Victor Stenger will be speaking with us in W. Wright Education Building 1120 at 6:00pm.

Here is a brief description of his talk:

Is There Evidence for Life After Death?

In his 2009 book Life After Death: The Evidence Dinesh D’Souza says that reason and science “supply new and persuasive evidence for the afterlife—evidence that wasn’t there before.” Similar assertions have been made by Deepak Chopra in his 2006 book Life After Death: The Burden of Proof and others. These conclusions are based on studies of past-life memories, near-death experiences, and various paranormal claims. They also rely on the notion that quantum mechanics has provided reason to believe that consciousness is a separate entity from our bodies and brains and thus able to survive death. I will examine this evidence from the point-of-view of a physicist who spend forty years studying the fundamental structure of the universe.

Vic Stenger received a PhD in Physics from UCLA in 1963. He then took a position on the faculty of the University of Hawaii, retiring to Colorado in 2000. His current position is adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and emeritus professor of physics at the University of Hawaii. Dr. Stenger has also held visiting positions on the faculties of the University of Heidelberg in Germany, Oxford in England, and the University of Florence in Italy. He also has bee a visiting researcher at Rutherford Laboratory in England and the National Nuclear Physics Laboratory in Frascati, Italy.

Dr. Stenger’s research career spanned the period of great progress in elementary particle physics that ultimately led to the current standard model. He participated in experiments that helped establish the properties of strange particles, quarks, gluons, and neutrinos. He also helped pioneer the emerging fields of very high-energy gamma ray and neutrino astronomy. In his last project before retiring, Dr. Stenger collaborated on the underground experiment in Japan that showed for the first time that the neutrino has mass. The project leader received the Nobel Prize in 2002 for this work.

Vic Stenger has had a parallel career as an author of nine critically acclaimed popular-level books that interface between physics and cosmology and philosophy, religion, and pseudoscience. His 2007 book God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist was a New York Times bestseller. His last two books, which came out in 2009, are Quantum Gods and The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason.

Please come join us.

Every week, the SAIU meets for a Russell’s Tea Party. The goal of this meeting is to promote discussion. We will have invited local speakers coming to talk to us as well as just discussion sessions amongst our members. We meet at 8pm in the Dogwood Room in the IMU.

This week we will be discussing being open about atheism. We will be sharing thoughts on whether or not we should proclaim that we’re atheist or if we should instead hide it, and why. This should be a really good time.

I hope to see you there.

Come join us in Swain East 105 at 8pm for our weekly movie night.

This week we will be watching The Last Temptation of Christ. Based upon a 1960 novel by the same name, the film depicts the life of Jesus Christ, and its central thesis is that Jesus, while free from sin, was still subject to every form of temptation that humans face, including fear, doubt, depression, reluctance and lust. This results in the book and film depicting Christ being tempted by imagining himself engaged in sexual activities, a notion that has caused outrage from some Christians. The movie includes a disclaimer explaining that it departs from the commonly-accepted Biblical portrayal of Jesus’ life, and that it is not intended to be an exact recreation of the events detailed in the Gospels.

This film has Willem Dafoe as Jesus and David MF Bowie as Pontius Pilate. Yeah. It’s awesome.

I hope to see you there.