Freethinkers of Colorado Springs

Membership Meeting

7:00 to 9:00 PM

315 East Costilla in Colorado Springs

This month Dr. Victor Stenger will be talking about his upcoming book: "The New Atheism," which is to published by Prometheus Books in Fall 2009.

Here is Dr. Stenger's abstract for his new book.

In 2004, Sam Harris published The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason that became a major bestseller. This marked the first of a series of series of bestsellers that took a harder line against religion than has been the custom among secularists: Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris (2006), The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins (2006), Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon by Daniel C. Dennett (2006), God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist by Victor J. Stenger (2007), and God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007) by Christopher Hitchens. These authors have been recognized as the leaders of a movement called The New Atheism.

In The New Atheism, I review and expand upon the principles of New Atheism and answer many of its critics. I show how naturalism, the view that everything is matter and nothing more, is sufficient to explain all we observe in the universe from the most distant galaxies to the inner workings of the brain that result in the phenomenon of mind. Nowhere is it necessary to introduce God or the supernatural to understand the world. I dispute the claim that science has nothing to say about God and argue that absence of evidence is evidence of absence when evidence should be there and is not. In the case of the JudeoChristian- Islamic God, as I show in God: The Failed Hypothesis, the lack of evidence is sufficient to conclude that he does not exist beyond a reasonable doubt.

In The New Atheism I argue that since faith is belief in the absence of evidence it should not be used to make any judgments about the world or personal life. I detail many of the horrors and terrors religion has produced over millennia and how it was all brought about by the folly of faith. I show how the Bible is unable to solve the problem of unnecessary suffering in the world. I discuss the approach to suffering in other religions. I then show how a common morality exists that is not divine but of natural, human origins.

Finally I discuss the teachings of the ancient sages such as Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Confucius who 2500 years ago provided guidelines for the individual to cope with the problems of living, and dying, that did not depend on the existence of any supernatural forces in the universe. I call this “the natural way" as opposed to the supernatural monotheisms, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These supernatural religions have poisoned the natural way by promising people life after death and encouraging the self-absorption that is so prominent both with the modern-day Christians comprising the “me” generation and Muslims who are willing to kill themselves along with thousands of others in order to guarantee highly unlikely eternal bliss.

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Vic Stenger received a PhD in Physics from UCLA in 1963. He then took a position on the faculty of the University of Hawaii, retiring to Colorado in 2000. His current position is adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii.