Point of Inquiry

Victor Stenger is Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. He is also founder and president of Colorado Citizens for Science. He's held visiting faculty positions at the University of Heidelberg in Germany, and at Oxford in the United Kingdom, 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. Stenger's search career has 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 and has also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high energy gamma ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring, Vic collaborated on the experiment in Japan which showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. He is the author of many books, including Comprehensible Cosmos, The Unconscious Quantum, Not by Design, Has Science Found God, and the recent New York times best-seller God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist. In this talk with D.J. Grothe, Stenger explores many of the topics treated in his book, including the scientific evidence against the belief in God, where the laws of physics come from if not from a divine lawgiver, what E.S.P. research may imply about God's existence, the morality of atheism, and whether science should even be treating the topic of God in the first place. Also in this episode, Austin Dacey, director of the Center for Inquiry in New York City details the upcoming Secular Islam Summit in Florida, and the growing grassroots movement of secular muslims working to advance rationalism, science, and the separation of mosque and state in the Islamic world.