Vic Stenger

Vic Stenger is a particle physicist and a vocal advocate of philosophical naturalism, skepticism and atheism. His 2007 New York Times bestseller, God: The Failed Hypothesis, is one of the foundational texts of the “new atheist” movement, which seeks to take a harder line against religious beliefs. In the book, Stenger argues that evidence from cosmology, particle physics and quantum mechanics shows there is no basis for belief in the existence of a deity. He dismisses attempts to make peace between science and religion. Stenger similarly dismisses assertions that a supernatural being could act through the holes of quantum mechanics, a point he argues in his book Quantum Gods. He is also an opponent of the idea of fine-tuning as evidence for God, claiming that the universe seems perfectly consistent with the absence of a higher power. Apparent mysteries such as free will and consciousness, he says, will eventually be explained away by conventional science.