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God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist

Victor J. Stenger

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Jul 30, 2008 David Rubenstein rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: religion, science

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 parame 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.) ...more

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Jul 25, 2009 Tracy Black rated it it was amazing

I LOVED this book! Stenger made an excellent case. God was carefully defined near the beginning, and was given the attributes of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. Then he laid out what we should expect to see if a god with those attributes existed. After every case, Stenger then concludes that (the human mind, world, nature, universe, laws of physics) look exactly as we would expect them to if God didn't exist.

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Dec 20, 2007 Ralph marked it as to-read