God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion (65 page)
Read God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion Online
Authors: Victor J. Stenger
telekinesis,
239
Tempier, étienne, Bishop of Paris,
75
Templeton, John,
36
Templeton Foundation,
36
temporo-parietal junction,
237
Ten Commandments,
78
Texas Board of Education,
315
Theophrastus,
52
theory of everything,
192
Therapeutic Touch,
229
Thermotheology,
129
Thierry of Chartres,
71
Thirty Years' War,
255
Thomson, William (Lord Kelvin),
105
time dilation,
137
Time
magazine,
140
Tobacco Institute,
311
Tomonaga, Sin-Itiro,
147
top quark,
182
Torah,
223
Transcendental Mediation,
131
Trivers, Robert,
251
tunnel vision,
231
Turing, Alan,
274
Tuszinski, Jack A.,
271
ultraviolet catastrophe,
142
ultraviolet light,
143
uniform motion,
87
Union of Concerned Scientists,
312
United Church of Canada,
284
United Church of Christ,
286
universal spirit,
284
universe, origin of,
29
University of Amsterdam,
240
University of California at Berkeley,
149
University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA),
148
University of Hawaii,
114
Upanishads
,
224
urea,
213
Urey, Harold,
220
US Atomic Energy Commission,
305
US Constitution,
114
vaccination,
320
vacuum energy,
184
vacuum polarization,
186
Vatican conference on climate change,
319
vector fields,
133
Vedanta,
224
Vereide, Abraham,
303
Vietnam War,
305
Vincent of Beauvais,
33
virus of religion,
124
vital energy,
229
Vitzthum, Richard C.,
93
Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan,
240
Ward, Keith,
195
Watergate,
319
Watson, James,
274
collapse of,
216
of the universe,
188
weak nuclear force,
148
Webster, Charles,
37
wedge strategy,
117
Wesley, John,
95
Wheeler, John,
196
White, Ellen,
265
Wiener, Norbert,
273
Wilberforce, William,
256
Williams, George C.,
250
Willis, Thomas,
37
Wilson, Edward O.,
123
Wilson, Robert,
170
Wilson, Woodrow,
301
Wiseman, Richard,
241
Wöhler, Freidrich,
213
World War II,
147
Wright, Robert,
194
Wuthnow, Robert,
276
Xenophon,
57
X-rays,
143
Yahweh,
219
YMCA,
253
young Earth creationism,
113
Zacharias, Ravi,
172
Zeh, Heinz-Dieter,
217
Zeno of Citrium,
129
V
ictor J. Stenger
grew up in a Catholic working-class neighborhood in Bayonne, New Jersey. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant, his mother the daughter of Hungarian immigrants. He attended public schools and received a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1956. While at NCE, he was editor of the student newspaper and received several journalism awards.
Moving to Los Angeles on a Hughes Aircraft Company fellowship, Dr. Stenger received a master of science degree in physics from UCLA in 1959 and a doctorate in physics in 1963. He then took a position on the faculty of the University of Hawaii and retired to Colorado in 2000. He currently is adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii. Dr. Stenger has also held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany and the University of Oxford in England, and he 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.
His research career 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. He also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high-energy gamma ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring, Dr. Stenger collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that in 1998 showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. The Japanese leader of this project, Masatoshi Koshiba, shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for this work.
Victor J. 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. His 2007 book,
God: The Failed Hypothesis
, made the
New York Times
bestseller list in March of that year.
Dr. Stenger and his wife, Phylliss, have been happily married since 1962 and have two children and four grandchildren. They will celebrate their golden wedding anniversary on October 6, 2012. They now live in Lafayette, Colorado, and travel the world as often as they can.
Dr. Stenger maintains a popular website where much of his writing can be found, at
http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/
. He also maintains an e-mail discussion list, avoid-L, “Atoms and the Void,” where the topics range from his own writings to the whole gamut of intellectual discourse and politics.
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)
God: The Failed Hypothesis—How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist
(2007)
Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos, and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness
(2009)
The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason
(2009)
The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe Is Not Designed for Us
(2011)