Quotes from Victor J. Stenger

Thought, without the data on which to structure that thought, leads nowhere.

Proof is not required to believe [in a god]. But some sign, some evidence is needed. None exists... Find some inkling of evidence. There is none.

In a poll taken in 1998, only 7 percent of the members of the US National Academy of Sciences, the elite of American scientists, said they believed in a personal god.

The belief in supernatural forces remains to this day a yoke on the neck of humanity, but at least Thales made it possible, for those of us who wish it, to be free of that yoke.

Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

Unlike those theists who at least pay lip service to science and scientific method, Johnson is out to convict science of fraud in the court of public opinion.

Debating is not an honest intellectual exercise. It's like a trial in which the goal is not to get to the truth but to win.

People want to be at the center of the Universe...and they're going to flock to anybody who tells them that.

Selling eternal life is an unbeatable business, with no customers ever asking for their money back after the goods are not delivered.

Selling eternal life is an unbeatable business, with no customers ever asking for their money back after the goods are not delivered.

Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion changes its commitment to nonsense.

Those who use the Bible as a reference for moral behavior are simply cherry-picking those teachings, such as the Golden Rule, that they have independently decided are moral for other reasons, while ignoring those teachings with which they disagree.

The so-called mysteries of quantum mechanics are in its philosophical interpretation, not in its mathematics.

We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that require a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the even...Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.

The origin and the operation of the universe do not require any violations of the laws of physics.

The universe is not fine-tuned to us; we are fine-tuned to our particular universe.

The most fundamental laws of physics are not restrictions on the behaviour of matter. Rather, they are restrictions on the way physicists may describe that behaviour.

The claim that the universe *began* with the big bang has no basis in current physical and cosmological knowledge. The observations confirming the big bang do not rule out the possibility of a prior universe.

Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.

The transition of nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any agent.

All great discoveries in experimental physics have been due to the intuition of men who made free use of models, which were for them not products of the imagination but representatives of real things. Max Born (1953)

The diameters of nuclei range from 0.8 femtometers for hydrogen to 15 femtometers for uranium, where 1 femtometer equals 10-15 meter. The diameter of the hydrogen atom is about 0.11 nanometer, while that of the uranium atom is 0.35 nanometer, where 1 nanometer equals 10-9 meter. So, roughly speaking, the nucleus of the atom is a million times smaller than the atom itself. Matter is, indeed, mostly empty space.

The existence of matter and energy in the universe did not require the violation of energy conservation at the assumed creation. In fact, the data strongly support the hypothesis that no such miracle occurred. If we regard such a miracle as predicted by the creator hypothesis, then the prediction is not confirmed.

The complex order we now observe [in the universe] could *not* have been the result of any initial design built into the universe at the so-called creation. The universe preserves no record of what went on before the big bang. The Creator, if he existed, left no imprint. Thus he might as well have been nonexistent.