერესებულისთვის ღირს დროის დაკარგვა.
ღმერთის არსებობა არ დასტურდება ლოცვის ექსპერიმენტებიდან. არც სიცოცხლის წარმოშობა განვითარება ითხოვს ზებუნებრივ შემოქმედს (ალტერნატივა - ბუნებრივი კანონზომიერებები) არც თავად სამყაროს და ბუნებრივი კანონზომიერებების შექმნას სჭირდება ვინმე ყოვლისშემძლე. და ა.შ. ტრადიციული მონოთეისტური ღმერთის მრავალგზის "ჩავარდნის" შემდეგ სტენგერი აღნიშნავს - "რათქმაუნდა მორწმუნეს შეუძლია თავისუფლად შემეკამათოს რომ - არც ერთი მათგანია ჩემი ღმერთი, -არსად დამიჩემებია რომ ყველა ღმერთს გავაბთლებდი - მხოლოდ მათ,[ვაბათილებ] ვისაც გააჩნიათ ემპირულად გამოვლენადი თვისებები. თუ რომელიმე მორწმუნის ღმერთს ეს თვისებები არ გააჩნია მაშინ მასთან არ ვდაობ. მაგალითად, ვინმეს შეუძლია წარმოიდგინოს, ღმერთი რომელმაც შექმნა სამყარო და მის მცხოვრებლებთან არ ურთიერთქმედებს" სტრენგერი დიესტურ ღმერთზე ამახვილებს ყურადღებას. ღმერთზე რომელმაც შემქნა სამყარო და აღარ ერევა მის მოქმედებაში. მისცა მას თავისი დამოუკიდებელი კანონზომიერებები, ამავე დროს არ დატოვა თავისი არსებობის არანაირი ემპირული კვალი. ასეთი ღმერთი ფაქტიურად შესაძლებელია - მაგრამ, ამ შემთხვევაში მისი არსებობა ექვივალენტურია მისი არ არსებობის. (კარლ სეიგანის დრაკ���ნის ამბავში) ასეთ შემოქმედზე საუბარს აზრი არ აქვს, რადგან მისი კვალის აღმოჩენა ფაქტიურად შეუძლებელია. სტენგერი კიდევ ერთი პრობლემას ასახელებს. ასეთ ღმერთის სამყარო დეტერმინირებული უნდა იყოს. თუმცა დღევანდელი ცოდნის მიხედვით მატერია ფუნდამენტში განუსაზღვრელია. (ჰეიზენბერგის განუსაზღვრელობის პრინციპი) მოკლედ ჩემი შეფასებით ამ წიგნის წაკითხვა ღირს. განსაკუთრებით მათთვის ვინც ეძებთ კითხვებზე პასუხებს და არ ხართ რწმენაზე ორიენტირებული. ამ წიგნში პრინციპულად ახალი და რევოლუციური არაფერია, თუმცა კი თავმოყრილია საინტერესო არგუმენტები და მეცნიერული ფაქტები.
რაც შეეხება ნაკლს - მომეჩვენა რომ ზოგიერთი საკითხი მწირი სახითაა წარმოდგენილი. მსჯელობის გაშლა და მაგალითები აკლია. ზოგან შესამჩნევია რომ ავტორი საკითხებს თავის წინა წიგნებისკენ ამისამართებს ნაცვლად იმისა რომ მკითხველს აქვე შესტავაზოს მდიდარი მასალა. თუმცა საერთო ჯამში სწორი მიმართულებით მიყავს მსჯელობა. მე ვისურვებდი რომ ასტროფიზიკურ და ბიოლოგიურ საკითხებზე მეტი წამეკითხა. თუმცა საერთო ჯამში წიგნი კარგია და ნამდვილად ღირს წაკითხვა. განსაკუთრებით მათ ვურჩევ, ვისაც მოატყუეს და დააჯერეს თითქოს მეცნიერება და რელიგია სრულ ჰარმონიაში იყვნენ. და კიდევ უარესი თითქოს მეცნიერება ღმერთის არსებობას ამტკიცებდეს. ეს რელიგიური პროპაგანდაა და მეტი არაფერი. ის კი რის გამოც მეცნიერული საზოგადოებები ამბობენ რომ თითქოს მეცნიერებას ზებუნებრივი არ ეკითხება - (არ ეკითხება მანამ სანამ ამ ზებუნებრივს ბუნებრივ მოვლენებზე არ აქვს გავლენა) მხოლოდ იმის გამოა რომ არ მოხდეს რელიგიური გადამხდელების განრისხება. ყველა ფრთხილობს და ერიდება რელიგიის და მეცნიერების დაპირისპირებას. ზოგისთვის ეს ფაქიზი საკითხია. ზოგისთვის გადამხდელის დაკარგვა და ა.შ. ერთი სიტყვით, საკითხით დაინტერესებულისთვის ღირს დროის დაკარგვა.
May 13, 2009
Proof that atheism is hot -- at least from the perspective of bookstores -- hit me in the local national chain bookstore. Just a few feet from the front door sits a center cap of new releases on sale. Amongst the dozen or so selections -- Victor Stenger's
God: The Failed Hypothesis
. Considering the religious and political views of the state in which I reside, that is a bold move. A significant portion of the population might well consider the placement of Stenger's book as flaunting the devil's work.[return][return]At the same time, the placement of the book is reflective of some of the buzz the so-called "new atheism" has been generating due to the popularity of Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Among the issues they raise is why religion is exempt from the same scrutiny applied to other areas of life and society. Although Stenger does not go as far as Harris or Dawkins in condemning religion itself, he takes the ultimate analytical step in the process. He subjects the question of the existence of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God (and, hence, the very foundation of those religions) to the scrutiny the scientific method would apply to any other hypothesis.[return][return]Stenger is fully aware of and does not hesitate to refer to the cries theists raise to this approach. Specifically, they claim that matters of faith, belief and miracles are not amenable to logic or the scientific method because they are outside science itself. Balderdash, says Stenger. You don't need to apply science to beliefs or faith itself. Instead, it can be applied to the factual foundations of the assertion that God exists.[return][return]Balance of review at http://prairieprogressive.com/?p=976
September 8, 2008
The best of the "neo-atheist" books, in my opinion. Basically the book attacks the notion that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria" to quote Steven Jay Gould. He points out that Judeo-Christian religions make claims that are scientifically testable, such as that prayer has an influence on the world. Stenger isn't overzealous: he understands that he is merely showing that there is an utter lack of evidence for the "Personal God" of the western tradition that interferes with humans in our day-to-day lives. He isn't providing evidence against an abstract, hands-off God of some sort. So the subtitle should more accurately be: "How Science Shows That The Personal Judeo-Christian God Does Not Exist."
October 25, 2012
Dr. Stenger does an excellent job of pointing out that propositions such as “God exists” can actually be studied rationally, and answered intelligibly. With such questions as “Does God exist?” typically come problems concerning wishful thinking, false causes and dilemmas, question-begging and the like. Dr. Stenger points out an obvious but often forgotten fact: all of our scientific knowledge is based not on deductive logic but on inductive logic; that is to say that the concept of truth that we all tend to abide by is defined by probability rather than certainty.
Given this premise, Dr. Stenger can and does conclude that the existence of God is more improbably than not. This book is able to circumvent typical problems inherent in many discussions concerning the existence of God because it clarifies the definition of “God” that most Judeo-Christian religions (including Islam) desire: an omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent creator. Given such a definition, logical contradiction ensues. It goes further however.
Dr. Stenger does not rely upon logical contradiction alone, but points out two things: that no where in the universe is the scientific data that points to there being a creator, and the universe can be explained without having to allude to the existence of a creator at all. The book points out that this point is different than the typical proposition by many: that because God is unknowable by science, his existence cannot be explained by science (and the added proposition), and must be explained elsewhere (spirituality etc…).
At times the book can be a little “preachy”, mostly towards the end, but generally speaking, it adheres to its original argument: that given how science works, science can be used to generate truth with regard to the existence of God.
Given this premise, Dr. Stenger can and does conclude that the existence of God is more improbably than not. This book is able to circumvent typical problems inherent in many discussions concerning the existence of God because it clarifies the definition of “God” that most Judeo-Christian religions (including Islam) desire: an omniscient, omnipotent, and omni-benevolent creator. Given such a definition, logical contradiction ensues. It goes further however.
Dr. Stenger does not rely upon logical contradiction alone, but points out two things: that no where in the universe is the scientific data that points to there being a creator, and the universe can be explained without having to allude to the existence of a creator at all. The book points out that this point is different than the typical proposition by many: that because God is unknowable by science, his existence cannot be explained by science (and the added proposition), and must be explained elsewhere (spirituality etc…).
At times the book can be a little “preachy”, mostly towards the end, but generally speaking, it adheres to its original argument: that given how science works, science can be used to generate truth with regard to the existence of God.
January 27, 2008
The most difficult parts of this book to read were actually the most helpful for me. I had to re-read the parts that were heavy on physics, but I finally have a reasonably plausible explanation for how this universe and our planet and everything on it could have developed without the existence of a "supreme being" out there orchestrating everything.
April 24, 2025
In God: The Failed Hypothesis physicist Victor J. Stenger argues that the existence of a personal, interventionist God is a scientific claim that can be tested. He upholds that if such a God existed, there should be observable evidence in the universe. Drawing on physics, cosmology, and empirical studies (such as those on prayer), Stenger finds no such evidence. He critiques arguments like fine-tuning and intelligent design, and concludes that the natural universe shows no signs of divine influence. Therefore, he asserts, the God hypothesis has failed under scientific scrutiny.
The book refutes the argument that the universe is “fine-tuned” for life, showing instead that the universe appears indifferent or even hostile to life. Stenger contends that the apparent fine-tuning can be explained by natural processes and selection bias, such as the anthropic principle. He also critiques Intelligent Design as unscientific and lacking predictive power.
Stenger also presents the universe as comprehensible without recourse to supernatural explanations. He discusses how modern physics, particularly quantum mechanics and cosmology, offer naturalistic accounts of the origins of matter, energy, and even the universe itself by exploring ideas such as the quantum vacuum and spontaneous symmetry breaking to support the idea that the universe could have arisen from “nothing” without divine intervention.
Stenger revisits the problem of evil, not just from a philosophical but a scientific perspective. If a benevolent, omnipotent God existed, we would expect a different kind of universe, one more hospitable and just. The actual universe, according to Stenger, shows no signs of such design. Suffering, randomness, and natural disasters suggest a universe that is blind and indifferent.
Rather than dismissing religion with crude cynicism, Stenger offers it the ultimate honor: the chance to stand trial in the court of scientific rigor. Unfortunately, the deity fails to appear, even as a witness. God was subpoenaed by science but ghosted the hearing.
As would be expected from a mathematical and scientific book, the writings on astronomy though fascinating also felt a tad dry and unnecessarily pedantic; rather than making complex scientific ideas accessible, Stenger frequently bogged it down with jargon and a textbook-like quality that felt more suited to a lecture hall than a general readership. Sometimes the narrative lacked a compelling flow making some of the chapters feel disjointed and difficult to stay engaged with, while other chapters were deeply fascinating.
Despite this, Stenger does manage to maintain a tone of almost ecclesiastical awe, not toward divinity, but toward the elegance of natural laws that work just fine without divine intervention. Gravity needs no guidance, electrons require no encouragement, and galaxies swirl without so much as a divine nudge.
Aside from my quibble on the writing, the book felt like a holy celebration of a universe that stands tall on its own; no miracles required, just mathematics.
Theists who argue that the universe is fine-tuned to earthly life have the burden of proving that no other form of life is possible, not just on other planets in our universe but in every conceivable universe that has different physical parameters. They have provided no such proof and it would seem that such proof is impossible.
In fact, the whole argument from fine-tuning ultimately makes no sense. As my friend Martin Wagner notes, all physical parameters are irrelevant to an omnipotent God. “He could have created us to live in hard vacuum if he wanted.” - page 154
The book refutes the argument that the universe is “fine-tuned” for life, showing instead that the universe appears indifferent or even hostile to life. Stenger contends that the apparent fine-tuning can be explained by natural processes and selection bias, such as the anthropic principle. He also critiques Intelligent Design as unscientific and lacking predictive power.
Why would God send his only son to die an agonizing death to redeem an insignificant bit of carbon?
Stenger also presents the universe as comprehensible without recourse to supernatural explanations. He discusses how modern physics, particularly quantum mechanics and cosmology, offer naturalistic accounts of the origins of matter, energy, and even the universe itself by exploring ideas such as the quantum vacuum and spontaneous symmetry breaking to support the idea that the universe could have arisen from “nothing” without divine intervention.
Stenger revisits the problem of evil, not just from a philosophical but a scientific perspective. If a benevolent, omnipotent God existed, we would expect a different kind of universe, one more hospitable and just. The actual universe, according to Stenger, shows no signs of such design. Suffering, randomness, and natural disasters suggest a universe that is blind and indifferent.
Rather than dismissing religion with crude cynicism, Stenger offers it the ultimate honor: the chance to stand trial in the court of scientific rigor. Unfortunately, the deity fails to appear, even as a witness. God was subpoenaed by science but ghosted the hearing.
As would be expected from a mathematical and scientific book, the writings on astronomy though fascinating also felt a tad dry and unnecessarily pedantic; rather than making complex scientific ideas accessible, Stenger frequently bogged it down with jargon and a textbook-like quality that felt more suited to a lecture hall than a general readership. Sometimes the narrative lacked a compelling flow making some of the chapters feel disjointed and difficult to stay engaged with, while other chapters were deeply fascinating.
Despite this, Stenger does manage to maintain a tone of almost ecclesiastical awe, not toward divinity, but toward the elegance of natural laws that work just fine without divine intervention. Gravity needs no guidance, electrons require no encouragement, and galaxies swirl without so much as a divine nudge.
Once we give up the idea that we are special children of God, we can see ourselves as a link in the chain of evolution. Our descendants, genetically engineered or made of titanium and silicon, unhampered by our brief life spans, may reach other planets. And if we do it right they hopefully will be smarter, kinder, more rational, and free of the superstitions that plague us and threaten our very survival even for a few more centuries. -page 160-161
Aside from my quibble on the writing, the book felt like a holy celebration of a universe that stands tall on its own; no miracles required, just mathematics.
July 11, 2021
ان اكتشاف اسلاف البشر ،DNA والترابطات التشريحية بين البشر والحيوانات الاخرى كلها تخطىء فرضية ان الله خلق البشر كشكل حياة مختلف ، وسجل الاحافير ، وجود الانواع الانتقالية والمشاهد الفعلية للتطور في المختبر كلها تخطىء ان الله خلق أصنافًا منفصلة من الانواع او اشكال الحياة في لحظة ما من التاريخ وتركها بلا تغيير منذئذ . فالتطور يمحو الحاجة الى تدخل الله في اي خطوة من عملية تطور الحياة من ابسط واقدم اشكالها ولكنه لا يفسر أصل الحياة .
حتى اوائل القرن العشرين كانت هناك اسباب قوية للاعتقاد بأن معجزة او اكثر كانت ضرورية لخلق الكون ، فالكون حالياً يحتوي على كمية هائلة من المادة . وقبل القرن العشرين كان يعتقد بأن المادة لا يمكن ان تفنى او تستحدث . ولكن آينشتاين في نظريته النسبية الخاصة أثبت ان المادة يمكن ان تتكون من طاقة وتتلاشى الى طاقة ، اي ان الجسم الساكن لا يزال يحتوي على طاقة . يتحرك الجسم يحمل معه طاقة اضافية للحركة تسمى بالطاقة الحركية ، يمكن تحويل الطاقة الحركية الى طاقة سكونية وهي مكافئة لتوليد الكتلة والعكس يحصل أيضًا . يمكن للتفاعلات الكيماوية والنووية ان تولد طاقة حركية . ان توازنًا لصيقاً بين الطاقة الموجبة والسالبة هو من توقعات التوسيع الحديث لنظرية الانفجار الكبير ووفقًا له مر المون بفترة من التضخم السريع الأسي خلال كسر صغير من ثانيته الاولى .
تخبر الاسطورة الصينية القديمة ان كل شيء بدأ من الفوضى والكون كان مثل بيضة سوداء "ثقب اسود" وأتى إله يدعى " پان غو" يحمل فأسًا وكسر البيضة وبدأت السموات بالتوسع ،وتطور البق والقمل على جسم "پان غو" الى نوع البشر . في الكتب المقدسة السماوية يخلق الله الموجود سلفًا الكون في ستة ايام .
توفر الاسطورة الصينية الموصوفة قصة اقرب الى السرد العلمي من نظيرتها الكتابية ، حيث تصور كوناً متوسعاً يبدأ من الفوضى وتشير الى تطور الحياة ، ولكن من العسير اعتبارها وصفًا دقيقًا للبيانات العلمية.
حتى اوائل القرن العشرين كانت هناك اسباب قوية للاعتقاد بأن معجزة او اكثر كانت ضرورية لخلق الكون ، فالكون حالياً يحتوي على كمية هائلة من المادة . وقبل القرن العشرين كان يعتقد بأن المادة لا يمكن ان تفنى او تستحدث . ولكن آينشتاين في نظريته النسبية الخاصة أثبت ان المادة يمكن ان تتكون من طاقة وتتلاشى الى طاقة ، اي ان الجسم الساكن لا يزال يحتوي على طاقة . يتحرك الجسم يحمل معه طاقة اضافية للحركة تسمى بالطاقة الحركية ، يمكن تحويل الطاقة الحركية الى طاقة سكونية وهي مكافئة لتوليد الكتلة والعكس يحصل أيضًا . يمكن للتفاعلات الكيماوية والنووية ان تولد طاقة حركية . ان توازنًا لصيقاً بين الطاقة الموجبة والسالبة هو من توقعات التوسيع الحديث لنظرية الانفجار الكبير ووفقًا له مر المون بفترة من التضخم السريع الأسي خلال كسر صغير من ثانيته الاولى .
تخبر الاسطورة الصينية القديمة ان كل شيء بدأ من الفوضى والكون كان مثل بيضة سوداء "ثقب اسود" وأتى إله يدعى " پان غو" يحمل فأسًا وكسر البيضة وبدأت السموات بالتوسع ،وتطور البق والقمل على جسم "پان غو" الى نوع البشر . في الكتب المقدسة السماوية يخلق الله الموجود سلفًا الكون في ستة ايام .
توفر الاسطورة الصينية الموصوفة قصة اقرب الى السرد العلمي من نظيرتها الكتابية ، حيث تصور كوناً متوسعاً يبدأ من الفوضى وتشير الى تطور الحياة ، ولكن من العسير اعتبارها وصفًا دقيقًا للبيانات العلمية.
August 31, 2019
In many ways the best of the "atheistic" books recently published
"The thesis of this book is that the supernatural hypothesis of God is testable, verifiable, and falsifiable by the established methods of science." --from page 29
"...I will...argue that...science has advanced sufficiently to be able to make a definitive statement on the existence or nonexistence of a God having the attributes that are traditionally associated with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God." --from page 11
These statements are a great leap forward from the fairly recent belief (I'm thinking of the late, great Stephen Jay Gould, for example) that we ought to render unto science things belonging to science and unto religion things belonging to religion. But what Professor Stenger is saying is that we can look at religion in a scientific sense and decide which aspects of it are true and which are false. In particular Stenger looks at the God of Abraham and fulfills the promise of the subtitle: "How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist." Note that it is only the personal God of the three Middle Eastern religions that he specifically lays to rest. The Ineffable God of the Vedas is presumably still standing, as are many other gods who are not defined as personal and possessing the three O's: omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience. An interesting book including arguments against the existence of some other gods is The Impossibility of God (2003) by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier (cited by Stenger; see my review at Amazon).
Stenger's is a step-by-step consideration of the arguments and the "evidence" for God's existence, followed by a demonstration that the arguments are faulty and/or the evidence is lacking. For example, he shows how the evil in the world is inconsistent with a God possessing the three O's; he shows how all the endless stories of miracles and such are easily explained by means not requiring an intervening deity; he (as many others have) demolishes the argument from design; he shows how morality has nothing to do with God or religion, that it is something humans naturally have, and that in fact, followers of especially Islam and Christianity, are less moral by most standards than are unbelievers.
The God of the Old Testament is exposed as ruthless and evil; Stenger even refers to the so-called "hidden" God (that is, hidden from nonbelievers) of evangelical Christians as a "hideous God." His point is that by staying hidden from nonbelievers this God (cf. the God of John Calvin) effectively makes certain that most people will spend an eternity in hell, people such as "Mahatma Gandhi...along with the six million Jews killed by Hitler and billions of others who died without accepting Jesus." It is interesting that Stenger allows that such a god could exist, but "I personally want nothing to do with him." (pp. 239-240)
As significant and important as showing that God is a hypothesis that has failed is, I think some other aspects of this fascinating book are what make it such an important read. I learned that a good answer to the eternal question (and one of my favorites) "Why is there something rather than nothing?" can be answered by "nothing is unstable" (Frank Wilczek) or, to put it another way, it is impossible for there to be nothing but nothing. (pp. 132-133)
I also discovered that the universe did not necessarily begin with the Big Bang, that events do not necessarily have causes, and that "even if the universe does not have a mathematically infinite number of events in the past, it still need not have a beginning." Additionally (quoting philosopher Keith Parsons), "To say the universe is infinitely old is to say that it had no beginning--not a beginning that was infinitely long ago." Here Stenger makes a nice distinction between the infinite of mathematics and the infinite of physics. He writes, "Physics is counting. In physics, time is simply the count of ticks on a clock. You can count backward as well as forward. Counting forward you can get a very big but never mathematically infinite positive number and time 'never ends.' Counting backward you can get a very big but never mathematically infinite negative number and time 'never begins.'" (pp. 123-125) The salient point, as Georg Cantor made clear, is that infinity is a mathematical concept and not a number. These points are brought to refute the claim that the universe must have had a beginning and therefore a creator God.
Stenger even brings entropy into the picture as an argument against the universe being created. He notes "If the universe were created, then it should have possessed some degree of order at the creation...." But according to Big Bang theory the initial state of the universe after the Planck time was one of high entropy or "total chaos." He then calls in "the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy or disorder of a closed system must remain constant or increase with time." So far it sounds like this is good argument (as it previously might have been) for God the Creator to have injected order into the cosmos since we clearly have order today. But then Stenger shows that because the universe is expanding, the order we see here on earth and elsewhere doesn't violate the second law because "maximum entropy...increases faster than the actual total entropy...." (pp. 117-119)
I have read and reviewed in recent months The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins; Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) by Daniel C. Dennett; and The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (2004, 2005) by Sam Harris. While all three are excellent books and sorely needed in this time of attempted evangelical takeover of our culture and government, none of them is as closely and convincingly argued as is this book.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
"The thesis of this book is that the supernatural hypothesis of God is testable, verifiable, and falsifiable by the established methods of science." --from page 29
"...I will...argue that...science has advanced sufficiently to be able to make a definitive statement on the existence or nonexistence of a God having the attributes that are traditionally associated with the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God." --from page 11
These statements are a great leap forward from the fairly recent belief (I'm thinking of the late, great Stephen Jay Gould, for example) that we ought to render unto science things belonging to science and unto religion things belonging to religion. But what Professor Stenger is saying is that we can look at religion in a scientific sense and decide which aspects of it are true and which are false. In particular Stenger looks at the God of Abraham and fulfills the promise of the subtitle: "How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist." Note that it is only the personal God of the three Middle Eastern religions that he specifically lays to rest. The Ineffable God of the Vedas is presumably still standing, as are many other gods who are not defined as personal and possessing the three O's: omnibenevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience. An interesting book including arguments against the existence of some other gods is The Impossibility of God (2003) by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier (cited by Stenger; see my review at Amazon).
Stenger's is a step-by-step consideration of the arguments and the "evidence" for God's existence, followed by a demonstration that the arguments are faulty and/or the evidence is lacking. For example, he shows how the evil in the world is inconsistent with a God possessing the three O's; he shows how all the endless stories of miracles and such are easily explained by means not requiring an intervening deity; he (as many others have) demolishes the argument from design; he shows how morality has nothing to do with God or religion, that it is something humans naturally have, and that in fact, followers of especially Islam and Christianity, are less moral by most standards than are unbelievers.
The God of the Old Testament is exposed as ruthless and evil; Stenger even refers to the so-called "hidden" God (that is, hidden from nonbelievers) of evangelical Christians as a "hideous God." His point is that by staying hidden from nonbelievers this God (cf. the God of John Calvin) effectively makes certain that most people will spend an eternity in hell, people such as "Mahatma Gandhi...along with the six million Jews killed by Hitler and billions of others who died without accepting Jesus." It is interesting that Stenger allows that such a god could exist, but "I personally want nothing to do with him." (pp. 239-240)
As significant and important as showing that God is a hypothesis that has failed is, I think some other aspects of this fascinating book are what make it such an important read. I learned that a good answer to the eternal question (and one of my favorites) "Why is there something rather than nothing?" can be answered by "nothing is unstable" (Frank Wilczek) or, to put it another way, it is impossible for there to be nothing but nothing. (pp. 132-133)
I also discovered that the universe did not necessarily begin with the Big Bang, that events do not necessarily have causes, and that "even if the universe does not have a mathematically infinite number of events in the past, it still need not have a beginning." Additionally (quoting philosopher Keith Parsons), "To say the universe is infinitely old is to say that it had no beginning--not a beginning that was infinitely long ago." Here Stenger makes a nice distinction between the infinite of mathematics and the infinite of physics. He writes, "Physics is counting. In physics, time is simply the count of ticks on a clock. You can count backward as well as forward. Counting forward you can get a very big but never mathematically infinite positive number and time 'never ends.' Counting backward you can get a very big but never mathematically infinite negative number and time 'never begins.'" (pp. 123-125) The salient point, as Georg Cantor made clear, is that infinity is a mathematical concept and not a number. These points are brought to refute the claim that the universe must have had a beginning and therefore a creator God.
Stenger even brings entropy into the picture as an argument against the universe being created. He notes "If the universe were created, then it should have possessed some degree of order at the creation...." But according to Big Bang theory the initial state of the universe after the Planck time was one of high entropy or "total chaos." He then calls in "the second law of thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy or disorder of a closed system must remain constant or increase with time." So far it sounds like this is good argument (as it previously might have been) for God the Creator to have injected order into the cosmos since we clearly have order today. But then Stenger shows that because the universe is expanding, the order we see here on earth and elsewhere doesn't violate the second law because "maximum entropy...increases faster than the actual total entropy...." (pp. 117-119)
I have read and reviewed in recent months The God Delusion (2006) by Richard Dawkins; Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006) by Daniel C. Dennett; and The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (2004, 2005) by Sam Harris. While all three are excellent books and sorely needed in this time of attempted evangelical takeover of our culture and government, none of them is as closely and convincingly argued as is this book.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
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