Below is the account of the Catholic church’s brutal execution of Giordano Bruno in Rome, Italy, in 1600. I recounted this event at the beginning of my recent podcast with Victor Stenger, in which we discussed the science-religion divide. It’s a good example of the stultifying effect Christianity had on…
When French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace presented Napoleon with a book of his work, circa 1800, Napoleon asked him why it didn’t mention god. Laplace purportedly replied, “I had no need of that hypothesis.” Physicist Victor Stenger marks this event as the start of the modern break between science…
Physicist Victor Stenger
In his new book, God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Religion and Science, physicist Victor Stenger presents historical, philosophical and scientific reasons why the two aren’t compatible. Stenger is a retired elementary particle physicist and author of eleven books, including the 2007 New York Times bestseller God: The Failed Hypothesis, How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. After discussing early Greek thought, Arabic science and other historical events, Stenger considers modern scientific philosophy. He also discusses the fallacy of the fine-tuning argument and the bad science used by Intelligent Design proponents. For more information and a complete list of Stenger’s books, see his web page here.
