Victor Stenger

From Philosopedia

Stenger, Victor J. (1935– )

A retired professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii, Stenger is a non-believer, a skeptic, and a freethinker. He currently is an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado.

In 1956 he earned his B. S. in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology). Stenger earned his M. S. in Physics in 1958 from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his Ph.D. in Physics there in 1963. He has held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany and Oxford in England (twice).

His research career has spanned the period of marked 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, he collaborated on the experiment in Japan, which showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass.

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 [1] his books on science and philosophy:

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).

In Free Inquiry (Winter 1992-1993), he wrote that data from the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite “made the first observation of temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background. Overly enthusiastic statements on the significance of the experiment from several of the scientists interviewed prompted the media to interpret the COBE results as an unprecedented verification of the biblical view of creation. Consequently, an important scientific result was so grossly misrepresented to the public as to turn its actual meaning on its head.” But the data provides no evidence for the creator which believers are seeking and, in fact, “make the existence of a creator that much more unlikely.” Stenger concluded that “those who look to science to bolster their faith in the fantasies of a creator and an invisible world of the spirit won’t find it in the ripples of the big bang or any other scientific observation.”

In The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (1995), he argued that the materialist stance does justice to explaining both quantum phenomena and mental activity. He finds no need to resort to holistic cosmology, idealistic ontology, or outmoded theology.

Stenger, who signed Humanist Manifesto 2000, was a president of Humanists of Hawaii (1990 - 1994). He currently lives in Colorado, where he is founder and president since 2002 of Colorado Citizens for Science.

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