God's Funeral-A Poem by Thomas Hardy

I've used this blog more often then not to speak against the faith of my past and of the liberation and freedom I experience due to leaving that faith behind. But I have no wish to hide the fact that my de-conversion (awakening) was a long and grueling process and the source of great pain. For a few years I struggled and fought to maintain my faith as it became more and more difficult due to the mounting evidence against it and the moral shortcomings of that faith. I can truthfully say that my desire to believe remained intact long after my ability to believe had passed. For months I grasped at straws looking for anything to restore my ability to believe in God (the Abrahamic one), while I faithfully continued on in my normal Christian activities as if nothing had changed, but it was simply gone. I still wanted God to be real but I could no longer pretend like he was. During these months my moods would often swing and seemingly without cause between feelings of amazing relief and joy at no longer needing to believe and support such ridiculous beliefs and doctrines as are endorse by Christianity to a tangible and acute sense of sorrow as if having lost a loved one. God both vanished and died. It was like I was participating in a party and a wake at the same time. I recently read this poem by Thomas Hardy and the imagery he uses of a funeral for God reminded me of those strong feelings of grief that I experienced. And while those feelings of pain and desire that God is real still pop up from time to time what has not changed is my complete inability to believe that such a being exists.




God’s Funeral
by Thomas Hardy


















I
I saw a slowly-stepping train --
Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar --
Following in files across a twilit plain
A strange and mystic form the foremost bore.

II
And by contagious throbs of thought
Or latent knowledge that within me lay
And had already stirred me, I was wrought
To consciousness of sorrow even as they.

III
The fore-borne shape, to my blurred eyes,
At first seemed man-like, and anon to change
To an amorphous cloud of marvellous size,
At times endowed with wings of glorious range.

IV
And this phantasmal variousness
Ever possessed it as they drew along:
Yet throughout all it symboled none the less
Potency vast and loving-kindness strong.

V
Almost before I knew I bent
Towards the moving columns without a word;
They, growing in bulk and numbers as they went,
Struck out sick thoughts that could be overheard: --

VI
'O man-projected Figure, of late
Imaged as we, thy knell who shall survive?
Whence came it we were tempted to create
One whom we can no longer keep alive?

VII
'Framing him jealous, fierce, at first,
We gave him justice as the ages rolled,
Will to bless those by circumstance accurst,
And longsuffering, and mercies manifold.

VIII
'And, tricked by our own early dream
And need of solace, we grew self-deceived,
Our making soon our maker did we deem,
And what we had imagined we believed,

IX
'Till, in Time's stayless stealthy swing,
Uncompromising rude reality
Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning,
Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.

X
'So, toward our myth's oblivion,
Darkling, and languid-lipped, we creep and grope
Sadlier than those who wept in Babylon,
Whose Zion was a still abiding hope.

XI
'How sweet it was in years far hied
To start the wheels of day with trustful prayer,
To lie down liegely at the eventide
And feel a blest assurance he was there!

XII
'And who or what shall fill his place?
Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes
For some fixed star to stimulate their pace
Towards the goal of their enterprise?'...

XIII
Some in the background then I saw,
Sweet women, youths, men, all incredulous,
Who chimed as one: 'This is figure is of straw,
This requiem mockery! Still he lives to us!'

XIV
I could not prop their faith: and yet
Many I had known: with all I sympathized;
And though struck speechless, I did not forget
That what was mourned for, I, too, once had prized.

XV
Still, how to bear such loss I deemed
The insistent question for each animate mind,
And gazing, to my growing sight there seemed
A pale yet positive gleam low down behind,

XVI
Whereof, to lift the general night,
A certain few who stood aloof had said,
'See you upon the horizon that small light --
Swelling somewhat?' Each mourner shook his head.

XVII
And they composed a crowd of whom
Some were right good, and many nigh the best....
Thus dazed and puzzled 'twixt the gleam and gloom
Mechanically I followed with the rest.

Daniel C. Dennett-Thank Goodness

This is an essay, more of a personal account, written Daniel C. Dennett (information about the author is at the bottom). It's a great piece that offers a wonderful blend of personal and philosophical thoughts. While I do not affirm all of Dennett's ideas in this piece (I would have to think about them some more) I completely agree with his view of the superiority (intellectually, practically and morally) of science over religion.



Thank Goodness

There are no atheists in foxholes, according to an old but dubious saying, and there is at least a little anecdotal evidence in favor of it in the notorious cases of famous atheists who have emerged from near-death experiences to announce to the world that they have changed their minds. The British philosopher Sir A.J. Ayer, who died in 1989, is a fairly recent example. Here is another anecdote to ponder.

Two weeks ago, I was rushed by ambulance to a hospital, where it was determined by CT scan that I had a “dissection of the aorta”—the lining of the main output vessel carrying blood from my heart had been torn up, creating a two-channel pipe where there should only be one. Fortunately for me, the fact that I’d had a coronary artery bypass graft seven years ago probably saved my life, since the tangle of scar tissue that had grown like ivy around my heart in the intervening years reinforced the aorta, preventing catastrophic leakage from the tear in the aorta itself. After a nine-hour surgery, in which my heart was stopped entirely and my body and brain were chilled down to about forty-five degrees to prevent brain damage from lack of oxygen until they could get the heart-lung machine pumping, I am now the proud possessor of a new aorta and aortic arch, made of strong Dacron fabric tubing sewn into shape on the spot by the surgeon, attached to my heart by a carbon-fiber valve that makes a reassuring little click every time my heart beats.

As I now enter a gentle period of recuperation, I have much to reflect on about the harrowing experience itself and even more about the flood of supporting messages I’ve received since word got out about my latest adventure. Friends were anxious to learn if I had had a near-death experience, and if so, what effect it had had on my longstanding public atheism. Had I had an epiphany? Was I going to follow in the footsteps of Ayer (who recovered his aplomb and, in an article in the Spectator, insisted a few days later “what I should have said is that my experiences have weakened, not my belief that there is no life after death, but my inflexible attitude towards that belief”), or was my atheism still intact and unchanged?

Yes, I did have an epiphany. I saw with greater clarity than ever before in my life that when I say “Thank goodness!” this in not merely a euphemism for “Thank God!” (We atheists don’t believe that there is any God to thank.) I really do mean thank goodness! There is a lot of goodness in this world, and more goodness every day, and this fantastic human-made fabric of excellence is genuinely responsible for the fact that I am alive today. It is a worthy recipient of the gratitude I feel today, and I want to celebrate that fact here and now.

To whom, then, do I owe a debt of gratitude? To the cardiologist who has kept me alive and ticking for years and who swiftly and confidently rejected the original diagnosis of nothing worse than pneumonia. To the surgeons, neurologists, anesthesiologists, and perfusionist who kept my systems going for many hours under daunting circumstances. To the dozen or so physician assistants, and to nurses and physical therapists and x-ray technicians and a small army of phlebotomists so deft that you hardly know they are drawing your blood, and the people who brought the meals, kept my room clean, did the mountains of laundry generated by such a messy case, wheel-chaired me to x-ray, and so forth. These people came from Uganda, Kenya, Liberia, Haiti, the Philippines, Croatia, Russia, China, Korea, India—and the United States, of course—and I have never seen more impressive mutual respect, as they helped each other out and checked each other’s work. But for all their teamwork, this local gang could not have done their jobs without the huge background of contributions from others. I remember with gratitude my late friend and Tufts colleague, the physicist Allan Cormack, who shared the Nobel Prize for this invention of the CT scanner. Allan—you have posthumously saved yet another life, but who’s counting? The world is better for the work you did. Thank goodness. Then there is the whole system of medicine, both the science and the technology, without which the best-intentioned efforts of individuals would be roughly useless. So I am grateful to the editorial boards and referees, past and present, of Science, Nature, Journal of the American Medical Association, Lancet, and all the other institutions of science and medicine that keep churning out improvements, detecting and correcting flaws.

Do I worship modern medicine? Is science my religion? Not at all; there is no aspect of modern medicine or science that I would exempt from the most rigorous scrutiny, and I can readily identify a host of serious problems that still need to be fixed. That’s easy to do, of course, because the worlds of medicine and science are already engaged in the most obsessive, intensive, and humble self-assessments yet known to human institutions, and they regularly make public the results of their self-examinations. Moreover, this open-ended rational criticism, imperfect as it is, is the secret of the astounding success of these human enterprises. There are measurable improvements every day. Had I had my blasted aorta a decade ago, there would have been no prayer of saving me. It’s hardly routine today, but the odds of my survival were actually not so bad (these days, roughly 33 percent of aortic dissection patients die in the first twenty-four hours after onset without treatment, and the odds get worse by the hour thereafter.)

One thing in particular struck me when I compared the medical world on which my life now depended with the religious institution I have been studying so intensively in recent years. One of the gentler, more supportive themes to be found in every religion (so far as I know) is the idea that what really matters is what is in your heart: if you have good intentions, and are trying to do what (God says) is right, that is all anyone can ask. Not so in medicine! If you are wrong—especially if you should have known better—your good intentions count for almost nothing. And whereas taking a leap of faith and acting without further scrutiny of one’s options is often celebrated by religions, it is considered a grave sin in medicine. A doctor whose devout faith in his personal revelations about how to treat aortic aneurysm led him to engage in untested trials with human patients would be severely reprimanded if not driven out of medicine altogether. There are exceptions, of course. A few swashbuckling, risk-taking pioneers are tolerated and (if they prove to be right) eventually honored, but they can exist only as rare exceptions to the ideal of the methodical investigator who scrupulously rules out alternative theories before putting his own into practice. Good intentions and inspiration are simply not enough.

In other words, whereas religions may serve a benign purpose by letting many people feel comfortable with the level of morality they themselves can attain, no religion holds its members to the high standards of moral responsibility that the secular world of science and medicine does! And I’m not just talking about the standards “at the top”—among the surgeons and doctors who make life or death decisions every day. I’m talking about the standards of conscientiousness endorsed by the lab technicians and meal preparers, too. This tradition puts its faith in the unlimited application of reason and empirical inquiry, checking and re-checking, and getting in the habit of asking, “What if I’m wrong?” Appeals to faith or membership are never tolerated. Imagine the reception a scientist would get if he tried to suggest that others couldn’t replicate his results because they just didn’t share the faith of the people in his lab! And, to return to my main point, it is the goodness of this tradition of reason and open inquiry that I thank for my being alive today.

What, though, do I say to those of my religious friends (and yes, I have quite a few religious friends) who have had the courage and honesty to tell me that they have been praying for me? I have gladly forgiven them, for there are few circumstances more frustrating than not being able to help a loved one in any more direct way. I confess to regretting that I could not pray (sincerely) for my friends and family in time of need, so I appreciate the urge, however clearly I recognize its futility. I translate my religious friends’ remarks readily enough into one version or another of what my fellow brights have been telling me: “I’ve been thinking about you, and wishing with all my heart (another ineffective but irresistible self-indulgence) that you come through this OK.” (1) The fact that these dear friends have been thinking of me in this way, and have taken an effort to let me know, is in itself, without any need for a supernatural supplement, a wonderful tonic. These messages from my family and from friends around the world have been literally heartwarming in my case, and I am grateful for the boost in morale (to truly manic heights, I fear!) that it has produced in me. But I am not joking when I say that I have had to forgive my friends who said that they were praying for me. I have resisted the temptation to respond, “Thanks, I appreciate it, but did you also sacrifice a goat?” I feel about this the same way I would feel if one of them said, “I just paid a voodoo doctor to cast a spell for your health.” What a gullible waste of money that could have been spent on more important projects! Don’t expect me to be grateful, or even indifferent. I do appreciate the affection and generosity of spirit that motivated you but wish you had found a more reasonable way of expressing it.

But isn’t this awfully harsh? Surely, it does the world no harm if those who can honestly do so pray for me! No, I’m not at all sure about that. For one thing, if they really wanted to do something useful, they could devote their prayer time and energy to some pressing project that they can do something about. For another, we now have quite solid grounds (e.g., the recently released Benson study at Harvard) for believing that intercessory prayer simply doesn’t work. Anybody whose practice shrugs off that research is subtly undermining respect for the very goodness I am thanking. If you insist on keeping the myth of the effectiveness of prayer alive, you owe the rest of us a justification in the face of the evidence. Pending such a justification, I will excuse you for indulging in your tradition: I know how comforting tradition can be. But I want you to recognize that what you are doing is morally problematic at best. If you would even consider filing a malpractice suit against a doctor who made a mistake in treating you, or suing a pharmaceutical company that didn’t conduct all the proper control tests before selling you a drug that harmed you, you must acknowledge your tacit appreciation of the high standards of rational inquiry to which the medical world holds itself, and yet you continue to indulge in a practice for which there is no known rational justification at all and take yourself to be actually making a contribution. (Try to imagine your outrage if Pfizer responded to your suit by blithely replying, “But we prayed good and hard for the success of the drug! What more do you want?”)

The best thing about saying thank goodness in place of thank God is that there really are lots of ways of repaying your debt to goodness—by setting out to create more of it, for the benefit of those to come. Goodness comes in many forms, not just medicine and science. Thank goodness for the music of, say, Randy Newman, which could not exist without all those wonderful pianos and recording studios, to say nothing of the musical contributions of every great composer from Bach through Wagner to Scott Joplin and the Beatles. Thank goodness for fresh drinking water in the tap, and food on our table. Thank goodness for fair elections and truthful journalism. If you want to express your gratitude to goodness, you can plant a tree, feed an orphan, buy books for schoolgirls in the Islamic world, or contribute in thousand of other ways to the manifest improvement of life on this planet now and in the near future.

Or you can thank God—but the very idea of repaying God is ludicrous. What could an omniscient, omnipotent Being (the Man Who has Everything?) do with any paltry repayments from you? (And besides, according to the Christian tradition, God has already redeemed the debt for all time, by sacrificing his own son. Try to repay that loan!) Yes, I know, those themes are not to be understood literally; they are symbolic. I grant it, but then the idea that by thanking God you are actually doing some good has got to be understood to be just symbolic, too. I prefer real good to symbolic good.

Still, I excuse those who pray for me. I see them as like tenacious scientists who resist the evidence for theories they don’t like long after a graceful concession would have been the appropriate response. I applaud you for your loyalty to your own position—but remember: loyalty to tradition is not enough. You’ve got to keep asking yourself: What if I’m wrong? In the long run, I think religious people can be asked to live up to the same moral standards as secular people in science and medicine.

(1): Elsewhere, Dennett provides the following characterization of the “movement: “A bright is a person with a naturalist as opposed to a supernaturalist worldview. We brights don’t believe in ghosts or elves or the Easter Bunny—or God. We disagree about many things, and hold a variety of views about morality, politics and the meaning of life, but we share a disbelief in black magic—and life after death.” See Daniel Dennett, “The Bright Stuff,” New York Times, July 12, 2003.


About the author
Daniel C. Dennett is the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of nearly a dozen books and hundreds of articles on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Recently, he has been supplementing his scholarly work with books and essays aimed at a general audience, focusing on science and religion and their respective roles in contemporary society. Some of his books are Content and Consciousness (1969), Consciousness Explained (1991), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Kinds of Minds (1996), Sweet Dreams: Philosophical Obstacles to a Science of Consciousness (2005), and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006).

A Happy Question

The poet Thomas Gray wrote, “where ignorance is bliss, ‘Tis folly to be wise”


So the question is would you really want to know the truth if it meant sacrificing the beliefs that make you happy? At the end of the day I believe most people who are Christians (particularly evangelical) are so because it is what they know and because it makes them happy. I would go further and say that the degree of their passion for their faith is, likely, directly connected to the degree of enjoyment they gain from their faith. Now by faith I do not mean simply a set of doctrines that an individual holds to but rather their entire religious experience, which includes friendships, common goals and a sense of value gained by being a part of something bigger than oneself. And by enjoyment I do not mean some carefree, easy life but rather a sense of pleasure derived from a feeling of satisfaction that is gained through the entirety of ones religious identity. Further enjoyment by no means precludes difficulty. One’s satisfaction with their religious life can often increase during trying times. In part because Christianity spends much of its time tweaking its doctrines to maintain people’s faith during extremely difficult times but also because of the support provided by the community surrounding a person. Churches offer friends that can comfort you, various activities and tasks that can engage you and very precise doctrines that can soothe you. But is that enough? For most people the answer is probably yes. But the truth of an idea cannot be affirmed merely by the satisfaction it gives the person who holds that idea. Basically just because you like your beliefs doesn’t make them true. So again the question is would you actually want to know the truth if it meant forfeiting your happiness?


note: while I chose to focus on Christians this question can obviously be thrown at any system of belief, religious or secular.

God Doesn’t Belong in the Pledge of Allegiance

The simple fact is that the phrase, “one nation under God” contained in America’s current pledge of allegiance was not written by the author of the pledge but rather was inserted into the pledge in 1954, during the McCarthy era. Most people believe the pledge is much older than it really is often thinking it goes back to revolutionary times but actually the pledge was written in 1892 by Francis Bellamy. He wrote it to be used in public schools to highlight the unity of children across the nation. Bellamy was a Baptist minister who was removed from the pulpit for preaching against the evils of capitalism. Bellamy was in fact a member of the Christian Socialist movement, which did not exist long. Bellamy believed in the separation of church and State and never included the word God anywhere within the pledge. When he was finished it read, “one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” No God was written no God was intended and no God should be there and there wasn't one until 1954. In 1954 the phrase “under God” was added due to the political workings of conservative religious groups most strongly the Catholic Church. The phrase quickly gained support from many religious denominations. It was accepted and approved in large part because it was seen as an important way to separate and distinguish ourselves from the “evil and godless” Soviet Union even if it meant moving away from the intent of the constitution by putting God where he did not belong, in the State. The church has always been good at rewriting history but hopefully we've come to a time where we can restore the original words of the pledge of allegiance and thereby restore what was originally intended by it, just a simple symbol of American unity, which all Americans can confirm and solidarity with one another not with any God or gods.

We should restore the pledge

Victor J. Stenger-Godless Cosmology

(information about the author is at the end of the piece)








Godless Cosmology

In recent years Christian apologists have blatantly misled the public in claiming that no conflict exists between science and religion and that modern science actually has dramatically confirmed biblical teachings. For example, in his recent book, What’s So Great About Christianity, Dinesh D’Souza says:

In a stunning conformation of the book of Genesis, modern scientists have discovered that the universe was created in a primordial explosion of energy and light. Not only did the universe have a beginning in space and time, but the origin of the universe was also the beginning for space and time. If you accept that everything that has a beginning has a cause, then the material universe has a nonmaterial or spiritual cause. (1)

Every culture has its creation myths and the Bible has no monopoly on those stories. Furthermore, the story in Genesis bears no resemblance to that of modern cosmology. It has the Earth created before the Sun, Moon, and stars. Actually, Earth formed eight billion years after the first stars. The Bible can hardly be credited with predicting the expanding universe described by the Big Bang when it depicts the universe as a firmament with Earth fixed and immobile at its center.

D’Souza’s main claim, however, is that the Big Bang showed that the universe, including space and time, began as a singularity of infinitesimal size and infinite density. For 30 years Christian apologist William Lane Craig has argued that everything that begins must have a cause and, since the universe had a beginning, it must have had an external cause. (2) Craig identifies that cause with the first cause or prime mover of Aristotle and Aquinas that they called God.

Craig bases his conclusions on the mathematical proof made by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose in 1970 that the universe began as a singularity. (3) Hawking and Penrose’s conclusion followed from Einstein’s general theory of relativity. What D’Souza, Craig, and other theists ignore is that more than 20 years ago Hawking and Penrose withdrew their claim and agreed that no singularity occurs when you take into account quantum mechanics. D’Souza refers to page 53 of Hawking’s 1988 bestseller A Brief History of Time, where Hawking is supposed to say: “There must have been a Big Bang singularity.” (4) I have not been able to find this statement on that or any other page in Hawking’s book. In fact, a few pages earlier Hawking says just the opposite:

So in the end our [Hawking and Penrose] work became generally accepted and nowadays nearly everyone assumed that the universe started with a Big Bang singularity. It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe – as we shall see later, it can disappear once quantum effects are taken into account. (5)

When I debated with William Lane Craig in Hawaii in 2003, I carefully explained the fact that Penrose and Hawking had withdrawn their proposal. Nevertheless, when I heard him talk a few months later on the University of Colorado campus, he was still using the singularity argument to provide evidence for a creator. As of this writing, his website has not corrected his 1991 paper that once again says that the universe began with infinite density. (6)

There simply was no singularity at the start of the Big Bang, and there is no basis to the claim that the universe, much less space and time, began at that point by the act of a creator or outside force. Indeed, modern cosmology points to a limitless universe that has no beginning or end in space and time, with the Big Bang an episode within the larger universe that led to that subuniverse we call home.

But even if we grant that the universe had a beginning, this does not imply that it had a cause. D’Souza refers to me: “Physicist Victor Stenger says the universe may be ‘uncaused’ and may have ‘emerged from nothing.’” He scoffs: “Even David Hume, one of the most skeptical of all philosophers, regarded this position as ridiculous…Hume wrote in 1754, ‘I have never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might rise without cause.’” (7)

Hume can be excused for not knowing quantum physics in 1754, but D’Souza and Craig cannot today, more than a century since its discovery. They are wrong in their assertion that everything that begins must have a cause. According to conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics, nothing “causes” the atomic transitions that produce light or the nuclear decays that produce nuclear radiation. These happen spontaneously and only their probabilities are determined.

In 1983 Hawking and James Hartle produced a model for the natural origin of our universe that today remains fully consistent with all we know from physics and cosmology. (8) This is just one of a number of natural scenarios that have been published by reputable scientists in reputable scientific journals. (9) In one variation of the Hartle-Hawking model, following the review by David Atkatz, (10) our universe appeared by a process of quantum tunneling from an earlier universe that extended back into our past without limit. That tunneling passes through a region of total chaos. I have worked out this model in full mathematical detail and published it in both a book and an article in a philosophical journal. (11)

All the published scenarios for a natural origin of our universe are consistent with existing knowledge. However, none has been proven unique. So, while we cannot say this is exactly how our universe came to be, the fact that we have several completely worked out scenarios refutes any claim that a supernatural cause was required to produce the universe.

Cosmological models such as that of Hartle and Hawking and more general considerations indicate that our universe at the earliest moment was a black hole of maximum entropy – this is, total chaos and minimal or no coherent information. This means that they early universe contained no information from any prior state. If a creator existed, our universe has no memory of him.

Now, although the initial entropy of the universe was maximal, that maximum was still very low because the universe at the time was very small. As the volume of the universe increases, the maximum entropy increases. This leaves room for order to form without violation the second law of thermodynamics.

No input of special information was needed for the Big Bang and no laws of physics were violated when it appeared 13.7 billion years ago. Recent measurements of the average energy density of the universe give exactly the value it should have if the total energy at the beginning of the Big Bang were zero. That is, no outside energy was required to make our universe. The total energy of the universe is zero, with the positive energy of motion exactly canceled by the negative potential energy of gravity.

Theologians such as Alvin Plantinga have tried to make much of these kinds of close balance, claiming that they were “fine-tuned” by God to make humanity possible. Any slight energy imbalance in the early universe, as small as one part in ten to the sixtieth, and either the universe would have collapsed too fast for life to form, or it would have expanded so quickly that stars would not have had a chance to form. (12)

This is another example, in this case a highly ironic one, where theologians’ ignorance of physics leads them to mislead themselves and others. Indeed, the balance between positive and negative energy is highly precise because the universe was not created but came into being naturally from nothing with zero energy. Far from helping to prove that God exists, this example provides just one more reason to believe he does not.

Let us look further at the claim that the constants of physics are so finely tuned that, without that tuning, life as we know it would not exist. This argument is often called the anthropic principle. (13) The weak version of this principle is trivial. Of course we live in a universe in which the constants of nature are suited for us. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here.

In the stronger version of the anthropic principle, the constants somehow were chosen to produce us. Theists say it was God’s doing. Scientists have proposed an alternative in which there are multiple universes with different constants and so, by the weak anthropic principle, we are in the universe suited for us.

Many theists have ridiculed the idea of multiple universes, saying it is unscientific since we cannot observe the other universes. They also claim that the multi-universe hypothesis violates Occam’s razor by “multiplying entities beyond necessity.” However, science often deals with the directly unobservable, and multiple universes are suggested by modern cosmological theories that agree with all existing data.

Furthermore, Occam’s razor deals with hypotheses, not objects. The atomic model multiplied the number of objects we had to deal with by a trillion trillion, yet it was more parsimonious than the models that preceded it. Similarly, since we need to introduce an additional hypothesis to limit ourselves to a single universe, it is the single universe model that violates Occam’s razor.

But even in a single universe, the fine-tuning argument fails. It says nothing about life as we don’t know it. We have no way of estimating how many different forms of life might be possible with different constants and laws of physics.

What is more, our universe does not look at all finely tuned for human life. We can only exist on this tiny planet. The universe visible from Earth contains a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars. The distance between stars is so vast by human standards that we will never make a bodily appearance outside our own solar system. Furthermore, more universe – of at least 50 orders of magnitude – lies beyond our horizon. The universe we see with our most powerful telescopes, out to some 40 billion light years, is but a grain of sand in the Sahara. Yet we are supposed to think that a supreme being exists who follows the path of every particle, while listening to every human thought, guiding his favorite football teams to victory, and assuring that the specially chosen survive plane crashes.

Besides, why would a perfect, omnipotent God have to twiddle any knobs to fine-tune the universe for humanity? He’s God. He should have got it right in the first place. He could have made it possible for us to live anyplace, even in outer space.

Finally, let me address probably the most common question theists ask atheists, one they smugly think is the final clincher on the case for God: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” This is called the primordial existential question. The eminent philosopher Adolf Grunbaum has shown that the question is ill-conceived because it assumes that the natural state of affairs is “nothing” and that some cause was necessary to bring “something” into existence. (14)

That argument can be supplemented with a physics argument that something is more natural than nothing. Material systems in nature tend to change spontaneously from simpler and symmetric states to more complicated and asymmetric states. For example, in the absence of external energy (heat), water vapor will condense into liquid water, which will then freeze into ice. Since nothing is simpler than something, we expect it to change spontaneously into something. As the Nobel prize-winning physicist Frank Wilczek said when he was asked why there is something rather than nothing: “Nothing is unstable.” (15)

We can also show that the laws of physics are just what they should be if the universe came from nothing. (16) The stars, planets, mountains, and your and I are simply frozen nothing.

Endnotes
1. Dinesh D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity? (Washington, DC: Regenery Publishing, Inc., 2007), p. 116
2. William Lane Craig, The Kalam Cosmological Argument. Library of Philosophy and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1979).
3. Stephen W. Hawking and Roger Penrose, “The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, series A, 314, (1970): 529-48.
4. D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity?, pp. 121-2.
5. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Books, 1988), p. 50.
6. William Lane Craig, “The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe,” Truth: A Journal of Modern Thought 3 (1991): 85-96; available online at www.leaderu.com/truth/3thruth11.html (accessed July 31, 2008).
7. D’Souza, What’s So Great About Christianity? P. 125, citing Victor J. Stenger, “Has Science Found God?” Free Inquiry 19/1 (Winter 1998/1999): 56-8, and J.Y.T. Greid, ed., The Letters of David Hume (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), p. 187.
8. James B. Hartle and Stephen W. Hawking, “Wave Function of the Universe,” Physical Review D28 (1983): 2960-75.
9. Alexander Vilenkin, “boundary Conditions and Quantum Cosmology,” Physical Review D33 (1986): 3560-9.
10. David Atkatz, “Quantum Cosmology for Pedestrians,” American Journal of Physics 62 (1994): 619-27.
11. Victor J. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos: Where Do the Laws of Physics Come From? (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2007), pp. 312-19. “A Scenario for a Natural Origin of Our Universe,” Philo 9/2 (2006): 93-102; available online at www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/Godless/Origin.pdf (accessed August 8, 2008).
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14. Adolf Grunbaum, “The Poverty of Theistic Cosmology,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 55 (2004): 561-614, axh401.
15. Frank Wilczek, “The Cosmic Asymmetry between Matter and Antimatter,” Scientific American 243/6 (1980): 82-90.
16. Stenger, The Comprehensible Cosmos.

About the Author
Victor J. Stenger received a bachelor's of science degree in electrical engineering from Newark College of Engineering (now New Jersey Institute of Technology) in 1956. He then received a master's of science degree in physics from UCLA in 1959 and a PhD in physics in 1963. He then took a position on the faculty of the University of Hawaii, retiring to Colorado in 2000. He currently is emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado. Dr. Stenger is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a research fellow of the Center for Inquiry. Dr. Stenger has also held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Oxford in England (twice), and 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 experiment shared the 2002 Nobel Prize for this work.

Victor 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. These include: 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). God: The Failed Hypothesis made the New York Times Best Seller List in March 2007.

Dr. Stenger maintains a popular Web site (a thousand hits per month), where much of his writing can be found, at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger.