Victor J Stenger is a particle physicist, philosopher and religious skeptic with over 50 years academic experience. He is the author of 12 books, including the influential rationalist text God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist and his latest work God and the Atom. Perhaps most famously, he is one of the foremost writers in the ‘new atheist’ movement.

Professor Stenger’s research career has spanned work including the establishing of the properties of gluons, quarks, strange particles and neutrinos. He pioneered the emerging research on neutrino astronomy and was also part of the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan, which demonstrated that the neutrino has mass (earning a 2002 Nobel Prize for the Japanese leader of the project).

His academic career has widened to areas outside of particle physics, though often using the immense body of knowledge and experience he has gained in the subject. Much of his published work focuses on atheism, skepticism and what we can learn about these subjects from our increasing understanding of the world through physics.

 

Dr Stenger, thanks for taking the time to answer a few questions; perhaps a softer question to ease in. Your work has been influential in the minds of many atheists and physicists alike. What scientists or philosophers do you feel have had the biggest impact on your career, both in physics and atheism?

First I would mention the usual giants like Einstein, Dirac, and Feynman. The only famous classical philosopher I really admire is David Hume, but I can’t say that he influenced me very much. Of the people I have known personally, philosopher of science Larry Laudan, whom I knew briefly when he was in Hawaii, had some effect on my thinking in later years. I would also mention Paul Kurtz, who helped me more as my publisher than as a mentor; I did read a lot of his stuff, as I have other contemporaries. But really, no single figure dominated, except maybe Feynman.

 

Your last book was called God and the Folly of Faith, can you give a brief summary of your findings?

Folly presents my basic thinking about why science and religion are irrevocably incompatible. When a scientific theory disagrees with the data, the theory is discarded. When a religious theory disagrees with the data, the data are discarded. It is foolish to take anything on faith, which is a belief based on no evidence, just wishful thinking.

 

This leads us to your latest book, God and The Atom, can you sum up the position you explore in this?

I trace the history of the notion called “atomism,” in which everything is just material particles and emptiness, from its originators in ancient Greece to the present. The ancients had it basically right, but the idea was suppressed for a thousand years in the Dark Ages when the Catholic Church ruled Europe. In the atomist view, there are no gods who pay any attention to humanity and what we now call the multiverse is infinite and eternal and includes many universes besides our own.  Atomism was rediscovered in the Renaissance and helped trigger the scientific revolution. The so-called “standard model of elementary particles” based on atomism has agreed with all observations since the 1970s and has been solidly confirmed by the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson.

 

‘New Atheism’ is a subject you’ve written on quite often; you are said to be one of the major advocates of this position. First thing’s first, do you think we even need a term named ‘new atheism’?

It’s needed because the new atheists make it clear that we should not accommodate religion since even its most moderate manifestations are based on magical thinking and humanity is doomed if we continue down that road.

 

Would this position not be better captured by the term ‘anti-theist’?

Perhaps, but atheism is an already existing, familiar word and really means the same thing.

 

The ‘atheism+’ movement is starting to gather momentum and divide opinion – what are your thoughts on this idea?

I think it’s a bad idea for the atheist movement to take up other causes, worthy as they may be, which already have plenty of organized support. I have been very disappointed to see this development. It detracts from the mission of fighting against magical thinking and we are still severely limited in resources, especially compared with what religion can throw at us.

 

Many people claim that science cannot prove God doesn’t exist. Given the immense volume of work you have done on this subject, there is perhaps no one better suited to answering it. How would you respond?

While we cannot prove that every conceivable god does not exist, we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a god that plays such an important role in the universe such as the Abrahamic God would have been detected by now. Absence of evidence is evidence of absence when the evidence that should be there is not. For example, if the people who write all these bestsellers about visiting heaven during a near-death experience really entered a supernatural realm, why do they never come back with any verifiable new knowledge? They should, and the fact that they don’t is proof it was all in their heads. See my book God: The Failed Hypothesis for other examples.

 

My own view of religion is that faith is the primary problem, but that religion is the institution in society which primarily upholds the dogma of faith as being a worthwhile and/or necessary mind set. What are your thoughts on the relation of faith and religion itself?

Yes, religion is based on faith and that’s why it is not worthwhile despite the false comfort it provides to people who want to live forever. The social life and other amenities such as music, art, and even ritual rites of passage found in churches can all be provided outside a supernatural context. In Scandinavia, where hardly anyone goes to church on Sunday anymore, they still get married and buried in church.

Faith is foolish because it leads people to irrational decisions that pose great dangers to the survival of humanity, such as opposing birth control and thinking that global warming is no problem because God would never let it harm us.

 

The scientific method is something you’ve been heavily involved in during your career. You will have also worked through the emergence in popularity of ‘social science’, and the pitfalls academics have encountered when trying to do science in the realm of the social or psychological. Do you have any thoughts or fears with regards to this emergence?

I think the social sciences can be very useful if they are performed with true scientific method and not corrupted by the notion that they should be directly involved in social change. They should gather and quantify the facts, report them dispassionately, and let other institutions carry out the activity of social change based on that knowledge. I am not saying that science cannot make a contribution to morality and ethics, which after all do involve observable behaviour. But scientists have to be very careful about appearing to promote political causes without the evidence to back them up.

The scientific method is not just limited to scientists. It can be applied in many ordinary situations. Basically one makes objective observations and then tries to describe them with some kind of model. Then one uses the model to predict future observations. The key is not to let your personal prejudices keep you from discarding a model you happen to like when the data rules it out.

And that’s the case with the God model. It’s appealing but it is ruled out by the data.

For many, the Taliban are not just a religious terrorist force, they represent one of the most extreme and violent groups on the planet. Understandably, then, most people are keen to differentiate between the kind of religious view the Taliban holds and those of other faiths and decrees.

However, the recent letter from the Taliban to Malala Yousafzai – a schoolgirl they had attempted to kill whilst on her way to school – shows a rather uncomfortable fact: the Taliban act like every other religious orientated group. They are not a ‘for or against us’ collection of violent thugs, they want to win the hearts and minds of people by appearing in the best possible manner and preaching what they sincerely believe to be the truth.

As anti-theists have been arguing for many years, this shows that religious dogma itself is the problem. You cannot reason with religious groups except with secularisation. The more secularisation we have, the greater need religious groups feel to normalise and drop the more extreme and violent views which they hold (hence a letter to attempt to appear more reasonable in the UK, whereas they do no such thing in Islamic regions). Under threat of rationality and secularisation they have no other way to survive than to moderate their views, and whilst we have not really seen this ‘moderating’ effect from the Taliban before in the West (their tactic previously has been to fight and oppose our lifestyles) the letter makes clear what we knew all along. The solution is anti-theism and anti-faith, not reasoning in degree.

This is not just the case with Islam’s terrorist associations in the modern world either, we saw Christianity drop all kinds of bizarre and immoral beliefs as secularisation increased in Western countries like the UK. No longer are women objects, non-whites are no longer slaves and animals are not unfeeling machines. Religion is a method of cultural indoctrination, and it will not drop it’s faith in any belief until secularisation and reason forces it to. As a personal matter we could each opt out of religion today and begin to fight faith based ignorance immediately. As a cultural matter we should begin the shift now, as it may take many years to stop religion’s worst effects.

Following reality TV star Katie Hopkins’ now infamous rant about children’s names on This Morning last week, there are two important points we can take from it:

 

Learning why we value objective viewpoints

Hopkins claimed, among other things, that she steers her children away from being friends with other children who have certain kinds of names. Her reasoning for this (as far as we can take from her ramblings, anyway) was that names are an indicator of social class, which she believes can point out children who are badly behaved or less well mannered. Certain names, she notes, can point to children who are not such good influences on her own children.

It’s not an overly clever point. There might be some kind of weak correlation between social class and name (though, ironically, Hopkins is going by her own individual observation and not from a capable study regarding the connection). Maybe there is even a weak connection between social class and negative influence. But on top of these two rationally insignificant connections, there’s also not that strong a connection between social success and happiness anyway (presuming that Hopkins is favouring the happiness of her children, like most parents, and not just their success as an end goal). This makes three overwhelmingly weak links in just that one conclusion which Hopkins draws.

You could never be 100% sure that Hopkins is wrong, however three weak connections in just one belief doesn’t leave a very high chance of her being right. Imagine it as the equivalent of tying two objects together by using a series of three elastic bands, but forgetting to tie the three bands together and instead lying them overlapping. When you move those two objects apart, the bands will not adhere together and you will notice there is no existing link. Even if two of the bands somehow adhere together (perhaps they become sticky through heating), they are likely to come apart under a small tug, so for all three to stay connected is asking for an immensely unlikely outcome. It is, thus, incredibly implausible that Hopkins poor reasoning has discovered a viable ‘link’ between all three elastic bands which thus ties the two factors (the names of child friends and your own children’s happiness) together. 

Hopkins’ rant didn’t come out of nowhere though; it might be nonsense, but it’s not completely random. This kind of viewpoint is a classic stereotype, of which all of our beliefs suffer. The human mind is wired to find patterns, even if there are none, so even weak correlations lead us to believe there are patterns which may not even be significant. In Hopkins and many other people’s opinions, stereotypes about social class are valuable primarily because of a variety of myths and social conditioning. If these beliefs are not subjected to scepticism – like as above where we discovered that the truth of these beliefs actually depends on three weak links in a chain, making the chain itself likely non-existent – then Hopkins will believe it to be true based on her knee jerk reaction about the subject.

This shows something very important: if we do not value opinions that are explicitly objective (which is another way of saying ‘properly thought through’) then we end up believing things that are not likely to be true. We won’t just believe the three weak beliefs in the chain, we will also believe the chain itself – in this case, and in many others, this can lead us to act in an irrational and prejudice way toward other people. This is important not just because Hopkins’ children (and followers within the audience) will likely grow to be prejudice, but also because it perpetuates the idea that moral discussion is about personal opinions and thus makes it devoid of evidence and reasons in favour of badly thought through gibberish. Similarly, when people publicly argue on behalf of opinions that are nothing more than stereotypes, it provides back up for people who already believe this, thus making them less likely to change their mind based on real evidence.

 

We should take an evidence based approach to ethics

Hopkins opinions, by and large, can be laughed off. She is one a very small minority, and we might hope that this kind of irrational thinking is getting less popular – not least because there is a large amount of media backlash against it when it is publicised. This is a good way of isolating and deleting prejudice and irrational viewpoints, like those which Hopkins holds (for an appearance fee, anyway).

The problem is that even though most of us disagree with Hopkins opinions on this subject, it is a symptom of a much larger problem which we all suffer – subjective moral opinions. Hopkins isn’t wrong merely because she’s an idiot, far from it, she is most likely an intelligent woman in many ways. She’s wrong because she’s forming moral opinions based on personal whims and observations.

If we did science like this – making our beliefs up based on personal preference – then we wouldn’t get anywhere. We wouldn’t discover objective truths, because we would need to take an evidence based approach to do this. We probably wouldn’t have computers, central heating or sewage systems that worked – and we would have had no reason to stop witch trials or cat burning. Yet although we now admit the necessarily evidence based nature of scientific endeavour – and all of the fruit it has bought us – we seem to want to ignore it when it comes to morality.

I and many others have written at great length about the problems with this morally ‘relativist’ way of thinking. It is a rationally flawed way of thinking that espouses there are no objective facts of morality purely because morality evolved a relative social tool (one which helped us to treat one another with respect, and protected us and our kin). It falls foul of a common logical error called the is-ought problem which, explained in terms keeping with the science analogy, is the equivalent of finding out that witches don’t exist. We shouldn’t keep up with witch trials once we understand witches don’t exist, just as we shouldn’t keep up with moral relativism once we understand it is logically untenable.

When aimed back at Hopkins we can see that a ‘relative to each person’ form of morality, even when just one parent believes it, can lead them to discriminate against others and teach a new generation of youngsters to carry on her irrational opinions. On a societal level, we are increasingly growing toward moral relativism and it has the potential to create mass moral problems. The way toward an ever increasing moral progress in society is not through personal opinion, it is through evidence based moral opinion.