Victor J. Stenger Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Nature is capable of building complex structures by processes of self-organization; simplicity begets complexity.

Fifteen years of skepticism has done more for me than 20 years of force-fed religion and 30 years of indifference in between.

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.

Any attempt at understanding humanity must include an explanation of the hold that supernatural belief continues to have on most of the human race.

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

Is there a place in a church where you leave your brains when you enter?

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.

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.

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

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

Just because quantum mechanics is weird does not mean that everything that is weird is quantum mechanics.

Infinity...is used in physics simply as a shorthand for "a very big number.

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

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 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.