While in graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, Victor Stenger went to a Protestant church near campus to meet people.
“It was a very liberal church, and they had a good young people’s group there,” he said. “That’s where I met my wife.”
By the time he became a professor at the University of Hawaii, Stenger had stopped going to church. He is now one of the most well-known atheists in America.
Stenger will lecture on his new book, “God: The Failed Hypothesis,” at 6 p.m. today at the Columbia Public Library. His lecture in Columbia, the first in a series of lectures, is sponsored by the MU Brights and the Show-Me Skeptics.
Stenger, professor emeritus of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii, has written several books disputing the existence of God. “God: The Failed Hypothesis” reached the New York Times bestsellers list in March. Other books on the bestsellers list at the time were “The God Delusion,” by Richard Dawkins, which claims that religion is a dangerous illusion, and “Letter to a Christian Nation,” by Sam Harris, which criticized the religious right.
While Stenger considers himself in the same genre as other atheist authors, his book deals with physics and cosmology, the study of the universe. In his new book, he argues that the inability of science to prove the existence of God proves that God does not exist.
“Absence of evidence is evidence of absence,” he said. “I argue that the god of Christianity, Judaism and Islam should be detectable. It is a god that has an important role in life and in the universe, and the effects of interference should be apparent.”
This swell of interest in atheism is not surprising to Stenger, who sees it as a response to the influence that religion has over public life in America.
“I hope there is at least a backlash against what the religious right has been doing in this country,” Stenger said.
There are scientists who hold the opposite belief — that the existence of God can be proven using the scientific method. It is called intelligent design, a theory that everything in the universe had a designer. John Marshall, a doctor of internal medicine at MU, is a proponent of intelligent design. After learning of Stenger’s lecture, he said he plans to attend.
Marshall believes that there is no compelling evidence for atheism.
“I think we are looking at the same evidence, and I can empathize to some degree because we are finite beings with finite knowledge,” he said. “But agnosticism is much more sustainable. To me, that is a coherent view, but atheism is not coherent.”
Marshall also believes that there is a cultural battle going on that explains the proliferation of atheist books such as Stenger’s.
“Over the last 20 years or so, I think people have become more vocal, and Christians have said, my faith can translate into my actions,” he said. “I think it’s possible (atheists) are threatened by it, they are trying to mobilize their forces, and one way to do that is to say it is irrational to believe that God exists. That is way overstating the evidence, no matter how you look at it.”
Stenger, however, thinks the evidence against intelligent design — that is, the lack of evidence of God — is compelling. Central to Stenger’s argument is his claim that no law of physics was violated or needed to be violated in order to create the universe.
“There is this tendency in nature to go from simple to complex,” he said. “It’s all spontaneous, it just happens in a natural sequence.”
Stenger also believes that America will become more secular in the next few decades, and that it is even more secular now than it appears to be.
“A lot more people are nonbelievers than the polls indicate,” he said. “What they believe in is their culture and heritage.”