Stenger Quotes

#1. When physicists make claims about the universe, Stenger writes, they are also engaging in a grand philosophical tradition that dates back thousands of years. Inescapably, physicists are philosophers, too.

Anonymous

#2. It is certainly the demiurge about whom Stenger and Dawkins write; neither has actually ever written a word about God.

David Bentley Hart

#3. Scientists have practical reasons for wishing that religion and science be kept separate. They can see nothing but trouble ... if they venture into the deeply divisive issue of religion - especially when their results tend to support a highly unpopular, atheistic conclusion.

Victor J. Stenger

#4. With pantheism ... the deity is associated with the order of nature or the universe itself ... when modern scientists such as Einstein and Stephen Hawking mention 'God' in their writing, this is what they seem to mean: that God is Nature.

Victor J. Stenger

#5. Just because quantum mechanics is weird does not mean that everything that is weird is quantum mechanics.

Victor J. Stenger

#6. The so-called mysteries of quantum mechanics are in its philosophical interpretation, not in its mathematics.

Victor J. Stenger

#7. It was not that I thought I was smarter. I had simply explored science and found what seemed to me a far more powerful authority. And, I did not steal or murder because I thought they were wrong, not because I feared damnation.

Victor J. Stenger

#8. Fifteen years of skepticism has done more for me than 20 years of force-fed religion and 30 years of indifference in between.

Victor J. Stenger

#9. The transition of nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any agent.

Victor J. Stenger

#10. The origin and the operation of the universe do not require any violations of the laws of physics.

Victor J. Stenger

#11. The claim that the universe *began* with the big bang has no basis in current physical and cosmological knowledge. The observations confirming the big bang do not rule out the possibility of a prior universe.

Victor J. Stenger

#12. The belief in supernatural forces remains to this day a yoke on the neck of humanity, but at least Thales made it possible, for those of us who wish it, to be free of that yoke.

Victor J. Stenger

#13. Those who use the Bible as a reference for moral behavior are simply cherry-picking those teachings, such as the Golden Rule, that they have independently decided are moral for other reasons, while ignoring those teachings with which they disagree.

Victor J. Stenger

#14. Saying the universe is eternal simply is saying that it has no beginning or end, not that it had a beginning an infinite time ago

Victor J. Stenger

#15. Proof is not required to believe [in a god]. But some sign, some evidence is needed. None exists ... Find some inkling of evidence. There is none.

Victor J. Stenger

#16. Debating is not an honest intellectual exercise. It's like a trial in which the goal is not to get to the truth but to win.

Victor J. Stenger

#17. When people start using science to argue for their specific beliefs and delusions, to try to claim that they're supported by science, then scientists at least have to speak up and say, You re welcome to your delusions, but don't say that they're supported by science.

Victor J. Stenger

#18. Is there a place in a church where you leave your brains when you enter?

Victor J. Stenger

#19. Any attempt at understanding humanity must include an explanation of the hold that supernatural belief continues to have on most of the human race.

Victor J. Stenger

#20. In a poll taken in 1998, only 7 percent of the members of the US National Academy of Sciences, the elite of American scientists, said they believed in a personal god.

Victor J. Stenger

#21. Science flies men to the moon, religion flies men into buildings.

Victor J. Stenger

#22. We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that require a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the even ... Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.

Victor J. Stenger

#23. Thought, without the data on which to structure that thought, leads nowhere.

Victor J. Stenger

#24. The problem is that people think faith is something to be admired. In fact, faith means you believe in something for which you have no evidence.

Victor J. Stenger

#25. People want to be at the center of the Universe ... and they're going to flock to anybody who tells them that.

Victor J. Stenger

#26. All great discoveries in experimental physics have been due to the intuition of men who made free use of models, which were for them not products of the imagination but representatives of real things.
Max Born (1953)

Victor J. Stenger

#27. The most fundamental laws of physics are not restrictions on the behaviour of matter. Rather, they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behaviour.

Victor J. Stenger

#28. Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion changes its commitment to nonsense.

Victor J. Stenger

#29. Alternative explanations are always welcome in science, if they are better and explain more. Alternative explanations that explain nothing are not welcome ... Note how science changed those beliefs when new data became available. Religions stick to the same ancient beliefs regardless of the data.

Victor J. Stenger

#30. Nature is capable of building complex structures by processes of self-organization; simplicity begets complexity.

Victor J. Stenger

#31. Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

Victor J. Stenger

#32. While science continually uncovers new mysteries, it has removed much of what was once regarded as deeply mysterious. Although we certainly do not know the exact nature of every component of the universe, the basic principles of physics seem to apply out to the farthest horizon visible to us today.

Victor J. Stenger

#33. Unlike those theists who at least pay lip service to science and scientific method, Johnson is out to convict science of fraud in the court of public opinion.

Victor J. Stenger

#34. Selling eternal life is an unbeatable business, with no customers ever asking for their money back after the goods are not delivered.

Victor J. Stenger

#35. Infinity ... is used in physics simply as a shorthand for a very big number.

Victor J. Stenger

#36. Rather than being handed down from above, like the Ten Commandments, they [the laws of physics] look exactly as they should look if they were not handed down from anywhere ... they follow from the very lack of structure at the earliest moment.

Victor J. Stenger

#37. In fact, current cosmological observations indicate that the average density of matter and energy in the universe is equal, within measurement errors, to the critical density for which the total energy of the universe was exactly zero at the beginning.

Victor J. Stenger