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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.

Victor J. Stenger

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Victor J. Stenger
Age: 79 †
Born: 1935
Born: January 29
Died: 2014
Died: August 25
Astronomer
Philosopher
Physicist
Writer
Bayonne
New Jersey
Victor John Stenger
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Trial
Trials
Intellectual
Exercise
Honest
Winning
Goal
Truth
Debating

More quotes by Victor J. Stenger

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Any attempt at understanding humanity must include an explanation of the hold that supernatural belief continues to have on most of the human race.
Victor J. Stenger
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The problem is that people think faith is something to be admired. In fact, faith means you believe in something for which you have no evidence.
Victor J. Stenger
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The argument from design stands or falls on whether it can be demonstrated that some aspect of the universe such as its origin or biological life could not have come about naturally. The burden of proof is ... on the supernaturalist to demonstrate that something from outside nature must be introduced to explain the data.
Victor J. Stenger
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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.
Victor J. Stenger
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When people start using science to argue for their specific beliefs and delusions, to try to claim that they're supported by science, then scientists at least have to speak up and say, You re welcome to your delusions, but don't say that they're supported by science.
Victor J. Stenger
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In fact, current cosmological observations indicate that the average density of matter and energy in the universe is equal, within measurement errors, to the critical density for which the total energy of the universe was exactly zero at the beginning.
Victor J. Stenger
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Fifteen years of skepticism has done more for me than 20 years of force-fed religion and 30 years of indifference in between.
Victor J. Stenger
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Assuming the universe came from nothing, it is empty to begin with... Only by the constant action of an agent outside the universe, such as God, could a state of nothingness be maintained. The fact that we have something is just what we would expect if there is no God.
Victor J. Stenger
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Is there a place in a church where you leave your brains when you enter?
Victor J. Stenger
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Nature is capable of building complex structures by processes of self-organization simplicity begets complexity.
Victor J. Stenger
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Thought, without the data on which to structure that thought, leads nowhere.
Victor J. Stenger
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Just because quantum mechanics is weird does not mean that everything that is weird is quantum mechanics.
Victor J. Stenger
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The so-called mysteries of quantum mechanics are in its philosophical interpretation, not in its mathematics.
Victor J. Stenger
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It was not that I thought I was smarter. I had simply explored science and found what seemed to me a far more powerful authority. And, I did not steal or murder because I thought they were wrong, not because I feared damnation.
Victor J. Stenger
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To most theistic believers, human life can have no meaning in a universe without God. Quite sincerely, and with understandable yearning for a meaning to their existence, they reject the possibility of no God. In their minds, only a purposeful universe based on God is possible and science can do nothing else but support thistruth.
Victor J. Stenger
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Selling eternal life is an unbeatable business, with no customers ever asking for their money back after the goods are not delivered.
Victor J. Stenger
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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.
Victor J. Stenger
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Saying the universe is eternal simply is saying that it has no beginning or end, not that it had a beginning an infinite time ago
Victor J. Stenger
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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.
Victor J. Stenger
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Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.
Victor J. Stenger