Guest Speaker Victor Stenger Presents

God: The Failed Hypothesis

Monday, April 14th, 2008

Time and location: 12:00 Noon, Key West Ballroom

Throughout history, arguments for and against the existence of God have been largely confined to philosophy and theology. In the meantime, science has sat on the sidelines and quietly watched this game of words march up and down the field. 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.

Physicist Victor J. Stenger 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, 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.

Organized by Campus Freethought Alliance at the University of Central Florida

The Misuse of Quantum Mechanics

Tuesday, April 15th, 2008

Time and location: 7:30 PM, HEC-125 (Tentatively)

Quantum mechanics is weird. So, every weird claim is justified by quantum mechanics. Since one cannot observe objects at the quantum scale without grossly interfering with them and often changing their properties, the false conclusion is drawn that human consciousness can make its own reality. Gurus of a new spirituality, such as Deepak Chopra, teach methods by which our thoughts can create what they call "quantum healing." In the recent highly successful DVD and accompanying book The Secret, we are told that wealth and happiness can be ours by just thinking about them. Quantum mechanics guarantees it. Theologians are also finding in the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics a place for God to take action to assure that the universe and humanity follow his divine plan. In fact, quantum mechanics as practiced by physicists provides no basis for these wishful fantasies. The history of quantum spirituality will be traced back to the 1970s with the publication of The Tao of Physics by physicist Fritjof Capra and the Transcendental Meditation movement of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Organized by Campus Freethought Alliance at the University of Central Florida

About Victor Stenger

Victor Stenger grew up in a Catholic working class neighborhood in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant, his mother the daughter of Hungarian immigrants. He attended public schools and received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1956. While at NCE, he was editor of the student newspaper and received several journalism awards.

Moving to Los Angeles on a Hughes Aircraft Company fellowship, Dr. Stenger received a Master of Science degree in physics from UCLA in 1959 and a PhD in physics in 1963. He then took a position on the faculty of the University of Hawaii, retiring to Colorado in 2000. He currently is emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. Dr. Stenger is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a research fellow of the Center for Inquiry. Dr. Stenger has also held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Oxford in England (twice), and has been a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy, and the University of Florence in Italy.

His research career spanned the period of great progress in elementary particle physics that ultimately led to the current standard model. He participated in experiments that helped establish the properties of strange particles, quarks, gluons, and neutrinos. He also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high-energy gamma ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring, Dr. Stenger collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that in 1998 showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. The Japanese leader of this experiment shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for this work.

Victor Stenger has had a parallel career as an author of critically well-received popular-level books that interface between physics and cosmology and philosophy, religion, and pseudoscience. These include: Not By Design: The Origin of the Universe (1988); Physics and Psychics: The Search for a World Beyond the Senses (1990); The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (1995); Timeless Reality: Symmetry, Simplicity, and Multiple Universes (2000); Has Science Found God? The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe (2003); The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come from? (2006); and God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (2007). The last made the New York Times bestseller list in March, 2007.

Dr. Stenger and his wife Phylliss have been happily married since 1962 and have two children and four grandchildren. They now live in Lafayette, Colorado. They attribute their long lives to the response of evolution to the human need for babysitters, a task they joyfully perform. Phylliss and Vic are avid doubles tennis players, golfers, generally enjoy the outdoor life in Colorado, and travel the world as often as they can.

Dr. Stenger maintains a popular Web site (a thousand hits per month), where much of his writing can be found, at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/.

Campus Freethought Alliance is offering copies of God: The Failed Hypothesis and The Comprehensible Cosmos for $20 each. If you are interested in purchasing copies, please contact us. Victor Stenger will be available to sign books.