Victor J. Stenger

Astronomer Luke Barnes argued in a 2012 paper that many of Stenger's claims about fine-tuning were problematic and that his arguments were fallacious. Stenger responded that Barnes misunderstood and misrepresented his positions.

Since August 2010, he was also a regularly featured science columnist for the Huffington Post.

Stenger took part in the 2008 "Origins Conference" hosted by the Skeptics Society at the California Institute of Technology and debated several Christian apologists and scientists on such topics as the existence of God and the relationship between science and religion.

Following a career as a research scientist in the field of particle physics, Stenger was associated with New Atheism and he authored popular science books. He published twelve books for general audiences on physics, quantum mechanics, cosmology, philosophy, religion, atheism, and pseudoscience, including the 2007 best-seller God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. His final book was God and the Multiverse: Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos (2014). He was a regular featured science columnist for the Huffington Post.

He was a member of the Department of Physics at the University of Hawaii until his 2000 retirement. He held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany and Oxford University (twice) and was a visiting researcher at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in England, the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy, and the University of Florence in Italy. He served as an adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

From 1998 to 2011 Stenger wrote for the column "Reality Check," in Skeptical Briefs, the quarterly newsletter of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI).

In 1992, Uri Geller sued Stenger and Prometheus Books for $4 million, claiming defamation for questioning his "psychic powers." The suit was dismissed and Geller was ordered to pay court costs.

Stenger's first peer-reviewed work was published in 1964, and his research career continued until his retirement in 2000. His research involved work that determined properties of gluons, quarks, strange particles, and neutrinos. Stenger focused on neutrino astronomy and very high-energy gamma rays.

Victor John Stenger (/ˈstɛŋɡər/; January 29, 1935 – August 25, 2014) was an American particle physicist, philosopher, author, and religious skeptic.

Victor J. Stenger was born on January 29, 1935, and raised in a working-class neighborhood of Bayonne, New Jersey. His father was a Lithuanian immigrant, and his mother was the daughter of Hungarian immigrants. He died on August 25, 2014, at the age of 79.