A Failed Hypothesis?

Tonight Victor Stenger will be speaking at Harvard Square. I wish I were able to attend. He's one of the self-proclaimed "new atheists" along with Dawkins, Harris, et. al. He recently published "God: The Failed Hypothesis" to go along with his earlier books such as "Has Science Found God" and "The Comprehensible Cosmos."

Stenger's approach can be quickly understood from a perusal of his website at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/. Essentially, he says the world does not look the way he would expect it to if there were a God. Hence, he claims we not only don't have evidence for a God, but evidence that there is no God. He would expect this world to have been created in ways that we could not comprehend (inconsistent with laws of physics) if there were a creator God. He would expect that prayers for headaches would be at least as effective if not more than aspirin. He summarizes it as "The world looks just as it would be expected to look if there is no God."  

The basis of his claim seems to be the height of arrogance. He claims to know just how the universe should look if there was a God. His own ideas trump that of the Creator himself. There is no reason that God must have created the world in ways we cannot describe. Nor that we can manipulate God's actions through our rites and prayers. Our dictates to God are hardly the measure of his existence.

Stenger has viewed the creation from the eyes of a human designer and finds that such a God doesn't exist. If he were to view creation through the lens of the incarnate Son of God who died and rose again, a totally different picture arises. The Word that was with God, the Word that was God and without him nothing was made that was made is the perspective that gives us clarity of vision, not our extrapolation of how we would have created the universe had we controlled the reins.