God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist | Victor J. Stenger

God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist | Victor J. Stenger | Universe Looks Like it Should Look If There Were No God

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God: The Failed Hy...

	God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist Victor J. Stenger Prometheus Books, 2008 - 310 pages average customer review:based on 145 reviews view larger image
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A sound scientific critique of God...only because they asked for it

This is clearly a book written by a scientist. Stenger who is a Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii treats God as a scientific hypothesis. He then thoughtfully and carefully sifts throught the evidence and without rhetoric, comes up with the conclusion that even giving people who believe in God the benefit of doubt does not prove their basic belief in a supernatural deity. This is an important point; God enters the turf of scientists and scientific investigations only when religious people invoke him to interfere in people's daily lives, cause miracles and heal the sick and wreak destruction by way of natural disasters on people who harbour homosexuals, atheists and liberals. Stenger's book is a gentle but no-nonsense scientific exposition on God, and was written because religious people seem to invite such books by believing in an interventionist God.

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Universe Looks Like it Should Look If There Were No God

As long as they're not unduly persuaded otherwise, people seem to have a good innate common sense. Long before science put such a big emphasis on evidence, primitive people were using it. I had always been suspicious about religion for common sense reasons. I didn't see prayers being answered. I didn't see any earthly advantage or help from outside being bestowed on believers. Nobody told me these things in my childhood - I just saw them. The biggest item that nobody had to tell me was that there were so many different religions with vastly different dogmas. They couldn't all be right but they were all vehemently believed and defended. The obvious answer - along the way, in different times and different places, they were all made up.

Despite these suspicions, I ended up going to a very religious college - eventually taking a course on Psychology of Religion. The teacher tried to accommodate psychological science to a theological incorporation of the holy spirit (I'll call him "Casper"), but I actually read the textbook. The author talked about Calvin, Luther, and some other charismatic individuals who had created big religious movements, and suggested that most of them had mental problems. That was my turning point. It reinforced the common sense I had been ignoring and I've been a non-believer ever since.

More recently, I've become interested in religion from a historical, mythological, anthropological, and sociological sense. Of course I've read the recent atheist books and like them. After all, they reinforce what I already thought. What better reason to like a book. This book is right up there with the best of them.

What makes it so good? Stenger takes the standard apologist arguments and analyzes them from the standpoint of one of my favorite things, science. He invariably concludes after each entree, "this is just as you would expect if there were no god." My particular favorite - simply because it seems to me to be the only god argument that has any ground at all to stand on - is the anthropomorphic argument. Since our author is a physicist/astronomer/cosmologist, this is right up his alley. After a very enlightening dissertation, he concluded, not surprisingly, "this is just as you would suspect if there were no god."

First rate book - not a polemic - you will probably like it.

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Science 1 religion 0

I found this book to be fascinating and very readable. The author shows, convincingly in my view, that religious explanations of the natural world and how it came to be are not just wrong, but unnecessary. I would recommend this book, especially to those who wouldn't be caught dead reading it!

Can science disprove God's existence?

"GOD the failed hypothesis ... How science shows that God does not exist" by Victor J. Stenger

Professor Stenger treats the existence of God as a scientifically testable hypothesis.

The God in question has certain attributes common to the gods of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The novelty of Stenger's approach lies in his attempt to use science to resolve this issue, which transcends the boundaries usually set by science. He argues "that God should be detectable by scientific means", and he gives "examples of phenomena that, if observed, cannot be of material origin beyond a reasonable doubt". "Observations of these phenomena would defy all reasonable, natural, material descriptions" (quoting from the preface).

Studies of such alleged phenomena as the efficacy of prayer, communication with dead souls, and the predictions of religious prophecies and revelations, have failed to produce statistically significant results.

Turning to science itself, Stenger searches for "miracles", defined as nonrepeatable exceptions to the laws of nature. A likely candidate is the Big Bang, but he explains that there was no "singularity" at that time. The law of conservation of energy was not violated, because the total energy of the universe (matter minus gravitation) has always been zero. The anthropic argument, that the universe was fine-tuned to make human life possible, is belied by the fact that the chemical elements needed for life are easily formed in nuclear reactions.

Stenger concludes that the existence of God is contradicted by empirical data. Furthermore, and this is essential to his argument, if the data had shown otherwise, atheists would have had to admit the possibility that God exists. I very much doubt that, because an overwhelming case can be made, using other arguments, that no such God exists. This ungodly reviewer, for one, would have looked to science to explain the paradoxocal data.

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