Vic Stenger Transcript

March 1, 2008

Dr. Kent Gustavson: Welcome to “Sound Authors.” Today is a leap day all across the world and there’s a lot to be said about it. This is the day that makes up for the mistake of saying that every year is made up of 365 days. It’s really made up of 365 and a quarter. Well, just about, I guess, 1600 and 2000 were leap years but 1700, 1800, and 1900, those years weren’t. That’s to make up for the tiny difference between 365 and a quarter days in the actual number. Leap day is also a day or a month in Europe tradition where women could ask men to marry them. Today is also a sad day in music. Buddy Miles, a drummer for Jimi Hendrix and many others, at age 60 passed away.But today is a sunny, gorgeous day out in New York and I’m excited for the guests we have on the show. The first guest will be Vic Stenger and he’s going to talk to us about the existence of God. Dr. David Gruder is the second guest with his movement called “The New IQ.” The third guest, her name is Lisa Genova and she has a kid’s book called “Astro Socks.” The fourth guest is going to be the incredible gifted finger-picking guitarist, Pat Donahue.Now, welcome my first guest, Vic Stenger. His book is about Atheism, it’s about God. He tries to answer the question “Can science explain the existence of God?” Welcome to the show.

Vic Stenger: Thanks for having.

Kent: Your book is called “Has Science Found God: The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe.” Give me a little sound clip about your book.

Vic: Actually, that is not the latest book and I wasn’t expecting to talk about that.

Kent: What is your latest book?

Vic: Let me tell you my latest book which is called “God: The Failed Hypothesis.”

Kent: ”God: The Failed Hypothesis.” Tell me a little bit about it.

Vic: Yes, sure. The subtitle is “How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist.” That’s been a very successful book and found the New York Times bestseller list back in March. The other book that you mentioned, it came out a couple of years ago, that’s kind of a prodigy to this book. This is by far more important book and it’s the one that I think you’ll find more interesting to discuss than the original one.

Kent: I apologize for the mix up, but of this book, Christopher Hitchens says, “Extremely tough and impressive; huge addition to the arsenal of argument.” Richard Dawkins who’s the author of “The God Delusions” says also an incredible quote. He says he learned an enormous amount from this splendid book. How did you get to the New York Times’ list? How did you find your audience.

Vic: I think that it helped that the publisher did a good job of exploiting the fact that I did have this prominent people supporting me especially Dawkins. Hitchens, he’s actually going to see the earlier book but he’s writing a foreword for me on the paperback which is going to be coming out very shortly. So it’s, I think, like everything else, you first of all, your publisher has to get the book out there on the front tables of Barnes & Nobles and the big bookstores.Then, of course, people have to like it. That’s the important thing that people read it and start telling others about it. It’s sitting very well with the books that had been bestsellers over the last couple of years including the books by Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens. So there’s a movement out there where people want to learn more about the Godless view of things, let’s say.

Kent: Now, your view of God, is that the creator, is it the Christian view, is it the Muslim view? The “God: The Failed Hypothesis”, does that cover all of these religions?

Vic: It covers, I would say, certainly the Judeo Christian Islamic God, the God that most people worship. There are other visions of God. There’s a Deist God who just sets the world going and then doesn’t play any role in it, a distant God in other words. That’d be very difficult to talk about in any kind of scientific way. But the point I’m making in this book is that the God that most people worship plays such an important role in the universe - created the universe, created life, made a special place for humanity in the universe.So all of these characteristics, it should lead to observable consequences that then you and I with our own two eyes but also science of its instruments can peer out to the universe, could look at the living things and under microscopes and study DNA. From all of these kinds of evidence, you come to the conclusion that the God that most people worship should have been detectable by now and hasn’t been. That’s a strong argument against His existence.

Kent: When you talk about science, I know there’s a brand new enormous supercollider being built in Europe. There’s many around the world to see if we can get down below the quark, to see if they can find the “God particle”. What do you think about that? Is it a misnomer? Are they still searching?

Vic: First of all, “God particle”, that was just a joke. Leon Letterman, who wrote the book “The God Particle”, he had been the director of Fermi Lab, the big lab near Chicago. He’s a Nobel Prize winner. He just thought he could write a book and by putting God in the title he could sell a few more books. Of course, I’ve put God in the title too. Its a good idea. [laughs] Don’t take that seriously. He was not being serious at all about associating that particle with God.Nevertheless, he was talking about something called the Higgs particle. If the Higgs particle is discovered with these new experiments, then that will have a lot to do in confirming the model of physics that we’ve had now for the last 25 years, that seems to agree with all the data. And if its not discovered actually, that’s going to be even more exciting, because it means that model’s going to have to be changed, and we’re going to have to look even deeper into things.None of this really bears much connection with the question of God. Nobody in science expects God to be showing up at that level of things; if he did it would have been obvious by now. Science is going to continue to progress, and of course if there’s any ever reason, any observation ever made that you can’t explain by natural means, then being a good scientist you have to accept the possibility that you may need to look for something else, a supernatural explanation. So far that hasn’t happened. So you keep your eyes open, you keep your mind open; it’s just unlikely to happen.

Kent: Do you feel like God, in a sense, is filling in the gaps for where we don’t understand science?

Vic: That’s a common argument, that any place that we don’t have something we can explain now that it’s room for God. But the history of science has been that those gaps get filled. So it’s not sufficient to just say “Well, here’s a gap.” Let’s talk about the origin of life. Now we know how complexity developed from simpler forms by Darwin’s natural selection, but we don’t know, yet, exactly how life originally came about. Now that’s a gap.You can say “Well, that had to be God”, but you can’t do that unless you can convincingly argue, or show in some irrefutable way, that there’s no way that you’ll ever find a natural explanation for that. Its very unlikely. There’s many proposals out there, we just haven’t found the right one just yet. Maybe none of the current proposals will work, but the chances that we will not be able to find an actual explanation for life someday are negligible. The “God of the gaps” argument only works if you can demonstrate that there’s no way that what you’re observing has a natural origin.

Kent: I’m interested in knowing; for example, C.S. Lewis was an atheist for a long time, very angry at God and believed God couldn’t exist. Then his famous biography was titled “Surprised by Joy”, he started believing when he released all of his doubts and all of that. What is your life’s story, and respond to what C.S. Lewis’ life story is.

Vic: That’s very common, what you talked about. There was a book that was written by the scientist; “On the language of God”, Francis Collins. It did very well, it was on the bestseller list too for a while. He was the scientist that started the genome project, was the head of the genome project; so very, very important scientist. He had read C.S. Lewis and C.S. Lewis convinced him to be a believer. I know any number of scientists who are believers.Let me tell you, in every case, they have not applied their scientific knowledge to religion. In every case they have kind of compartmentalized their thinking and not talked about science at all. They say “I believe because I have this emotional need” and the same thing, of course, was true for C.S. Lewis. These guys kneel down and they view a sunset and they feel that they’ve had a religious experience.They interpret that as something supernatural, and of course that’s a thinking process that they’ve been through that is not a rational one. Its not an analysis of the data in any kind of systematic way, they’ve just developed this feeling. In my case, I’ve never had such a feeling. Maybe if I did, I would change my mind. I had a debate with a good friend of mine. I was in Hawaii not too long ago, and they had a panel discussion which a lot of people attended.I was up there with four other faculty members of the University of Hawaii who were all believers. Three of them were scientists and one, or two of them actually, were astronomers I had known for many years.One guy, he just argued that his love for his wife and family he interpreted in terms of religion and so on. I said, look, I have a wife and family that I love too, and that has nothing to do with God.So, I think you have these spurious explanations where people had these wonderful feelings and think they cannot possibly be just due to electrons whirling around in the brain. But in fact what we know about the brain, it seems very possible that that is what it is.

Kent: In this country during the primary we see the two major parties and then the splinter groups. Of course, John McCain is not conservative enough for the Christian right.It makes you think about what are they asking for. To me it comes to mind, I believe there’s an amusement park or museum down in Arkansas that has dinosaurs alongside Adam and Eve. And they put the age of the Earth at 8,000 years or something like that.

Vic: Yeah, a creationist park. It’s in Kentucky I believe.

Kent: Kentucky, yeah. So what is your opinion? It’s a huge move to have the homeschooling and teaching of creationism.

Vic: Actually, it’s not as huge as you think. It’s relatively small and relatively vocal, and of course they have a lot of money. There are a lot of TV stations and radio stations that are owned by Christian groups, and so there’s a lot of propaganda out there they’re able to make.But if you look at surveys of religion, you’ll find that it’s really falling off in this country. Protestantism has now become a minority. Less than half of Americans are Protestants.If you look at it, 25% of Americans are Catholics, but that’s held steady because of the influx of Latin American immigrants. But 10% of the people who were raised Catholics have left the Church.The number of unaffiliated is growing. It’s about 20% of the American people now. Some of these people still believe there’s something out there. They’re not all atheists. But the atheist movement, I think, is also growing, especially among young people.The percentages are much higher when you look at young people, when you look at educated people, when you look at people with higher incomes.

Kent: Let’s talk about for a second, is religion or is God kind of a replacement or an embodiment of hope? And thinking again about politics right now, where there’s this great movement for Barack Obama and these jokes about him being a messiah and all of this, is it a similar thing?

Vic: Well, I’m a great Barack Obama fan. I hope that’s not what he’s being viewed as. I think that he is religious as is Hillary Clinton. I’m not sure about McCain. Of course, you have Huckleberry, or whatever his name is.I’ve looked at some of the things Obama has said, for example he supports the separation of church and state very strong. That’s a big difference between the Republicans and the Democrats who are all religious.They all have to be religious. The change of anybody ever getting elected to high office, at least in the near future, is still very low because unfortunately atheists are regarded by so many other people as devils, people not to be trusted. They don’t look at the facts, they don’t look at the fact that atheists are probably some of the best citizens we have in the country.I think this is why some of the books on atheism are beginning to do well, because there are a lot of people out there who are closet atheists, who are beginning to come out of the closet just like the gays have come out of the closet. They realize that they just have to go out there and admit it.I don’t know how many people have told me that they have beliefs pretty much like mine, that I hitting a nerve with them, my thinking was just like their thinking. They always kept to themselves for fear of offending their friends and family, and then they finally spoke out.My friends and family have for the most part accepted it, just like you accept your son as gay and if you’re anti-gay are going to turn that son away? You’re not going.So, I think that’s what’s happening now as people are beginning to say, “Look, I’m not a believer and that’s just the way it is.”

Kent: Here’s a Bible for the people that haven’t come out of the closet of atheism. It’s a book called “God, The Failed Hypothesis: How science shows that God does not exist”. It’s been a true pleasure speaking with you on the leap day, Victor J. Stenger.