List of Atheists in Science and Technology

•        Norman Bethune (1890–1939): Canadian physician and medical innovator.[27]

•        Patrick Blackett OM, CH, FRS (1897–1974): Nobel Prize winning English experimental physicist known for his work on cloud chambers, cosmic rays, and paleomagnetism.[28]

•        Susan Blackmore (1951–): English psychologist and memeticist, best known for her book The Meme Machine.[29]

•        Niels Bohr (1885-1962): Danish physicist. Best known for his foundational contributions to understanding atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.[30][31][32][33]

•        Sir Hermann Bondi KCB, FRS (1919–2005): Anglo-Austrian mathematician and cosmologist, best known for co-developing the steady-state theory of the universe and important contributions to the theory of general relativity.[34][35]

•        Paul D. Boyer (1918–): American biochemist and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1997.[36]

•        Calvin Bridges (1889–1938): American geneticist, known especially for his work on fruit fly genetics.[37]

•        Percy Williams Bridgman (1882–1961): American physicist who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the physics of high pressures.[38][39]

•        Paul Broca (1824–1880): French physician, surgeon, anatomist, and anthropologist. Broca's work also contributed to the development of physical anthropology, advancing the science of anthropometry.[40]

•        Rodney Brooks (1954-): Australian-American computer scientist and roboticist.[41]

•        Sheldon Brown (1944–2008): Bicycle mechanic and technical authority on almost every aspect of bicycles.[42]

•        Ruth Mack Brunswick (1897–1946): American psychologist, a close confidant of and collaborator with Sigmund Freud.[43]

•        Robert Cailliau (1947–): Belgian informatics engineer and computer scientist who, together with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, developed the World Wide Web.[44]

•        John D. Carmack (1970–): American game programmer and the co-founder of id Software. Carmack was the lead programmer of the id computer games Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake, Rage and their sequels.[45]

•        Sean M. Carroll (1966–): American cosmologist specializing in dark energy and general relativity.[46]

•        James Chadwick (1891–1974): English physicist. He won the 1935 Nobel prize in physics for his discovery of the neutron.[47]

•        Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910–1995): Indian American astrophysicist known for his theoretical work on the structure and evolution of stars. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983.[48]

•        Georges Charpak (1924–2010): French physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1992.[49]

•        William Kingdon Clifford FRS (1845–1879): English mathematician and philosopher, co-introducer of geometric algebra, the first to suggest that gravitation might be a manifestation of an underlying geometry, and coiner of the expression "mind-stuff".[50]

•        Frank Close OBE (1945–): British particle physicist, Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, known for his lectures and writings making science intelligible to a wider audience, for which he was awarded the Institute of Physics’ Kelvin Medal and Prize.[51]

•        John Horton Conway (1937–): British mathematician active in the theory of finite groups, knot theory, number theory, combinatorial game theory and coding theory. He is best known for the invention of the cellular automaton called Conway's Game of Life.[52]

•        Brian Cox OBE (1968–): English particle physicist, Royal Society University Research Fellow, Professor at the University of Manchester. Best known as a presenter of a number of science programmes for the BBC. He also had some fame in the 1990s as the keyboard player for the pop band D:Ream.[53][54]

•        Jerry Coyne (1949–): American professor of biology, known for his books on evolution and commentary on the intelligent design debate.[55]

•        Francis Crick (1916–2004): English molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist; noted for being one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962.[56][57][58][59][60][61][62]

•        George Washington Crile (1864–1943): American surgeon. Crile is now formally recognized as the first surgeon to have succeeded in a direct blood transfusion.[63]

•        James F. Crow (1916–2012): American geneticist.[64]

•        Pierre Curie (1859–1906): French physicist, a pioneer in crystallography, magnetism, piezoelectricity and radioactivity, and Nobel laureate. In 1903 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics with his wife, Marie Curie, and Henri Becquerel, "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel".[65]

•        Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1717–1783): French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. He was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie.[66][67]

•        Sir Howard Dalton FRS (1944–2008): British microbiologist, Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs from March 2002 to September 2007.[68]

•        Richard Dawkins (1941–): British zoologist, biologist, creator of the concepts of the selfish gene and the meme; outspoken atheist and populariser of science, author of The God Delusion and founder of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.[69]

•        Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871): British mathematician and logician. He formulated De Morgan's laws and introduced the term mathematical induction, making its idea rigorous.[70][71][72]

•        Jean Baptiste Delambre (1749–1822): French mathematician and astronomer.[73]

•        Arnaud Denjoy (1884–1974): French mathematician, noted for his contributions to harmonic analysis and differential equations.[74]

•        David Deutsch (1953–): Israeli-British physicist at the University of Oxford. He pioneered the field of quantum computation by being the first person to formulate a description for a quantum Turing machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer.[75]

•        Jared Diamond (1937–): American scientist and author whose work draws from a variety of fields. He is best known for his award-winning popular science books The Third Chimpanzee, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.[76]

•        Paul Dirac (1902–1984): British theoretical physicist, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, predicted the existence of antimatter, and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933.[77][78][79][80][81]

•        Arthur Eddington (1882–1944): British astrophysicist. He was also a philosopher of science and a populariser of science. The Eddington limit, the natural limit to the luminosity of stars, or the radiation generated by accretion onto a compact object, is named in his honour.[82][83][84]

•        Thomas Edison: American inventor, one of the best inventors of all time. During his career Edison patented more than 1,000 inventions, including the electric light, the phonograph, and the motion-picture camera.[85][86]

•        Paul Ehrenfest (1880–1933): Austrian-Dutch physicist. Made major contributions to the field of statistical mechanics and its relations with quantum mechanics.[87][88]

•        Thomas Eisner (1929–2011): German-American entomologist and ecologist, known as the "father of chemical ecology".[89]

•        Albert Ellis (1913–2007): American psychologist who in 1955 developed Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy.[90]

•        Paul Erdős (1913–1996), Hungarian mathematician. He published more papers than any other mathematician in history, working with hundreds of collaborators. He worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory.[91][92][93]

•        Richard R. Ernst (1933–): Swiss physical chemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1991.[94]

•        Hugh Everett III (1930–1982): American physicist who first proposed the many-worlds interpretation (MWI) of quantum physics, which he termed his "relative state" formulation.[95]

•        Sandra Faber (1944–): American University Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, also working at the Lick Observatory, who headed the team that discovered 'The Great Attractor.[96]

•        Gustav Fechner (1801–1887): German experimental psychologist. An early pioneer in experimental psychology and founder of psychophysics.[97]

•        Leon Festinger (1919–1989): American social psychologist famous for his Theory of Cognitive Dissonance.[98]

•        Richard Feynman (1918–1988): American theoretical physicist, best known for his work in renormalizing Quantum electrodynamics (QED) and his path integral formulation of quantum mechanics . He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965.[99][100]

•        James Franck (1882–1964): German physicist. Won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1925.[101]

•        Sigmund Freud (1856–1939): Father of psychoanalysis.[102]

•        Erich Fromm (1900–1980): renowned Jewish-German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and humanistic philosopher, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.[103]

•        Christer Fuglesang (1957–): Swedish astronaut and physicist.[104]

•        George Gamow (1904–1968): Russian-born theoretical physicist and cosmologist. An early advocate and developer of Lemaître's Big Bang theory.[105][106][107]

•        Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac (1772–1850): French chemist and physicist. He is known mostly for two laws related to gases.[108]

•        Vitaly Ginzburg (1916–2009): Russian theoretical physicist and astrophysicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003. He was also awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1994/95.[109]

•        Gordon Gould (1920–2005): American physicist. He is widely, but not universally, credited with the invention of the laser. Gould is best known for his thirty-year fight with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to obtain patents for the laser and related technologies.[110]

•        Susan Greenfield, Baroness Greenfield, CBE (1950–): British scientist, writer and broadcaster, specialising in the physiology of the brain, who has worked to research and bring attention to Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease.[111]

•        Herb Grosch (1918–2010): Canadian-American computer scientist, perhaps best known for Grosch's law, which he formulated in 1950.[112]

•        Alan Guth (1947–): American theoretical physicist and cosmologist.[113]

•        Jacques Hadamard (1865–1963): French mathematician. He made major contributions in number theory, complex function theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations.[114]

•        Jonathan Haidt (c.1964–): Associate professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, focusing on the psychological bases of morality across different cultures, and author of The Happiness Hypothesis.[115]

•        E. T. 'Teddy' Hall (1924–2001): English archaeological scientist, famous for exposing the Piltdown Man fraud and dating the Turin Shroud as a medieval fake.[116]

•        Sir James Hall (1761–1832): Scottish geologist and chemist, President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment.[117]

•        Edmond Halley (1656-1742): English astronomer, geophysicist, mathematician, meteorologist and physicist. Best known for computing the orbit of the eponymous Halley's Comet.[118]

•        Beverly Halstead (1933–1991): British palaeontologist and populariser of science.[119]

•        Frances Hamerstrom (1908–1998): American author, naturalist and ornithologist known for her work with the greater prairie chicken in Wisconsin, and for her research on birds of prey.[120]

•        W. D. Hamilton (1936–2000): British evolutionary biologist, widely recognised as one of the greatest evolutionary theorists of the 20th century.

•        G. H. Hardy (1877–1947): a prominent English mathematician, known for his achievements in number theory and mathematical analysis.[121][122]

•        Herbert A. Hauptman (1917–2011): American mathematician. Along with Jerome Karle, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1985.[123]

•        Stephen Hawking (1942–): arguably the world's pre-eminent scientist advocates atheism in The Grand Design[124]

•        Ewald Hering (1834–1918): German physiologist who did much research into color vision and spatial perception. He proposed opponent colour theory in 1892.[125]

•        Peter Higgs (1929–): British theoretical physicist, recipient of the Dirac Medal and Prize, known for his prediction of the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson, nicknamed the "God particle".[126]

•        Roald Hoffmann (1937–): American theoretical chemist who won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.[127]

•        Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975): English experimental zoologist and medical statistician, now best known for his popularising books on science, mathematics and language.[128]

•        Russell Alan Hulse (1950–): American physicist and winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics, shared with his thesis advisor Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr..[129]

•        Nicholas Humphrey (1943–): British psychologist, working on consciousness and belief in the supernatural from a Darwinian perspective, and primatological research into Machiavellian intelligence theory.[130]

•        Sir Julian Huxley FRS (1887–1975): English evolutionary biologist, a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century evolutionary synthesis, Secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, and a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund.[131]

•        François Jacob (1920–): French biologist who, together with Jacques Monod, originated the idea that control of enzyme levels in all cells occurs through feedback on transcription. He shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Medicine with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff.[132]

•        Frédéric Joliot-Curie (1900–1958): French physicist and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1935.[133][134]

•        Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956): French scientist. She is the daughter of Marie Curie and Pierre Curie. She along with her husband, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1935.[135]

•        Steve Jones (1944–): British geneticist, Professor of genetics and head of the biology department at University College London, and television presenter and a prize-winning author on biology, especially evolution; one of the best known contemporary popular writers on evolution.[136][137]

•        Paul Kammerer (1880–1926): Austrian biologist who studied and advocated the now abandoned Lamarckian theory of inheritance – the notion that organisms may pass to their offspring characteristics they have acquired in their lifetime.[138][139]

•        Samuel Karlin (1924–2007): American mathematician. He did extensive work in mathematical population genetics.[140]

•        Stuart Kauffman (1939-): American theoretical biologist and complex systems researcher concerning the origin of life on Earth. He is best known for arguing that the complexity of biological systems and organisms might result as much from self-organization and far-from-equilibrium dynamics as from Darwinian natural selection, as well as for applying models of Boolean networks to simplified genetic circuits.[141]

•        Ancel Keys (1904–2004): American scientist who studied the influence of diet on health. He examined the epidemiology of cardiovascular disease (CVD) and was responsible for two famous diets: K-rations and the Mediterranean diet.[142]

•        Lawrence Krauss (1954-): Professor of physics at Arizona State University and populariser of science. Krauss speaks regularly at atheist conferences, like Beyond Belief and Atheist Alliance International.[143]

•        Herbert Kroemer (1928–): German-American professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 2000, he along with Zhores I. Alferov, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "for developing semiconductor heterostructures used in high-speed- and opto-electronics".[144]

•        Harold Kroto (1939–): 1996 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry.[145]

•        Alfred Kinsey (1894–1956): American biologist, sexologist and professor of entomology and zoology.[146]

•        Ray Kurzweil (1948–): American author, scientist, inventor and futurist. He is the author of several books on health, artificial intelligence (AI), transhumanism, the technological singularity, and futurism.[147]

•        Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813): mathematician and astronomer.[24]

•        Jérôme Lalande (1732–1807): French astronomer and writer.[148]

•        Lev Landau (1908-1968): Soviet physicist. He received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physics for his development of a mathematical theory of super fluidity.[149][150]

•        Christopher Langton (1948 or 1949-): American computer scientist and one of the founders of the field of artificial life.[151]

•        Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749 –1827): French mathematician and astronomer whose work was pivotal to the development of mathematical astronomy and statistics, and anticipated the discovery of galaxies other than the Milky Way and the existence of black holes.[24][152][153]

•        Richard Leakey (1944–): Kenyan paleontologist, archaeologist and conservationist.[154]

•        Leon M. Lederman (1922–): American physicist who, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988 for their joint research on neutrinos.[155]

•        Jean-Marie Lehn (1939–): French chemist. He received the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Donald Cram and Charles Pedersen.[156]

•        Sir John Leslie (1766–1832): Scottish mathematician and physicist best remembered for his research into heat; he was the first person to artificially produce ice, and gave the first modern account of capillary action.[157]

•        Nikolai Lobachevsky (1792–1856): Russian mathematician. Known for his works on hyperbolic geometry.[158][159]

•        H. Christopher Longuet-Higgins FRS (1923–2004): English theoretical chemist and a cognitive scientist.[160]

•        Paul MacCready (1925–2007): American aeronautical engineer. He was the founder of AeroVironment and the designer of the human-powered aircraft that won the Kremer prize.[161]

•        Ernst Mach (1838-1916): Austrian physicist and philosopher. Known for his contributions to physics such as the Mach number and the study of shock waves.[162][163][164]

•        Andrey Markov (1856–1922): Russian mathematician. He is best known for his work on stochastic processes.[165][166]

•        Samarendra Maulik (1881–1950): Indian entomologist specialising in the Coleoptera, who worked at the British Museum (Natural History) and a Professor of Zoology at the University of Calcutta.[167]

•        Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759): French mathematician, philosopher and man of letters. He is often credited with having invented the principle of least action; a version is known as Maupertuis' principle – an integral equation that determines the path followed by a physical system.[168]

•        John Maynard Smith (1920–2004): British evolutionary biologist and geneticist, instrumental in the application of game theory to evolution, and noted theorizer on the evolution of sex and signalling theory.[169]

•        Ernst Mayr (1904–2005): a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, historian of science, and naturalist. He was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists.[170]

•        John McCarthy (1927–2011): American computer scientist and cognitive scientist who received the Turing Award in 1971 for his major contributions to the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI). He was responsible for the coining of the term "Artificial Intelligence" in his 1955 proposal for the 1956 Dartmouth Conference and was the inventor of the Lisp programming language.[171]

•        Sir Peter Medawar (1915–1987): Nobel Prize-winning British scientist best known for his work on how the immune system rejects or accepts tissue transplants.[172]

•        Jeff Medkeff (1968–2008): American astronomer, prominent science writer and educator, and designer of robotic telescopes.[173]

•        Élie Metchnikoff (1845–1916): Russian biologist, zoologist and protozoologist. He is best known for his research into the immune system. Mechnikov received the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1908, shared with Paul Ehrlich.[174]

•        Jonathan Miller CBE (1934–): British physician, actor, theatre and opera director, and television presenter. Wrote and presented the 2004 television series, Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief, exploring the roots of his own atheism and investigating the history of atheism in the world.[175][176]

•        Marvin Minsky (1927–): American cognitive scientist and computer scientist in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) in MIT.[177]

•        Peter D. Mitchell (1920–1992): 1978-Nobel-laureate British biochemist. His mother was an atheist and he himself became an atheist at the age of 15.[178]

•        Jacob Moleschott (1822–1893): Dutch physiologist and writer on dietetics.[179]

•        Gaspard Monge (1746–1818): French mathematician. Monge is the inventor of descriptive geometry.[24][180]

•        Jacques Monod (1910–76): French biologist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1965 for discoveries concerning genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis.[181]

•        Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945): American evolutionary biologist, geneticist and embryologist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1933 for discoveries relating the role the chromosome plays in heredity.[182][183]

•        Desmond Morris (1928–): English zoologist and ethologist, famous for describing human behaviour from a zoological perspective in his books The Naked Ape and The Human Zoo.[184][185]

•        Fritz Müller (1821–1897): German biologist who emigrated to Brazil, where he studied the natural history of the Amazon rainforest and was an early advocate of evolutionary theory.[186]

•        Hermann Joseph Muller (1890–1967): American geneticist and educator, best known for his work on the physiological and genetic effects of radiation (X-ray mutagenesis). He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1946.[187]

•        PZ Myers (1957–): American biology professor at the University of Minnesota and a blogger via his blog, Pharyngula.[188]

•        John Forbes Nash, Jr. (1928–): American mathematician whose works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. He shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.[189]

•        Yuval Ne'eman (1925–2006): Israeli theoretical physicist, military scientist, and politician. One of his greatest achievements in physics was his 1961 discovery of the classification of hadrons through the SU(3)flavour symmetry, now named the Eightfold Way, which was also proposed independently by Murray Gell-Mann.[190]

•        Alfred Nobel (1833–1896): Swedish chemist, engineer, innovator, and armaments manufacturer. He is the inventor of dynamite. In his last will, he used his enormous fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes.[191]

•        Paul Nurse (1949–): 2001 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine.[192]

•        Mark Oliphant (1901–2000): Australian physicist and humanitarian. He played a fundamental role in the first experimental demonstration of nuclear fusion and also the development of the atomic bomb.[193]

•        Alexander Oparin (1894-1980): Soviet biochemist.[194]

•        Frank Oppenheimer (1912–1985): American particle physicist, professor of physics at the University of Colorado, and the founder of the Exploratorium in San Francisco. A younger brother of renowned physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, Frank Oppenheimer conducted research on aspects of nuclear physics during the time of the Manhattan Project, and made contributions to uranium enrichment.[195]

•        J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967): American theoretical physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Along with Enrico Fermi, he is often called the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in the Manhattan Project.[196][197]

•        Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932): Baltic German chemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria and reaction velocities. He, along with Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff and Svante Arrhenius, are usually credited with being the modern founders of the field of physical chemistry.[198]

•        Robert L. Park (born 1931): scientist, University of Maryland professor of physics, and author of Voodoo Science and Superstition.[199]

•        Linus Pauling (1901–1994): American chemist, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry (1954) and Peace (1962)[78][200]

•        John Allen Paulos (1945–): Professor of mathematics at Temple University in Philadelphia and writer, author of Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up (2007)[201]

•        Ivan Pavlov (1849–1936): Nobel Prize winning Russian physiologist, psychologist, and physician, widely known for first describing the phenomenon of classical conditioning.[202]

•        Sir Roger Penrose (1931–): English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He is renowned for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology. He is also a recreational mathematician and philosopher[203] and refers to himself as an atheist.[204]

•        Francis Perrin (1901–1992): French physicist, co-establisher of the possibility of nuclear chain reactions and nuclear energy production.[205]

•        Jean Baptiste Perrin (1870–1942): French physicist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1926.[206]

•        Max Perutz (1914–2002): Austrian-born British molecular biologist, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with John Kendrew, for their studies of the structures of hemoglobin and globular proteins.[207]

•        Massimo Pigliucci (1964–): Professor of Ecology and Evolution at the Stony Brook University who known as an outspoken critic of creationism and advocate of science education.[208]

•        Steven Pinker (1954–): Canadian-born American psychologist.[209]

•        Norman Pirie FRS (1907–1997): British biochemist and virologist co-discoverer in 1936 of viral crystallization, an important milestone in understanding DNA and RNA.[210]

•        Ronald Plasterk (1957–): Dutch prize-winning molecular geneticist and columnist, and Minister of Education, Culture and Science in the fourth Balkenende cabinet for the Labour Party.[211]

•        Henri Poincaré (1854–1912): French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.[212][213]

•        Derek J. de Solla Price (1922–1983): British-American historian of science.[214]

•        Frank P. Ramsey (1903–1930): British mathematician who also made significant contributions in philosophy and economics.[215]

•        Marcus J. Ranum (1962–): American computer and network security researcher and industry leader. He is credited with a number of innovations in firewalls.[216]

•        Martin Rees, Baron Rees of Ludlow (1942–): British cosmologist and astrophysicist.[217]

•        David Ricardo (1772–1823): English political economist, scientist and stock trader. He was often credited with systematising economics, and was one of the most influential of the classical economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill.[218][219]

•        Oscar Riddle (1877–1968): American biologist. He is known for his research into the pituitary gland and for isolating the hormone prolactin.[220]

•        Richard J. Roberts (1943–): British biochemist and molecular biologist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1993 for the discovery of introns in eukaryotic DNA and the mechanism of gene-splicing.[221][222][223]

•        Steven Rose (1938–): Professor of Biology and Neurobiology at the Open University and University of London, and author of several popular science books.[224]

•        Marshall Rosenbluth (1927–2003): American physicist nicknamed "the Pope of Plasma Physics". He created the Metropolis algorithm in statistical mechanics, derived the Rosenbluth formula in high-energy physics, and laid the foundations for instability theory in plasma physics.[225]

•        Oliver Sacks (1933–): United States-based British neurologist, who has written popular books about his patients, the most famous of which is Awakenings.[226]

•        Carl Sagan (1934–1996): American astronomer and astrochemist, a highly successful populariser of astronomy, astrophysics, and other natural sciences, and pioneer of exobiology and promoter of the SETI. Although Sagan has been identified as an atheist according to some definitions,[227][228][229] he rejected the label, stating "An atheist has to know a lot more than I know."[227] He was an agnostic who,[230] while maintaining that the idea of a creator of the universe was difficult to disprove,[231] nevertheless disbelieved in God's existence, pending sufficient evidence.[232]

•        Meghnad Saha (1893-1956): Indian astrophysicist noted for his development in 1920 of the thermal ionization equation, has remained fundamental in all work on Stellar atmospheres. This equation has been widely applied to the interpretation of stellar spectra, which are characteristic of the chemical composition of the light source. The Saha equation links the composition and appearance of the spectrum with the temperature of the light source and can thus be used to determine either the temperature of the star or the relative abundance of the chemical elements investigated.[233][234]

•        Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989): Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist. He gained renown as the designer of the Soviet Union's Third Idea, a codename for Soviet development of thermonuclear weapons. Sakharov was an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. The Sakharov Prize, which is awarded annually by the European Parliament for people and organizations dedicated to human rights and freedoms, is named in his honour.[235][236][237]

•        Robert Sapolsky (1957–): Professor of Biological Sciences and Professor of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University.[238]

•        Wallace L. W. Sargent (1935–): American astronomer.[239]

•        Mahendralal Sarkar (1833–1904): Indian physician and academic.[240]

•        Marcus du Sautoy (1965–): mathematician and holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair for the Public Understanding of Science.[241]

•        Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961): Austrian-Irish physicist and theoretical biologist. A pioneer of quantum mechanics and winner of the 1933 Nobel Prize for Physics.[242][243][244][245][246][247]

•        Amartya Kumar Sen (1933–): 1998 Nobel Laureate in Economics.[248][249][250][251]

•        Claude Shannon (1916–2001): American electrical engineer and mathematician, has been called "the father of information theory", and was the founder of practical digital circuit design theory.[252]

•        Edwin Shneidman (1918–2009): American suicidologist and thanatologist.[253]

•        William Shockley (1910–1989): American physicist and inventor. Along with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain, Shockley co-invented the transistor, for which all three were awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics.[254]

•        William James Sidis (1898–1944): American mathematician, cosmologist, inventor, linguist, historian and child prodigy.[255]

•        Stephen Smale (1930–): American mathematician.[256]

•        Michael Smith (1932–2000): British-born Canadian biochemist and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1993.[257]

•        Lee Smolin (1955–): American theoretical physicist, a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and an adjunct professor of physics at the University of Waterloo.[258]

•        Alan Sokal (1955–): American professor of mathematics at University College London and professor of physics at New York University. To the general public he is best known for his criticism of postmodernism, resulting in the Sokal affair in 1996.[259]

•        Richard Stallman (1953–): American software freedom activist, hacker, and software developer.[260]

•        Hugo Steinhaus (1887–1972): Polish mathematician and educator.[261]

•        Victor J. Stenger (1935–): American physicist, emeritus professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Hawaii and adjunct professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado. Author of the book God: The Failed Hypothesis.[262][263]

•        Jack Suchet (1908–2001): South African born obstetrician, gynaecologist and venereologist, who carried out research on the use of penicillin in the treatment of venereal disease with Sir Alexander Fleming.[264]

•        Eleazar Sukenik (1889–1953): Israeli archaeologist and professor of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, undertaking excavations in Jerusalem, and recognising the importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls to Israel.[265]

•        John Sulston (1942–): British biologist. He is a joint winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.[266]

•        Leonard Susskind (1940–): American theoretical physicist; a founding father of superstring theory and professor of theoretical physics at Stanford University.[267]

•        Raymond Tallis (1946–): Leading British gerontologist, philosopher, poet, novelist and cultural critic.[268]

•        Igor Tamm (1895–1971): Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Frank, for their 1934 discovery of Cherenkov radiation.[269][270]

•        Arthur Tansley (1871–1955): English botanist who was a pioneer in the science of ecology.[271]

•        Alfred Tarski (1901-1983): Polish logician and mathematician. A prolific author best known for his work on model theory, metamathematics, and algebraic logic.[272]

•        Nikolaas Tinbergen (1907–1988): Dutch ethologist and ornithologist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Karl von Frisch and Konrad Lorenz for their discoveries concerning organization and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns in animals.[273]

•        Gherman Titov (1935–2000): Soviet cosmonaut and the second human to orbit the Earth.[274]

•        Linus Torvalds (1969–): Finnish software engineer, creator of the Linux kernel.[275]

•        Alan Turing (1912–1954): English mathematician, logician, and cryptographer; often considered to be the father of modern computer science. The Turing Award, often recognized as the "Nobel Prize of computing", is named after him.[276][277]

•        Matthew Turner (died ca. 1789): chemist, surgeon, teacher and radical theologian, author of the first published work of avowed atheism in Britain (1782).[278][279]

•        Harold Urey (1893–1981): American physical chemist whose pioneering work on isotopes earned him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1934. He played a significant role in the development of the atom bomb, but may be most prominent for his contribution to theories on the development of organic life from non-living matter.[280][281]

•        Nikolai Vavilov (1887–1943): Russian and Soviet botanist and geneticist best known for having identified the centres of origin of cultivated plants. He devoted his life to the study and improvement of wheat, corn, and other cereal crops that sustain the global population.[282]

•        J. Craig Venter (1946–): American biologist and entrepreneur, one of the first researchers to sequence the human genome, and in 2010 the first to create a cell with a synthetic genome.[283]

•        Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945): Ukrainian and Soviet mineralogist and geochemist who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry, biogeochemistry, and of radiogeology. His ideas of noosphere were an important contribution to Russian cosmism.[284]

•        George Wald (1906–1997): American scientist who is best known for his work with pigments in the retina. He won a share of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit.[285]

•        W. Grey Walter (1910–1977): American neurophysiologist famous for his work on brain waves, and robotician.[286]

•        James D. Watson (1928–): 1962-Nobel-laureate and co-discover of the structure of DNA.[287][288]

•        Joseph Weber (1919–2000): American physicist, who gave the earliest public lecture on the principles behind the laser and the maser, and developed the first gravitational wave detectors (Weber bars).[289]

•        Steven Weinberg (1933–): American theoretical physicist. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1979 for the unification of electromagnetism and the weak force into the electroweak force.[290][291][292]

•        Victor Weisskopf (1908–2002): Austrian-American theoretical physicist, co-founder and board member of the Union of Concerned Scientists.[293]

•        Frank Whittle (1907–1996): English aerospace engineer, inventor, aviator and Royal Air Force officer. He is credited with independently inventing the turbojet engine (some years earlier than Germany's Dr. Hans von Ohain) and is regarded by many as the father of jet propulsion.[294]

•        Ian Wilmut (1944-): English embryologist and is currently Director of the Medical Research Council Centre for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known as the leader of the research group that in 1996 first cloned a mammal from an adult somatic cell, a Finnish Dorset lamb named Dolly.[295]

•        David Sloan Wilson (1949–): American evolutionary biologist, son of Sloan Wilson, proponent of multilevel selection theory and author of several popular books on evolution.[296]

•        Edward Witten (1951–): American theoretical physicist with a focus on mathematical physics who is a professor of Mathematical Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study. Witten is a researcher in superstring theory, a theory of quantum gravity, supersymmetric quantum field theories and other areas of mathematical physics.[297]

•        Lewis Wolpert CBE FRS FRSL (1929–): developmental biologist, author, and broadcaster.[298]

•        Steve Wozniak (1950–): co-founder of Apple Computer and inventor of the Apple I and Apple II.[299]

•        Elizur Wright (1804–1885): American mathematician and abolitionist, sometimes described as the "father of life insurance" for his pioneering work on actuarial tables.[300]

•        Will Wright (1960–): American computer game designer and co-founder of the game development company Maxis.[301]

•        Wilhelm Wundt (1832–1920): German physician, psychologist, physiologist, philosopher, and professor. He is regarded as the "father of experimental psychology".[302][303]

•        Eliezer Yudkowsky (1979–): American artificial intelligence researcher concerned with the singularity and an advocate of friendly artificial intelligence.[304]

•        Oscar Zariski (1899–1986): American mathematician and one of the most influential algebraic geometers of the 20th century.[305]

•        Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich (1914–1987): Soviet physicist born in Belarus. He played an important role in the development of Soviet nuclear and thermonuclear weapons, and made important contributions to the fields of adsorption and catalysis, shock waves, nuclear physics, particle physics, astrophysics, physical cosmology, and general relativity.[306][307]

•        Konrad Zuse (1910–1995): German civil engineer and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, which became operational in May 1941.[308][309]

•        Fritz Zwicky (1898–1974): Swiss astronomer and astrophysicist.[310]

[edit] Notes and references

1.       ^ "Prominent Russians: Zhores Alferov". RT.com. http://russiapedia.rt.com/prominent-russians/science-and-technology/zhores-alferov/. Retrieved 21 April 2012. "In public life the scientist is a strong supporter of communism, an atheist strongly objecting to advancement of religious education in Russia, and proponent of science and knowledge as the means to see a better future."

2.       ^ "Zhores I. Alferov". NNDB.com. http://www.nndb.com/people/039/000027955/. Retrieved 21 April 2012.

3.       ^ "Sometime after this, Hannes Alfvén was brought to the presence of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion. The latter was curious about this young Swedish scientist who was being much talked about. After a good chat, Ben Gurion came right to the point: "Do you believe in God?" Now, Hannes Alfvén was not quite prepared for this. So he considered his answer for a few brief seconds. But Ben-Gurion took his silence to be a "No." So he said: "Better scientist than you believes in God."" As told by Hannes Alfvén to Asoka Mendis, Hannes Alfvén Birth Centennial.

4.       ^ "Nuclear power is uniquely unforgiving: as Swedish Nobel physicist Hannes Alfvén said, "No acts of God can be permitted."" Amory Lovins, Inside NOVA - Nuclear After Japan: Amory Lovins, pbs.org.

5.       ^ "Alfven dismissed in his address religion as a "myth," and passionately criticized the big-bang theory for being dogmatic and violating basic standards of science, to be no less mythical than religion." Helge Kragh, Matter and Spirit in the Universe: Scientific and Religious Preludes to Modern Cosmology (2004), page 252.

6.       ^ "I find it more comfortable to say I'm an atheist, and for that I probably have someone like Dawkins to thank." - Jim Al-Khalili, BBC - Radio 4 - Science Explorer: Jim Al-Khalili featured in The Life Scientific, BBC.co.uk.com.

7.       ^ Philip W. Anderson (2011). "Imaginary Friend, Who Art in Heaven". More and Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon. World Scientific. p. 177. ISBN 9789814350129. "We atheists can, as he does, argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse."

8.       ^ "The same Arago who spent his time criticizing unfounded myths now peddled them. Arago the atheist now spoke of souls." Theresa Levitt, The shadow of enlightenment: optical and political transparency in France, 1789-1848, page 105.

9.       ^ Gordon Stein (1988). The encyclopedia of unbelief, Volume 1. Prometheus Books. p. 594. ISBN 9780879753078. "Svante Arrhenius (I859-I927), recipient of the Nobel Prize in chemistry (I903), was a declared atheist and the author of The Evolution of the Worlds and other works on cosmic physics."

10.     ^ NNDB.com. "Svante Arrhenius". Soylent Communications. http://www.nndb.com/people/875/000092599/. Retrieved 11 September 2012.

11.     ^ When asked by Rod Liddle in the documentary The Trouble with Atheism "Give me your views on the existence, or otherwise, of God", Peter Atkins replied "Well it's fairly straightforward: there isn't one. And there's no evidence for one, no reason to believe that there is one, and so I don't believe that there is one. And I think that it is rather foolish that people do think that there is one.""The Trouble with Atheism, UK Channel 4 TV". 2006-12-18.

12.     ^ "Although he became an atheist early in life and resented the strict upbringing of his parents’ religion, he identified with Jewish culture and joined several international fights against anti-Semitism." Craver, Carl F: "Axelrod, Julius", Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography Vol. 19 p. 122. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008.

13.     ^ "In religious matters he was an atheist." A.G. MacGregor: "Bailey, Edward Battersby", Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography Vol. 1 p. 393. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008.

14.     ^ "A confirmed agnostic, he [Bateson] was converted to atheism after attending a dinner where he tried to converse with a woman who was a creationist. "For many years what had been good enough for Darwin was good enough for me. Not long after that dreadful dinner, Richard Dawkins wrote to me to ask whether I would publicly affirm my atheism. I could see no reason why not." " Lewis Smith, 'Science has second thoughts about life', The Times (London), January 1, 2008, Pg. 24.

15.     ^ "William Bateson was a very militant atheist and a very bitter man, I fancy. Knowing that I was interested in biology, they invited me when I was still a school girl to go down and see the experimental garden. I remarked to him what I thought then, and still think, that doing research must be the most wonderful thing in the world and he snapped at me that it wasn’t wonderful at all, it was tedious, disheartening, annoying and anyhow you didn’t need an experimental garden to do research." Interview with Dr. Cecilia Gaposchkin by Owen Gingerich, March 5, 1968.

16.     ^ "Indeed, addressing the atheist, biologist George Beadle raised the question..." Ravi K. Zacharias, The real face of atheism, page 44.

17.     ^ "Beadle's views on this occasion were somewhat more tempered than David's characterization of him as a "vehement atheist," and from his earliest days "intolerant of religion and other forms of superstition." Paul Berg, Maxine Singer, George Beadle, an uncommon farmer: the emergence of genetics in the 20th century (2003), page 273.

18.     ^ Quantum Reflections. Cambridge University Press. 2000. p. xi. ISBN 9780521630085. "By now, he was also a 'Protestant Atheist', which he remained all his life."

19.     ^ "I am so sorry to hear of Asher's passing. I will miss his scientific insight and advice, but even more his humour and stubborn integrity. I remember when one of his colleagues complained about Asher's always rejecting his manuscript when they were sent to him to referee. Asher said in effect, "You should thank me. I am only trying to protect your reputation." He often pretended to consult me, a fellow atheist, on matters of religious protocol. As we waited in line to eat the hors d'oeuvres at a conference in Evanston, he said, "There is a prayer Jews traditionally say when they do something new that they have never done before. I am about to eat a new kind of non-Kosher food. Do you think I should say the prayer?" My wife and grown children, who are visiting us this new year, and remember Asher from when we all lived in Cambridge 20 years ago, join me in sending you our condolences for this sudden loss of an irrepressible and irreplaceable person. Please convey our feelings especially to your mother at this difficult time. " Charles H. Bennett's letter written to the family of Israeli physicist, Asher Peres, A selection of the many letters of condolence sent to the Peres family during January 2005 .

20.     ^ "The Bernals were originally Sephardic Jews who came to Ireland in 1840 from Spain via Amsterdam and London. They converted to Catholicism and John was Jesuit-educated. John enthusiastically supported the Easter Rising and, as a boy, he organised a Society for Perpetual Adoration. He moved away from religion as an adult, becoming an atheist." William Reville, John Desmond Bernal – The Sage.

21.     ^ "Dr. Paul Bert, the atheist Minister of Public Instruction, in M. Gambetta's Cabinet, made the next greatest sensation of the Congress." The Phrenological journal and science of health: incorporated with the Phrenological magazine, Volume 76, page 42.

22.     ^ Robert K. Wilcox (2010). The Truth About the Shroud of Turin: Solving the Mystery. Regnery Gateway. p. 23. ISBN 9781596986008. "In 1902, Marcellin P. Berthelot, often called the founder of modern organic chemistry, was one of France's most celebrated scientists—if not the world's. He was permanent secretary of the French Academy, having succeeded the giant Louis Pasteur, the renowned microbiologist. Unlike Delage, an agnostic, Berthelot was an atheist—and militantly so."

23.     ^ Thomas de Wesselow (2012). The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection. Penguin. ISBN 9781101588550. "Although Delage made it clear that he did not regard Jesus as the resurrected Son of God, his paper upset the atheist members of the Academy, including its secretary, Marcellin Berthelot, who prevented its full publication in the Academy's bulletin."

24.     ^ a b c d "Napoleon replies: "How comes it, then, that Laplace was an atheist? At the Institute neither he nor Monge, nor Berthollet, nor Lagrange believed in God. But they did not like to say so." Baron Gaspard Gourgaud, Talks of Napoleon at St. Helena with General Baron Gourgaud (1904), page 274.

25.     ^ Horgan, J. (1992) Profile: Hans A. Bethe – Illuminator of the Stars, Scientific American 267(4), 32-40.

26.     ^ Denis Brian (2001). The Voice Of Genius: Conversations With Nobel Scientists And Other Luminaries. Basic Books. p. 117. ISBN 9780738204475. "Bethe: "I am an atheist.""

27.     ^ Larry Hannant (1998). The Politics of Passion: Norman Bethune's Writing and Art. University of Toronto Press. ISBN 978-0-8020-0907-4. "Bethune was a communist and an atheist with a healthy contempt for his evangelical father."

28.     ^ "The grandson of a vicar on his father’s side, Blackett respected religious observances that were established social customs, but described himself as agnostic or atheist." Mary Jo Nye: "Blackett, Patrick Maynard Stuart." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Vol. 19 p. 293. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008.

29.     ^ In a Point of Inquiry podcast interview, Blackmore described religion as a collection of "really pernicious memes", "I think religious memeplexes are really amongst the nastiest viruses we have on the planet". Blackmore also practices Zen Buddhist meditation; later, when she was asked: "And you find this practice of Zen, the meditative practice, completely compatible with your lack of theism, your atheism...?" she replied: "Oh yes, I mean, there is no god in Buddhism...". Susan Blackmore - In Search of the Light, Point of Inquiry, December 15, 2006 (accessed April 1, 2008).

30.     ^ Simmons, John (1996). The Scientific 100: a rankings of the most influential scientists, past and present.. Carol Publishing Group. p. 16. ISBN 978-0-8065-1749-0. "His mother was warm and intelligent, and his father, as Bohr himself later recalled, recognized "that something was expected of me." The family was not at all devout, and Bohr became an atheist who regarded religious thought as harmful and misguided."

31.     ^ J. Faye, H. Folse, ed. (2010). Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy. Springer. p. 88. ISBN 9789048142996. "Planck was religious and had a firm belief in God; Bohr was not, but his objection to Planck's view had no anti-religious motive."

32.     ^ Science and Religion in Dialogue, Two Volume Set. John Wiley & Sons. p. 416. ISBN 9781405189217. "On the other hand Bohr wrote of his admiration for the writing and presentation of Kierkegaard – at the same time stating he could not accept some of it. Part of this may have followed from Kierkegaard being a very avowed, yet rather circuitous proponent of a costly Christian faith, while after a youth of confirming faith Bohr himself was a non-believer."

33.     ^ Larry Witham (2006). The Measure of God: History's Greatest Minds Wrestle with Reconciling Science and Religion. Harper Collins. pp. 138-139. ISBN 9780060858339. ""Bohr's atheism, the counter piece of Einstein's monotheism,... was more affined to traditional Far Eastern philosophy,” according to Stent. ...The young Bohr thus lived in two worlds, but mostly the cultural Christianity of the Danish middle class. As a young man, he had read Søren Kierkegaard, a fellow Dane and a Christian existentialist from the nineteenth century, with some enthusiasm. But he finally faced a religious crisis, and by the time he went to England to study physics, the idea of God had lost its appeal. The aim of life was happiness, he wrote his fiancée, making it impossible “that a person must beg from and bargain with fancied powers infinitely stronger than himself." ... In his only published paper on the topic of religion, Bohr spoke not of deities and doctrines but of psychological experience."

34.     ^ "Since his childhood in Vienna Bondi had been an atheist, developing from an early age a view on religion that associated it with repression and intolerance. This view, which he shared with Hoyle, never left him. On several occasions he spoke out on behalf of freethinking, so-called, and became early on active in British atheist or "humanist" circles. From 1982 to 1999, he was president of the British Humanist Association, and he also served as president of the Rationalist Press Association of United Kingdom." Helge Kragh: "Bondi, Hermann", Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography Vol. 19 p. 343. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008. Accessed via Gale Virtual Reference Library April 29, 2008.

35.     ^ In a letter to the Guardian, Jane Wynne Willson, Vice-President of the British Humanist Association, added to his obituary: "Also president of the Rationalist Press Association from 1982 until his death, and with a particular interest in Indian rationalism, Hermann was a strong supporter of the Atheist Centre in Andhra Pradesh. He and his wife Christine visited the centre a number of times, and the hall in the science museum there bears his name. When presented with a prestigious international award, he divided a large sum of money between the Atheist Centre and women's health projects in Mumbai." Obituary letter: Hermann Bondi, Guardian, September 23, 2005 (accessed April 29, 2008).

36.     ^ Boyer, Paul. "A Path to Atheism". Freedom From Religion Foundation. Retrieved February 3, 2007.

37.     ^ "...he always remained true to his own concepts and ideals and did not dissimulate. His open designation of himself as "atheist" in "Who's Who in America" and his opposition to the invasion of the Soviet Union by the Allies..." H J Muller, 'Dr. Calvin B. Bridges', Nature 143, 191-192 (04 Feb 1939).

38.     ^ "Percy Williams Bridgman". NNDB.com. http://www.nndb.com/people/750/000099453/. Retrieved 24 April 2012. "He was raised in the Congregational Church, but faith in God clashed with his well-known analytical nature and he told his family as a young man that he could not in good conscience become a church member."

39.     ^ Maila L. Walter (1990). Science and Cultural Crisis: An Intellectual Biography of Percy Williams Bridgman (1882-1961). Stanford University Press. pp. 14–15. ISBN 978-0-8047-1796-0. "Raymond Bridgman was extremely disappointed with his son's rejection of his religious views. Near the end of his life, however, he offered a conciliatory interpretation that allowed him to accept Percy's commitment to honesty and integrity as a moral equivalent to religion."

40.     ^ "Paul Broca (1824-80)". sciencemuseum.org.uk. http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/broughttolife/people/paulbroca.aspx. Retrieved 12 April 2012. "He was a left-wing atheist who argued against African enslavement."

41.     ^ Kristi Coale (07/25/97). "Seeding Intelligence". Wired Magazine. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1997/07/5433. Retrieved 17 July 2012. ""I've been an atheist - I had found it difficult to have religious beliefs and scientific ones," Brooks explained. "But I've accepted that I have a duality - there's a human way of interacting with people but also a mechanistic explanation of what people are and how they work.""

42.     ^ "Some Things I Do Not Believe In: Angels, Astrology,... Devils, Elves, Faeries, Faith, Gods, "Intelligent Design", Leprechauns, ...Magic..."[1]

43.     ^ "Although in her youth she had shared her father's Zionist sympathies, she was not otherwise involved in Jewish affairs and was by conviction an atheist." 'BRUNSWICK, Ruth Jane Mack (Feb. 17, 1897-Jan. 24, 1946)' in Notable American Women: 1607-1950. Retrieved August 01, 2008, from Credo Reference

44.     ^ "As Richard Dawkins points out, I have no obligation to explain why I am an atheist, it's for those who believe in a god to supply evidence." - Robert Cailliau. [2]

45.     ^ ""Having a reasonable grounding in statistics and probability and no belief in luck, fate, karma, or god(s), the only casino game that interests me is blackjack," he wrote in a .plan file." - John D. Carmack, David Kushner, Masters of Doom: How two guys created an Empire and transformed Pop Culture (2003).

46.     ^ "Why (Almost All) Cosmologists are Atheists". Preposterousuniverse.com. http://preposterousuniverse.com/writings/nd-paper/. Retrieved 2012-06-03.

47.     ^ Andrew Brown (1997). The neutron and the bomb: a biography of Sir James Chadwick. Oxford University Press. p. 362. ISBN 9780198539926. "He was a lifelong atheist and felt no need to develop religious faith as he approached the end of his life."

48.     ^ "In his later years, Chandra had openly admitted to being an atheist which also meant that he subscribed to no religion in the customary sense of the word." Vishveshwara, S. 2000. Leaves from an unwritten diary: S. Chandrasekhar, Reminiscences and Reflections, Current Science, 78(8):1025-1033.

49.     ^ "Georges Charpak". NNDB.com. http://www.nndb.com/people/811/000099514/. Retrieved 17 July 2012.

50.     ^ "I once wrote a book about the Victorian crisis of faith and entitled it, borrowing from a poem of Hardy's, God's Funeral. I included Carlyle, [...] as well as the out-and-out atheists such as W K Clifford [...]." A N Wilson, 'Browning's faith kept the snake wriggling underfoot', Daily Telegraph, August 20, 2001, Pg. 19.

51.     ^ When describing a total solar eclipse, Close wrote: "It was simultaneously ghastly, beautiful, supernatural. Even for a 21st century atheist, the vision was such that I thought, "If there is a heaven, this is what its entrance is like." The heavenly vision demanded music by Mozart; instead we had the crickets." Frank Close, 'Dark side of the moon', The Guardian, August 9, 2001, Guardian Online Pages, Pg. 8.

52.     ^ "Conway propped up the pillow behind his head and grinned. "I like showing off. When I make a new discovery, and I really like telling people about it. I guess I'm not so much a mathematician as a teacher. In America, kids aren't supposed to like mathematics. It's so sad.' Conway sat up suddenly. 'Most people think that mathematics is cold. But it's not at all! For me, the whole damn thing is sensual and exciting. I like what it looks like, and I get a hell of a lot more pleasure out of math than most people do out of art!' He relaxed slightly, and he lowered his voice. 'I feel like an artist. I like beautiful things - they're there already; man doesn't have to create it. I don't believe in God, but I believe that nature is unbelievably subtle and clever. In physics, for instance, the real answer to a problem is usually so subtle and surprising that it wasn't even considered in the first place. That the speed of light is a constant - impossible! Nobody even thought about it. And quantum mechanics is even worse, but it's so beautiful, and it works!"", John Horton Conway in an interview with Charles Seife, The Sciences (1994).

53.     ^ Kendall, Paul (March 14, 2010). "Professor Brian Cox: bringing the solar system to your living room". The Daily Telegraph (London). http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/7435109/Professor-Brian-Cox-bringing-the-solar-system-to-your-living-room.html.

54.     ^ "Dr. Brian Cox (science consultant) - Sunshine - Interview". Sci-fi-online.com. 2007-08-27. http://www.sci-fi-online.com/2006_Interviews/07-08-27_brian-cox.htm. Retrieved 2012-06-03.

55.     ^ "Yet they [the NCSE] can afford to ignore us because, in the end, where else can we atheists go for support against creationists? [...] Am I grousing because, as an atheist and a non-accommodationist, my views are simply ignored by the NAS and NCSE? Not at all. I don't want these organizations to espouse or include my viewpoint. I want religion and atheism left completely out of all the official discourse of scientific societies and organizations that promote evolution." Jerry Coyne, 'Truckling to the Faithful: A Spoonful of Jesus Helps Darwin Go Down', April 22, 2009 (accessed 23 April 2009).

56.     ^ Francis Crick, What Mad Pursuit: a Personal View of Scientific Discovery, Basic Books reprint edition, 1990, ISBN 0-465-09138-5, p. 145.

57.     ^ "How I Got Inclined Towards Atheism". Positiveatheism.org. http://www.positiveatheism.org/india/s1990a01.htm. Retrieved 2012-06-03.

58.     ^ Mark Steyn identify Crick as an atheist. See: The Twentieth-Century Darwin by Mark Steyn, published in The Atlantic Monthly, October 2004.

59.     ^ "Francis Crick was an evangelical atheist."Francis Crick's Legacy for Neuroscience: Between the α and the Ω

60.     ^ "Instead, it is interlaced with descriptions of Crick’s vacations, parties and assertions of atheism — occasionally colourful stuff that drains the intellectual drama from the code breaking."Genome Human

61.     ^ "There is Crick the mentor, Crick the atheist, Crick the free-thinker, and Crick the playful."Entertaining Dr Crick

62.     ^ Crick, 86, said: "The god hypothesis is rather discredited." Do our genes reveal the hand of God?

63.     ^ "George Washington Crile". The Educational Broadcasting Corporation.. 2002. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/redgold/innovators/bio_crile.html. Retrieved 10 September 2012. "Although both parents were English Lutherans, Crile, after reading Paine, Ingersoll, and Voltaire in his college years, became a lifelong atheist, devoted to the concept of intellectual freedom."

64.     ^ "James F. Crow dies". NCSE. January 5, 2012. http://ncse.com/news/2012/01/james-f-crow-dies-007045. Retrieved 21 April 2012. "In his published work, Crow seems not to have mentioned the creationism/evolution controversy at all. But he was deeply concerned with the integrity of science education nevertheless. In a June 1–3, 2005, interview with the Oral History of Human Genetics Project, he was asked how he felt about the persistence of the antievolutionist movement despite the continued advances in understanding evolution. "I am puzzled by this," he answered, adding, "I'm especially puzzled by literate, intelligent, often scientifically trained people who are into intelligent design. ... The argument of so-called irreducible complexity that the intelligent design people make such a to-do over, I think that's a non-issue. ... That to me is a very, very old argument. I'd say the elephant trunk is complicated, too, and a lot more complicated than the bacterial flagellum. So what's new in this argument?" Reiterating "I am worried about creationism," he offered his view about science and religion: "My own views are atheistic, but I don't go around preaching atheism."

65.     ^ Warren Allen Smith (2000). Who's who in hell: a handbook and international directory for humanists, freethinkers, naturalists, rationalists, and non-theists. Barricade Books. p. 259. ISBN 9781569801581. "Curie, Pierre (1859—1906) A codiscoverer of radium, Pierre Curie was an atheist."

66.     ^ Jonathan Israel (2011). Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750-1790. Oxford University Press. p. 115. ISBN 978-0-19-954820-0. "D'Alembert, though privately an atheist and materialist, presented the respectable public face of 'la philosophie' in the French capital while remaining henceforth uninterruptedly aligned with Voltaire."

67.     ^ James E. Force, Richard Henry Popkin, ed. (1990). Essays on the Context, Nature, and Influence of Isaac Newton's Theology. Springer. p. 167. ISBN 9780792305835. "Unlike the French and English deists, and unlike the scientific atheists such as Diderot, d'Alembert, and d'Holbach,..."

68.     ^ "She advised him that he risked being called up, and suggested an unusual way to avoid the draft - by becoming a priest, one of the categories exempt from military service. Dalton discovered a little-known religious group called the Universal Life Church of California which for $25 would "ordain" anyone. He duly sent off a cheque and within days was delighted to learn that he was now a bona fide Minister of Religion. It became a running joke and his friends frequently addressed letters to the Reverend Howard Dalton; as a life-long atheist, he particularly relished the irony of his new title." 'Obituary of Professor Sir Howard Dalton, Microbiologist who became Defra's Chief Scientific Adviser just after the foot-and-mouth outbreak', Daily Telegraph January 15, 2008, Pg. 25.

69.     ^ Dawkins identifies himself as an atheist in his article "A Challenge to Atheists: Come Out of the Closet," Free Inquiry, Summer 2002. Excerpt reprinted at Positiveatheism.org

70.     ^ Memoir of Augustus De Morgan. Longmans, Green, and Company. 1882. p. 393. "So you called me an atheist vagabond, fancying that Voltaire was an atheist : he was, in fact, theistic to bigotry, and anti-revolutionist to the same extent."

71.     ^ "There is a word in our language with which I shall not confuse this subject, both on account of the dishonourable use which is frequently made of it, as an imputation thrown by one sect upon another, and of the variety of significations attached to it. I shall use the world Anti-Deism to signify the opinion that there does not exist a Creator who made and sustains the Universe." Augustus De Morgan, An essay on probabilities: and on their application to life contingencies and insurance offices (1838), page 22.

72.     ^ John Beloff (1997). Parapsychology: A Concise History. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 47. ISBN 9780312173760. "He seems an unlikely convert considering that his atheistic views had debarred him from a position at Oxford or Cambridge but his involvement with spiritualism was partly due to his wife, Sophia."

73.     ^ George William Foote, ed. (1887). Progress: a monthly magazine of advanced thought, Volume 7. Progressive Publishing Co.. p. 127. "DELAMBRE (Jean Baptiste Joseph), French astronomer, born at Amiens, 19 Sept. 1749, studied under Lalande and became, like his master, an Atheist."

74.     ^ "Denjoy was an atheist, but tolerant of others' religious views; he was very interested in philosophical, psychological, and social issues." "Denjoy, Arnaud", Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography Vol. 17, p.219. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008.

75.     ^ "First of all, I do not believe in the supernatural, so I take it for granted that consciousness has a material explanation. I also do not believe in insoluble problems, therefore I believe that this explanation is accessible in principle to reason, and that one day we will understand consciousness just as we today understand what life is, whereas once this was a deep mystery." David Deutsch in an interview with Philosophy Now magazine, Philosophy Now, December/January 2001 issue.

76.     ^ "As an atheist, Diamond is locked into the argument that environmental causes are the primary reasons for a society to fail or succeed." Jonas E Alexis, Christianity's Dangerous Idea: How the Christian Principle & Spirit Offer the Best Explanation for Life & Why Other Alternatives Fail (2010), page 199.

77.     ^ Werner Heisenberg recollects a friendly conversation among young participants at the 1927 Solvay Conference about Einstein's and Planck's views on religion. Wolfgang Pauli, Heisenberg and Dirac took part in it. Among other things, Dirac said: "I cannot understand why we idle discussing religion. If we are honest — and as scientists honesty is our precise duty — we cannot help but admit that any religion is a pack of false statements, deprived of any real foundation. The very idea of God is a product of human imagination.[...] I do not recognize any religious myth, at least because they contradict one another.[...]" Pauli jokingly said: "Well, I'd say that also our friend Dirac has got a religion and the first commandment of this religion is: God does not exist and Paul Dirac is his prophet." Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-131622-9.

78.     ^ a b "... I [Pauling] am not, however, militant in my atheism. The great English theoretical physicist Paul Dirac is a militant atheist. I suppose he is interested in arguing about the existence of God. I am not. It was once quipped that there is no God and Dirac is his prophet." Linus Pauling & Daisaku Ikeda (1992). A Lifeling Quest for Peace: A Dialogue. Jones & Bartlett. p. page 22. ISBN 0-86720-277-7.

79.     ^ Sara Lippincott (August 30, 2009). "The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom' by Graham Farmelo". Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/2009/aug/30/entertainment/ca-graham-farmelo30. Retrieved 9 June 2012. "Dirac was contemptuous of philosophy and, as many scientists do, professed atheism. But it was a narrow sort, mainly dismissive of religious orthodoxy. In notes he wrote in 1933, he embraces another creed: "[T]his article of faith is that the human race will continue to live forever and will develop and progress without limit . . . Living is worthwhile if one can contribute in some small way to this endless chain of progress.""

80.     ^ Helen Brown (23 Jan 2009). "The Strangest Man: the Hidden Life of Paul Dirac by Graham Farmelo". The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/4316309/The-Strangest-Man-the-Hidden-Life-of-Paul-Dirac-by-Graham-Farmelo-review.html. Retrieved 9 June 2012. "Dirac’s story ends with a whimper. As a young man he had joked that physicists were all washed up by 30 and as he aged his powers waned. The Cambridge physics department took away his parking space and an outraged Manci insisted he take up a fellowship at Florida State University. He died in 1984, aged 82. An atheist, he was buried under a gravestone chosen by Manci. It read “because God said it should be so”."

81.     ^ H. B. G. Casimir (2010). Haphazard Reality: Half a Century of Science. Amsterdam University Press. p. 151. ISBN 9789089642004. "Kramers was certainly not a dogmatic atheist like, for instance, Dirac in his younger years, whose attitude was summed up by Pauli in one famous sentence: "Our friend Dirac has a religion; and the main tenet of that religion is: 'There is no God and Dirac was his prophet."

82.     ^ Kelly Ryan Harriger (2009). God: An Unauthorized Biography. Xulon Press. p. 49. ISBN 9781607916147. "When Einstein's General Theory of Relativity became commonly accepted around 1927 as proof that the Universe had a beginning, the astronomer and astrophysicist Sir Arthur Eddington, an atheist, commented in his book The Nature of the Physical World: "Religion first became possible for a reasonable man of science in the year 1927." In all fairness to Sir Eddington, it should be noted that many of his defenders have complained that this statement has been used out of context because it's not consistent with Eddington's personal atheistic views..."

83.     ^ "Arthur Eddington". Quotable Atheist: Ammunition for Nonbelievers, Political Junkies, Gadflies, and Those Generally Hell-Bound. Nation  ;Books. 2008. ISBN 9781568584195.

84.     ^ Marcia Bartusiak. "Einstein and Beyond". National Geographic Society. p. 3. http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/space/universe/beyond-einstein/#page=3. Retrieved 21 August 2012. "With or without that extra ingredient, the basic recipe for the expanding universe was Einstein's. But it was left to others to identify one revolutionary implication: a moment of cosmic creation. In 1931 the Belgian priest and astrophysicist Georges Lemaître put the fleeing galaxies into reverse and imagined them eons ago merged in a fireball of dazzling brilliance—a "primeval atom," as he put it. "The evolution of the world can be compared to a display of fireworks that has just ended: some few red wisps, ashes and smoke," wrote Lemaître. From this poetic scenario arose today's big bang. Many were appalled by this concept. "The notion of a beginning… is repugnant to me," said British astrophysicist Arthur Eddington in 1931."

85.     ^ "Thomas Edison." Microsoft® Student  2009 [DVD]. Redmond, WA: Microsoft Corporation, 2008

86.     ^ "A merciful and loving Creator he [Edison] considers not to be believed in. Nature, the supreme power, he recognizes and respects, but does not worship. Nature is not merciful and loving, but wholly merciless, indifferent." "No Immortality of the Soul" Says Thomas A. Edison, By Edward Marshall, The New York Times, October 2, 1910 (Retrieved 3 July 2010)

87.     ^ Ronald Clark (2011). Einstein: The Life and Times. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN 9781448202706. "That Einstein's attitude was the result more of muddle than agnostic scruple seems clear from a letter which he wrote less than two years later when Paul Ehrenfest ruled himself out from becoming Einstein's successor by roundly declaring himself an atheist."

88.     ^ Thomas Levenson (2004). Einstein in Berlin. Random House of Canada. p. 172. ISBN 9780553378443. "The man he had hoped would succeed him in Prague, Paul Ehrenfest, refiased to compromise his true atheist's principles. Einstein scolded him. "Your refusal to acknowledge a religious affiliation" was just this side of "willful stupidity," he assured him, with the benefit of recent experience. Once he became a professor Ehrenfest could revert to unbelief."

89.     ^ Natalie Angier (April 4, 2011). "Paths of Discovery, Lighted by a Bug Man’s Insights". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/05/science/05angier.html?pagewanted=all. Retrieved 19 April 2012. "Dr. Eisner died from complications of his disease on March 25, at the age of 81. He had a notoriously mordant sense of humor: “I may not believe in God,” he once said, “but I don’t ring doorbells saying I’m a Seventh-Day Atheist,”..."

90.     ^ Nielsen, Stevan Lars & Ellis, Albert. (1994). "A discussion with Albert Ellis: Reason, emotion and religion", Journal of Psychology and Christianity, 13(4), Win 1994. pp. 327-341

91.     ^ Vithal C Nadkarni (Apr 28, 2011). "Are Facts Sacred?". The Economics Times. http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-04-28/news/29482882_1_beast-beauty-paul-erdos. Retrieved 6 June 2012. "The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos was a confirmed bachelor and atheist."

92.     ^ Varadaraja Raman (2005). Variety in Religion And Science: Daily Reflections. iUniverse. p. 256. ISBN 9780595358403. "Erdös had a pungent wit. As an atheist who had suffered under fascist regimes, he described God as a Supreme Fascist."

93.     ^ Nathalie Sinclair, William Higginson, ed. (2006). Mathematics and the Aesthetic: New Approaches to an Ancient Affinity. Springer. p. 36. ISBN 9780387305264. "Erdös, an atheist, named 'the Book' the place where God keeps aesthetically perfect proofs."

94.     ^ "50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God". JPararajasingham. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s47ArcQL-XQ. Retrieved 14 May 2012.

95.     ^ "Everett was a life-long atheist, but he did not let that stand in his way as St. John's was well-regarded academically and socially." Peter Byrne, The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett III: Multiple Universes, Mutual Assured Destruction, and the Meltdown of a Nuclear Family (2010), page 29.

96.     ^ " An atheist, Faber speaks like an evangelist as she weaves quantum physics and astronomy to describe the dawn of time. "I think that the story of the creation of the universe is the most inspiring and exciting story science can tell. I mean, who would have thought I could be telling you about events 10 to the minus 35 seconds after the big bang?" she said, seated in her cluttered, sunny UC Santa Cruz office amid photos of her two daughters and her husband. "It's just totally inspiring." " Mike Swift interviewing Faber, 'Last outer space repair of Hubble telescope pairs genius of two South Bay women', Contra Costa Times (California), May 9, 2009.

97.     ^ "The study of medicine also contributed to a loss of religious faith and to becoming atheist." Michael Heidelberger, Nature from within: Gustav Theodor Fechner and his psychophysical worldview, page 21.

98.     ^ "Festinger, a professed atheist, was an original thinker and a restless, highly motivated individual with (in his words) "little tolerance for boredom". " Franz Samelson: "Festinger, Leon", American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000 (accessed April 28, 2008) [3].

99.     ^ Feynman was of Jewish birth, but described himself as "an avowed atheist" by his early youth in Freethought of the Day, Freedom From Religion Foundation, May 11, 2006.

100.    ^ "Having abandoned the tenets of Judaism at 13, he never wavered in his gentle atheism, nor in his determination to stay away from matters about which he had opinions but no expertise." John Morrish reviewing the collection of Feynman's letters Don't You Have Time to Think?, "Particle Physics: The Route to Pop Stardom", Independent on Sunday (London), July 24, 2005, p. 21.

101.    ^ "James Franck was born in Hamburg, the son of a Jewish banker. ...As he said, science was his God and nature his religion. He did not insist that his daughters attend religious instruction classes (Religionsunterricht) in school. But he was very proud of his Jewish heritage..." David Nachmansohn, German-Jewish pioneers in science, 1900-1933: highlights in atomic physics, chemistry, and biochemistry, page 62.

102.    ^ "[Freud and Jung] were close for several years, but Jung's ambition, and his growing commitment to religion and mysticism — most unwelcome to Freud, an aggressive atheist — finally drove them apart." Sigmund Freud, by Peter Gay, The TIME 100: The Most Important People of the Century.

103.    ^ "About the same time he stopped observing Jewish religious rituals and rejected a cause he had once embraced, Zionism. He "just didn't want to participate in any division of the human race, whether religious or political," he explained decades later (Wershba, p. 12), by which time he was a confirmed atheist." Keay Davidson: "Fromm, Erich Pinchas", American National Biography Online, Feb. 2000 (accessed April 28, 2008) [4].

104.    ^ Atlantseglaren från Bromma vill tänja gränsen mot rymden, Dagens Nyheter, December 10, 2006.

105.    ^ ANDERSON: "What, uh, one thing I’m fascinated with is, of course, George Gamow left the university in ’59 [1956], and Edward Teller had left in 1946 [1945] and went to the University of Chicago. But do you have any recollections of maybe some of the, anything between Dr. Marvin and Dr. Gamow, as far as, just before he left and went to Colorado?" NAESER: "Ah, no, I don’t know of any. I know Gamow made no, never did hide the fact that he was an atheist, but whether that came into the picture, I don’t know. But the story around the university was that Gamow and Mrs. Gamow were divorced, but they were in the same social circles some of the time, he thought it was better to get out of Washington. That’s why he went to Ohio State." The George Washington University and Foggy Bottom Historical Encyclopedia, Gamow, George and Edward Teller, October 23, 1996.

106.    ^ Grote Reber. "The Big Bang Is Bunk". 21st Century Science Associates.. p. 44. http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2011/BigBang_Bunk.pdf. Retrieved 28 May 2012. "After the initial mathematical work on relativity the¬ ory had been done, the Big Bang theory itself was invented by a Belgian priest, Georges lemaitre, im¬ proved upon by an avowed atheist, George Gamow, and is now all but universally accepted by those who hold advanced degrees in astronomy and the physical sciences, despite its obvious absurdity."

107.    ^ Simon Singh (2010). Big Bang. HarperCollins UK. ISBN 9780007375509. "Surprisingly, the atheist George Gamow enjoyed the Papal attention given to his field of research."

108.    ^ Ramesh Chopra (2005). Academic Dictionary Of Philosophy. Gyan Books. p. 143. ISBN 9788182052246. "Renowned French chemist. He was one of the greatest chemists in Europe at the time. He made innumerable discoveries in the science, and even the restored royalty made him a Peer of France, although he worked politically with the anti-clericals. He was closely associated with Arago and shared his atheism."

109.    ^ "I am an atheist, that is, I think nothing exists except and beyond nature."Ginzburg's autobiography at Nobelprize.org

110.    ^ "Gordon Gould". NNDB.com. http://www.nndb.com/people/658/000104346/. Retrieved 7 June 2012.

111.    ^ What I don't like about Richard [Dawkins] is not so much what he knows or doesn't know as the dogmatic way in which he says things. I think that is a poor advertisement for science, because the whole thing about being a scientist is that you shouldn't be prejudiced, you should have an open mind. So, I don't believe in God but that is a belief, not some thing I know. I believe I love my husband, but I couldn't prove it to you one way or the other. How could I? I just know I do. My particular belief is that there is no Deity out there, but I can't prove it and therefore I would not have the temerity to tell other people they're wrong. The coinage of proof is not appropriate for belief and Dawkins thinks it is. But if you keep an open mind, that doesn't mean you swallow anything whole. As someone has said, 'Believing in anything is as bad as believing in nothing.' 'Brain Teaser: Susan Greenfield talks to Peter McCarthy', Third Way, November 2000.

112.    ^ Grosch, Herbert (July 15, 1970). "Smithsonian National Museum of American History - Computer Oral History Collection, 1969-1973, 1977 - Interview with Herbert R. Grosch". http://invention.smithsonian.org/downloads/fa_cohc_tr_gros700715.pdf. Retrieved 12 April 2012. "I made them quit essentially. When I was nine years old I decided that I was an atheist. So I told them, "Well you shouldn't go to church anymore, it's silly." Well, apparently they'd been going to church primarily for my benefit. So after I refused to go, they quit going too."

113.    ^ "The question of the origin of the matter in the universe is no longer thought to be beyond the range of science — everything can be created from nothing...it is fair to say that the universe is the ultimate free lunch." Alan Guth, The Inflationary Universe: The Quest for a New Theory of Cosmic Origins (1998). q:Atheism

114.    ^ Shaposhnikova, T. O. (1999). Jacques Hadamard: A Universal Mathematician. American Mathematical Soc.. pp. 33–34. ISBN 978-0-8218-1923-4. "In 1924, Hadamard recounted his meetings with Hermite: "...When Hermite loved to direct to me remarks such as: "He who strays from the paths traced by Providence crashes." These were the words of a profoundly religious man, but an atheist like me understood them very well, especially when he added at other times: "In mathematics, our role is more that of servant than master."""

115.    ^ "Religions are technologies that are evolved over millennia to do this and many religions are very effective in doing this. I'm an atheist, I don't believe that gods actually exist, but I part company with the New Atheists because I believe that religion is an adaptation that generally works quite well to suppress selfishness, to create moral communities, to help people work together, trust each other and collaborate towards common ends." Jonathan Haidt, Interview with Jonathan Haidt, Vox Popoli November 19, 2007 (accessed April 14, 2008).

116.    ^ "The three laboratories unanimously agreed that the cloth dated from between 1260 and 1390, a date consistent with its known history—but which demolished the notion of its being the burial shroud of Christ. Hall, who made no secret of his atheism, had no hesitation in enjoying the public attention that this definitive result attracted." Robert Hedges, 'Hall, Edward Thomas [Teddy] (1924–2001)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, Oxford University Press, January 2005 (accessed May 2, 2008).

117.    ^ " 'Unequalled stability and sweetness of disposition' are said to have been among his domestic virtues, while in politics and religion he was 'a declared democrat and avowed atheist' (The Times)." Jean Jones: 'Hall, Sir James, of Dunglass, fourth baronet (1761–1832)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004; online edition, October 2006 (accessed May 1, 2008).

118.    ^ "It can hardly have been due to any reluctance on Newton's part to becoming too closely involved with Halley, the well-known atheist." Derek Gjertsen, The Newton Handbook (1986), page 250.

119.    ^ "He and the Bishop of Oxford staged another version of the great debate between Thomas Henry ('Darwin's bulldog') Huxley and Bishop ('Soapy Sam') Wilberforce that followed the publication of Darwin's Origin Of Species. The present Bishop defended the new Darwinian orthodoxy, but Dr Halstead, an atheist, took the line that the former Bishop of Oxford had been quite right to oppose Darwin's thesis. But that too was entirely characteristic. He told me that he was a member of the Athenaeum only because it had a painting of Darwin in the lobby." Tim Radford, 'A passion for dinosaurs: Obituary of Beverly Halstead', The Guardian (London), May 2, 1991.

120.    ^ Dan Barker (2011). The Good Atheist: Living a Purpose-Filled Life Without God. Ulysses Press. p. 176. ISBN 9781569758465. "Speaking of her 55-year marriage to Frederick Hamerstrom (a nephew of Charles Darwin), Fran quipped: “You'll notice that our 'pair bond' has lasted fairly well and I think it's because we're both remarkably tolerant people. He's an agnostic and I'm an atheist, and we've put up with each other all this time!""

121.    ^ "Hardy... was a stringent atheist..." Hit Play on Ramanujan, by Lisa Drostova, East Bay Express, April 30, 2003. Retrieved October 7, 2007.

122.    ^ "The first Bombe to be delivered was named Agnus by Turing: a joke that atheist Hardy might have made..." Alan Turing — a Cambridge Scientific Mind, by Andrew Hodges, Cambridge Scientific Minds (Cambridge University Press, 2002) Retrieved July 2, 2007.

123.    ^ "Outside the field of scientific research, he was known for his outspoken atheism: belief in God, he once declared, is not only incompatible with good science, but is "damaging to the wellbeing of the human race." “The Telegraph. [5]

124.    ^ Boyett, Jason. "Stephen Hawking says there's no creator God; the twitter verse reacts", The Washington Post, September 3, 2010, Retrieved April 25, 2011.

125.    ^ "Ernst Mach". Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Wed. May 21, 2008. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ernst-mach/. Retrieved 4 September 2012. "Hering and Mach were atheists, and disbelieved in a soul, but still accepted the idea that nature had internal direction."

126.    ^ "Officially, the particle is called the Higgs boson, but its elusive nature and fundamental role in the creation of the universe led a prominent scientist to rename it the God particle. The name has stuck, but makes Higgs wince and raises the hackles of other theorists. "I wish he hadn't done it," he says. "I have to explain to people it was a joke. I'm an atheist, but I have an uneasy feeling that playing around with names like that could be unnecessarily offensive to people who are religious." Ian Sample, 'The God of Small Things', The Guardian, November 17, 2007, Weekend pages, Pg. 44.

127.    ^ Liberato Cardellini: "A final and more personal question: You defined yourself as “an atheist who is moved by religion”. Looking at the tenor of your life and the many goals you have achieved, one wonders where your inner force comes from." Roald Hoffmann: "The atheism and the respect for religion come from the same source. I observe that in every culture on Earth, absolutely every one, human beings have constructed religious systems. There is a need in us to try to understand, to see that there is something that unites us spiritually. So scientists who do not respect religion fail in their most basic task—observation. Human beings need the spiritual. The same observation reveals to me a multitude of religious constructions—gods of nature, spirits, the great monotheistic religions. It seems to me there can’t be a God or gods; there are just manifestations of a human-constructed spirituality." Liberato Cardellini, Looking for Connections: An Interview with Roald Hoffmann, page 1634.

128.    ^ "A reader who has suffered me so far will have realised how much of my mental energy had been hitherto absorbed in a fruitless search for an intellectually compelling rationale to rescue some fragments from the wreckage of my family faith. The mood of liberation I experienced when I finally discarded the last remnant of theism was no less exhilarating than that of Bunyan's Pilgrim when the burden of sin fell from his back. [...] In retrospect, the final steps seem as sudden as they were painless. [...] As I looked upward [at the night sky], I realised that the sole prospect was limitless expanse of unthreatening and impersonal emptiness — but for unapproachable galaxies — of a universe without purpose of punishment or reward for a lately arrived animal species, free to make or mar its own destiny without help or hindrance from above." Lancelot Hogben, Lancelot Hogben: Scientific Humanist: An Unauthorised Autobiography, edited by Adrian and Ann Hogben. Merlin Press, 1998.

129.    ^ "Russell A. Hulse". NNDB.com. http://www.nndb.com/people/992/000099695/. Retrieved 17 July 2012. "I consider myself a very moral person but I do not need a religion for that."

130.    ^ "He has worked with monkeys in laboratories and in the wild. He has been a media don, a campaigner against nuclear weapons and the holder of a chair in parapsychological research who was dedicated to debunking even the possibility of telepathy or survival after death. He is an atheist, and the man who suggested to Richard Dawkins the analogy of viruses of the mind for religions; yet nowadays he talks as if spirituality were the thing that makes us human." Andrew Brown interviewing Humphrey, 'A life in science: The human factor', The Guardian, July 29, 2006, Review Pages, Pg. 13.

131.    ^ "Despite his atheism Huxley could appreciate Teilhard de Chardin's vision of evolution, and like his grandfather T. H. Huxley he believed progress could be described in biological terms." Robert Olby, 'Huxley, Sir Julian Sorell (1887–1975)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, May 2007 (accessed May 2, 2008).

132.    ^ Jacob, The Statue Within, pp 20–57. Quotes from pp 42 and 53.

133.    ^ "Irène Joliot-Curie". Making the Modern World. 1956-03-17. http://www.makingthemodernworld.org.uk/people/BG.0087/. Retrieved 2012-06-03.

134.    ^ "Raised in a completely nonreligious family, Joliot never attended any church and was a thoroughgoing atheist all his life." Perrin, Francis: "Joliot, Frédéric", Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography Vol. 7 p. 151. Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons, 2008.

135.    ^ "It was to her grandfather, a convinced freethinker, that Irène owed her atheism, later politically expressed as anticlericalism." Joliot-Curie, Irène. Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 2008. Encyclopedia.com. 17 Mar. 2012.

136.    ^ "Scientists in Britain, where the film will premiere at next month's London Film Festival, with general release in December, dismissed the intelligent design lobby's expropriation of the film. Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London and an atheist, said: 'I find it sad that people with intrinsically foolish viewpoints don't recognise this as a naturally beautiful film, but have to attach their absurd social agendas to it.' “David Smith, 'How the penguin's life story inspired the US religious right: Antarctic family values', The Observer, September 18, 2005, News Pages, Pg. 3.

137.    ^ On the side of the atheists were Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College London, [...] Jones, meanwhile, revealed that he would "love to believe in God", because it would offer some degree of comfort. But he said he stopped believing in God as a child as soon as he discovered that what he was learning in school biology classes conflicted with the kind of things he had been taught in Sunday school - like dinosaurs and humans walking the earth at the same time." If Darwin has really killed God, when was the funeral?', Guardian Unlimited, 13 May 2009 (accessed 26 May 2009).

138.    ^ "The Law of Serialitity". http://www.life-cycles-destiny.com/for/the-law-of-seriality-kammerer.htm. Retrieved 18 July 2012. "The paradox is that he thought of himself as a hard-boiled philosophical materialist. He was also what one may call a devoted atheist; a freemason; a member of the Austrian Socialist Party; and a regular contributor to the Monisticshe Monatshelfe, the monthly published by the German league of Monists."

139.    ^ "Paul Kammerer". NNDB.com. http://www.nndb.com/people/265/000057094/. Retrieved 18 July 2012.

140.    ^ "Sam Karlin, mathematician who improved DNA analysis, dies". Stanford Report. January 16, 2008. http://news.stanford.edu/news/2008/january16/karlin-011608.html. Retrieved 21 April 2012. "Karlin was born in Yonova, Poland, in 1924. His family immigrated to Chicago when he was a small child and struggled financially through the Great Depression. He was raised in a strict Orthodox Jewish household but broke with religion in his early teens and remained an atheist for the rest of his life."

141.    ^ "TSN: Stuart Kauffman". Thesciencenetwork.org. http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/beyond-belief-enlightenment-2-0/stuart-kauffman. Retrieved 2012-06-03.

142.    ^ Todd Tucker (2008). The Great Starvation Experiment: Ancel Keys and the Men Who Starved for Science. U of Minnesota Press. p. 146. ISBN 978-0-8166-5161-0. "Max's advocates made up a diverse cast of characters, from the Jewish Peace Fellowship leader Rabbi Isador Hoffman to the atheist Ancel Keys, who wrote the committee that Max “proved to be a highly reliable and conscientious man who comported himself well under the most rigorous and demanding circumstances.""

143.    ^ "...I had the opportunity to participate in several exciting panel discussions at the World Science Festival in New York City. But the most dramatic encounter took place at the panel strangely titled 'Science, Faith and Religion.'... I ended up being one of two panelists labeled 'atheists.'..." God and Science Don't Mix: A scientist can be a believer. But professionally, at least, he can't act like one., Lawrence M. Krauss, The Wall Street Journal, page A15, 26 June 2009 (retrieved 22 May 2010). On the 21 June 2012 Colbert Report, the author of A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing told Colbert: "There is no evidence for any deity.... You don't need him.... There's no need for God." The evolutions of the universe occur "without any supernatural shenanigans."

144.    ^ Kroemer, Herbert. "Herbert Kroemer - Science Video Interview". http://vega.org.uk/video/programme/32. "Interviewer: "You have no belief in a afterlife?" Kroemer: "That's correct." Interviewer: "...You don't see the evidence of a designer?" Kroemer: "No, I don't." Interviewer: "Could you say more about it?" Kroemer: "I think it's just wishful thinking.""

145.    ^ Harold Kroto claims to have four "religions": humanism, atheism, amnesty-internationalism and humourism.[6]

146.    ^ "Kinsey was also shown to be an atheist who loathed religion and its constraints on sex." 'Kinsey' critics ready, Cheryl Wetzstein, The Washington Times. Retrieved February 2, 2007.

147.    ^ "In his mythic book The Singularity Is Near, Ray Kurzweil, serial inventor, technology enthusiast, and unabashed atheist, announces: "Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater intelligence, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without any limitation.... So evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal."" - Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants (2010).

148.    ^ "He studied at the Jesuit College in Lyon and at this stage he nearly decided to join the Jesuit Order. In fact it was his parents who encouraged him to continue his education by going to Paris to study law, which he did. It is somewhat ironical that Lalande, who would later become renowned as an atheist, should have come so close to becoming a Jesuit." J J O'Connor and E F Robertson, Joseph-Jérôme Lefrançais de Lalande.

149.    ^ Henry F. Schaefer (2003). Science and Christianity: Conflict Or Coherence?. The Apollos Trust. p. 9. ISBN 9780974297507. "I present here two examples of notable atheists. The first is Lev Landau, the most brilliant Soviet physicist of the twentieth century."

150.    ^ "Listed as an atheist in NNDB.com." Lev Landau, NNDB.com

151.    ^ "Chris Langton". NNDB.com. http://www.nndb.com/people/787/000080547/. Retrieved 18 July 2012.

152.    ^ Napoleon said to Laplace: "You have written this huge book on the system of the world without once mentioning the author of the universe [God]." Laplace replied: "Sire, I had no need of that hypothesis." Quoted in Augustus De Morgan, A Budget of Paradoxes, London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1872. As found in http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Quotations/Laplace.html, accessed 13 February 2006.

153.    ^ "The Catholic newspaper La Quotidienne [The Daily] announced that Laplace had died in the arms of two curés (priests), implying that he had a proper Catholic end, but this is not credible. To the end, he remained a skeptic, wedded to his deterministic creed and to an uncompromised ethos derived from his vast scientific experience." Roger Hahn, Pierre Simon Laplace, 1749-1827: a determined scientist, page 204.

154.    ^ Leakey, Richard; Virginia Morell (2001). Wildlife Wars: My Fight to Save Africa's Natural Treasures. design by Kathryn Parise. p. 257. ISBN 0-312-20626-7.

155.    ^ Babu Gogineni (July 10, 2012). "It’s the Atheist Particle, actually". Postnoon News. http://postnoon.com/2012/07/10/its-the-atheist-particle-actually/58312. Retrieved 10 July 2012. "Leon Lederman is himself an atheist and he regrets the term, and Peter Higgs who is an atheist too, has expressed his displeasure, but the damage has been done!"

156.    ^ "It is a scene I won’t forget in a hurry: Jean-Marie Lehn, French winner of the Nobel prize in chemistry, defending his atheism at a packed public conference at the new Alexandria Library in Egypt." Ehsan Masood, ProspectMagazine.co.uk, Islam’s reformers, 22nd July 2006.

157.    ^ "In these years Leslie was an unsuccessful candidate for the chairs of natural philosophy at the universities of St Andrews and Glasgow respectively. He failed at the former because he was then an extreme whig and an atheist who deplored the Erastianism of many of the Scottish clergy." Jack Morrell, 'Leslie, Sir John (1766–1832)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed May 2, 2008).

158.    ^ Bardi, Jason (2008). The Fifth Postulate: How Unraveling a Two Thousand Year Old Mystery Unraveled the Universe. John Wiley & Sons. p. 186. ISBN 978-0-470-46736-7. "His stubbornness, reported atheism, and genius supported his rise as a champion of the proletariat. To the Soviets, Lobachevsky represented not just the greatness of the common man, emerging from a humble background as he did, he also was a revolutionary of sorts."

159.    ^ "The History of Science". Soviet Science. Taylor & Francis. p. 329. "Though Lobachevsky appears to have invented non- Euclidean geometry without the help of the Almighty, he built a church on the instructions of the University council. It is said that he was an atheist."

160.    ^ "By that time Longuet-Higgins had become a convinced atheist, although he still respected many of the features of the Church of England." John Murrell, 'Higgins, (Hugh) Christopher Longuet- (1923–2004)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, Oxford University Press, January 2008 (accessed May 1, 2008).

161.    ^ "Paul MacCready, the inventor, defines it thus: "A secular humanist does not believe in God, and doesn't steal."" Paul Kurtz, Is Secular Humanism a Religion?.

162.    ^ R. S. Cohen; Raymond J. Seeger (1975). Ernst Mach, Physicist and Philosopher. Springer. p. 158. ISBN 978-90-277-0016-2. "And Mach, in personal conviction, was a socialist and an atheist."

163.    ^ Gregory Scott Charak (2007). Between Soul and Precision: Ernst Mach's Biological Empiricism and the Social Democratic Philosophy of Science. ProQuest. p. 94. ISBN 9780549129738. "Both make explicit claims against the pseudo-problems generated by materialism, and although Mach the atheist would have no gripe with “irreligion” per se, as a pacifist and a socialist he was indeed an ardent proponent of “peace."

164.    ^ Helge Kragh (2004). Matter And Spirit In The Universe: Scientific And Religious Preludes To Modern Cosmology. OECD Publishing. p. 55. ISBN 9781860944697. "The Austrian positivist physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach was nominally a Catholic, but in reality he was an atheist and strongly opposed to Christian doctrines."

165.    ^ "Of course, Markov, an atheist and eventual excommunicate of the Church quarreled endlessly with his equally outspoken counterpart Nekrasov. The disputes between Markov and Nekrasov were not limited to mathematics and religion, they quarreled over political and philosophical issues as well." Gely P. Basharin, Amy N. Langville, Valeriy A. Naumov, The Life and Work of A. A. Markov, page 6.

166.    ^ Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity. Harvard University Press. 2009. p. 69. ISBN 978-0-674-03293-4. "Markov (1856–1922), on the other hand, was an atheist and a strong critic of the Orthodox Church and the tsarist government (Nekrasov exaggeratedly called him a Marxist)."

167.    ^ "He attempted to adopt a scientific attitude in his approach to all problems. His views were liberal, and he was an atheist." Leslie Bairstow, 'Dr. S. Maulik', Nature 166, 422-423 (09 Sep 1950).

168.    ^ René Bösch (2007). Labyrinth of Digressions: Tristram Shandy as Perceived and Influenced by Sterne's Early Imitators. Rodopi. p. 265. ISBN 9789042022911. "Maupertuis was an atheist friend of La Mettrie."

169.    ^ From a Humanist News interview in Autumn 2001: Interviewer: What is your attitude to religion now? JMS: Ever since reading (J. B. S. Haldane's book) Possible Worlds I have been an atheist, and a semi-conscious atheist before that. I think there are two views you can have about religion. You can be tolerant of it and say, I don't believe in this but I don't mind if other people do, or you can say, I not only don't believe in it but I think it is dangerous and damaging for other people to believe in it and they should be persuaded that they are mistaken. I fluctuate between the two. I am tolerant because religious institutions facilitate some very important work that would not get done otherwise, but then I look around and see what an incredible amount of damage religion is doing. [7]

170.    ^ "An appreciation of biologist Ernst Mayr (1904-2005)". Wsws.org. 2005-05-03. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/may2005/mayr-m03.shtml. Retrieved 2012-06-03.

171.    ^ "Responding to Richard Dawkins's pestering his fellow atheists to "come out", I mention that I am indeed an atheist. To count oneself as an atheist one need not claim to have a proof that no gods exist. One need merely think that the evidence on the god question is in about the same state as the evidence on the werewolf question." [8]

172.    ^ "... I believe that a reasonable case can be made for saying, not that we believe in God because He exists but rather that He exists because we believe in Him. [...] Considered as an element of the world, God has the same degree and kind of objective reality as do other products of mind. [...] I regret my disbelief in God and religious answers generally, for I believe it would give satisfaction and comfort to many in need of it if it possible to discover and propound good scientific and philosophic reasons to believe in God. [...] To abdicate from the rule of reason and substitute for it an authentication of belief by the intentness and degree of conviction with which we hold it can be perilous and destructive. [...] I am a rationalist—something of a period piece nowadays, I admit [...]" Peter Medawar, 'The Question of the Existence of God' in his book The Limits of Science (Harper and Row 1984).

173.    ^ "I met Jeff at The Amazing Meeting 5.5 in Fort Lauderdale in January. We became friends and I read his blog within hours of each posting. He was a programmer, an astronomer, a pro-bono science educator, a hard-nosed skeptic and an atheist. This random blow against a friendly and generous guy is a typical example of the non-plannedness of things." Martin Rundkvist, Jeff Medkeff 1968-2008, Aardvarchaeology blog, August 4, 2008 (accessed August 5, 2008).

174.    ^ "There is no clear record that he was professionally restricted in Russia because of his lineage, but he sympathized with the problem his Jewish colleagues suffered owing to Russian anti-Semitism; his personal religious commitment was to atheism, although he received strict Christian religious training at home." Alfred I. Tauber, Leon Chernyak, Metchnikoff and the origins of immunology: from metaphor to theory, page 5.

175.    ^ A Rough History of Disbelief Official BBC site describing the series

176.    ^ On the filming of The Atheism Tapes with Jonathan Miller: "We had been friends for a number of years, and had discussed a great many topics, but we had never, except glancingly, ever spoken about religion. We knew about our shared atheism, but the subject didn't seem to warrant much attention; in the Miller-McGinn world it was a non-existent topic. [...] It is often forgotten that atheism of the kind shared by Jonathan and me (and Dawkins and Hitchens et al.) has an ethical motive." Atheism Tapes, Colin McGinn, on his blog. (Accessed April 1, 2008)

177.    ^ "When we reflect on anything for long enough, we're likely to end up with what we sometimes call "basic" questions -- ones we can see no way at all to answer. For we have no perfect way to answer even this question: How can one tell when a question has been properly answered? What caused the universe, and why? What is the purpose of life? How can you tell which beliefs are true? How can you tell what is good? These questions seem different on the surface, but all of them share one quality that makes them impossible to answer: all of them are circular! You can never find a final cause, since you must always ask one question more: "What caused that cause?" You can never find any ultimate goal, since you're always obliged to ask, "Then what purpose does that serve?" Whenever you find out why something is good-or is true-you still have to ask what makes that reason good and true. No matter what you discover, at every step, these kinds of questions will always remain, because you have to challenge every answer with, "Why should I accept that answer?" Such circularities can only waste our time by forcing us to repeat, over and over and over again, "What good is Good?" and, "What god made God?" " Marvin Minsky. The Society of Mind.

178.    ^ Nobel Biography [9].

179.    ^ Harmke Kamminga (1995). The Science and Culture of Nutrition, 1840-1940. Rodopi. p. 31. ISBN 978-90-5183-818-3. "Moleschott's atheism is much more prominent, for example, and he declares absurd Liebig's opinion that insights into the laws of nature inevitably lead us to the notion of a Being knowable only through revelation."

180.    ^ "Yet, sailing to Egypt, he had lain on deck, asking his scientists whether the planets were inhabited, how old the Earth was, and whether it would perish by fire or by flood. Many, like his friend Gaspard Monge, the first man to liquefy a gas, were atheists." Vincent Cronin, The View from Planet Earth: Man looks at the Cosmos, page 164.

181.    ^ "In his final chapter de Duve turns to the meaning of life, and considers the ideas of two contrasting Frenchmen: a priest, Teilhard de Chardin, and an existentialist and atheist, Jacques Monod." Peaks, Dust, & Dappled Spots, by Richard Lubbock, Books in Canada: The Canadian Review of Books. Retrieved July 2, 2007.

182.    ^ George Pendle (2006). Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p. 69. ISBN 9780156031790. "The Nobel Prize-winning geneticist and stringent atheist Thomas Hunt Morgan was developing the chromosome theory of heredity by examining his swarm of mutated Drosophila (fruit flies) through a jeweler's loupe."

183.    ^ "Morgan's passion for experimentation was symptomatic of his general scepticism and his distaste for speculation. He believed only what could be proven. He was said to be an atheist, and I have always believed that he was. Everything I knew about him—his scepticism, his honesty—was consistent with disbelief in the supernatural." Norman H. Horowitz, T. H. Morgan at Caltech: A Reminiscence, Genetics, Vol. 149, 1629-1632, August 1998, Copyright © 1998.

184.    ^ "[Religion] is not an easy subject to deal with, but as zoologists we must do our best to observe what actually happens rather than listen to what is supposed to be happening. If we do this, we are forced to the conclusion that, in a behavioural sense, religious activities consist of the coming together of large groups of people to perform repeated and prolonged submissive displays to appease a dominant individual. The dominant individual takes many forms in different cultures, but always has the common factor of immense power. [...] If these submissive actions are successful, the dominant individual is appeased. [...] The dominant individual is usually, but not always, referred to as a god. Since none of these gods exist in a tangible form, why have they been invented? To find the answer to this we have to go right back to our ancestral origins." Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape, p.178-179, Jonathan Cape, 1967.

185.    ^ "Man's evolution as a neotenous ape has put him in a similar position to the dog's. He becomes sexually mature and yet he still needs a parent — a super-parent, one as impressive to him as a man must be to a dog. The answer was to invent a god — either a female super-parent in the shape of a Mother Goddess, or a male god in the shape of God the Father, or perhaps even a whole family of gods. Like real parents they would both protect, punish and be obeyed. [...] These — the houses of the gods — the temples, the churches and the cathedrals — are buildings apparently made for giants, and a space visitor would be surprised to find on closer examination that these giants are never at home. Their followers repeatedly visit them and bow down before them, but they themselves are invisible. Only their bell-like cries can be heard across the land. Man is indeed an imaginative species." Desmond Morris, The Pocket Guide to Manwatching, p.234-236 Triad Paperbacks, 1982.

186.    ^ "[Müller] was an atheist..." Review of Müller's biography, by James Mallet, Quarterly Review of Biology 79:196 (2004). Retrieved July 2, 2007.

187.    ^ "Muller, who through Unitarianism had become an enthusiastic pantheist, was converted both to atheism and to socialism." Hermann Joseph Muller. 1890–1967, G. Pontecorvo, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 14, Nov., 1968 (Nov., 1968), pp. 348-389 (Quote from p. 353) Retrieved July 14, 2007.

188.    ^ "I was brought up a Lutheran, but I became an atheist"—PZ Myers (February 14, 2007), It's the arrogance, stupid, Pharyngula. Retrieved February 22, 2007.

189.    ^ Sylvia Nasar (1999). A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994. Simon and Schuster. ISBN 9780684853703. "Nash, by then an atheist, balked at a Catholic ceremony. He would have been happy to get married in city hall."

190.    ^ Michael P. Prior (1997). The Bible and Colonialism: A Moral Critique. Continuum International Publishing Group. p. 164. ISBN 978-1-85075-815-0. "Although an atheist, Neeman believes that traditions are important for a revolutionary movement, and he strongly defends the spiritual heritage of the Jewish people, preaches a retum to biblical sources, and is in constant dialogue with the ultra-nationalist-religious groupings."

191.    ^ Michael Evlanoff; Marjorie Fluor (1969). Alfred Nobel, the loneliest millionaire. W. Ritchie Press. p. 88. "He declared himself an agnostic in his youth, an atheist later, but at the same time, bestowed generous sums to the church..."

192.    ^ "I gradually slipped away from religion over several years and became an atheist or to be more philosophically correct, a sceptical agnostic." Nurse's autobiography at Nobelprize.org

193.    ^ "It was nice to be honoured but I like ‘Mark’ not ‘Sir Mark’. When one’s young, one’s brash and all-knowing; when one’s old, one realises how little one knows. You asked me earlier if I believed in God and the hereafter. I would tend to say no but when one dies one could well be surprised." Mark Oliphant from an interview in 1996., Sir Mark Oliphant - Reluctant Builder of the Atom Bomb.

194.    ^ Neil Schlager; Josh Lauer (2000). Science and its times: understanding the social significance of scientific discovery (illustrated ed.). Gale Group. p. 112. ISBN 978-0-7876-3939-6. "Alexander Oparin (1894-1980), an atheist, suggested that natural chemical reactions produced biological molecules that came together to form the first living thing."

195.    ^ K. C. Cole (2012). Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens: Frank Oppenheimer and His Astonishing Exploratorium. University of Chicago Press. pp. 104–105. ISBN 9780226113470. "For the locals, it was as if aliens had landed. "The normal folks were wearing tight jeans and cowboy hats, and here was a rancher who didn't wear a hat," said Pete Richards, who lived on one of the neighboring ranches at the time. “He was skinnier than a rail, he was really hyper. Both he and Jackie swore like sailors. And they were atheists!”."

196.    ^ Dronamraju, Krishna (2008). Emerging Consequences of Biotechnology: Biodiversity Loss and IPR Issues. World Scientific. p. 413. ISBN 978-981-277-500-9. "Most of them are either atheists like Albert Einstein and Robert Oppenheimer, or agnostics like JBS Haldane."

197.    ^ Axelrod, Alan (2009). Risk: Adversaries and Allies: Mastering Strategic Relationships. Sterling Publishing Company, Inc.. p. 127. ISBN 978-1-4027-5411-1. "He was a Jew and Groves was at least conventionally anti-Semitic; but perhaps worse, Oppenheimer practiced no religion at all and was almost certainly an atheist, whereas Groves was the sincerely believing son of an army chaplain."

198.    ^ Jürgen Kocka (2010). Jürgen Kocka. ed. Work in a Modern Society: The German Historical Experience in Comparative Perspective. Berghahn Books. p. 45. ISBN 978-1-84545-575-0. "Even Wilhelm Ostwald, who was the most radical atheist among these scholars, uses the instrument of the 'Monistic Sunday Sermons' to spread his ideas on rationality."

199.    ^ Park, Robert L. Superstition: Belief in the Age of Science, 2008, Princeton University Press, page viii

200.    ^ Originally a Lutheran, Pauling declared his atheism in 1992, two years before his death.

201.    ^ Amazon listing of Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up.

202.    ^ Pavlov's follower E.M. Kreps asked him whether he was religious. Kreps writes that Pavlov smiled and replied: "Listen, good fellow, in regard to [claims of] my religiosity, my belief in God, my church attendance, there is no truth in it; it is sheer fantasy. I was a seminarian, and like the majority of seminarians, I became an unbeliever, an atheist in my school years." Quoted in George Windholz, "Pavlov's Religious Orientation", Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, vol. 25, no. 3 (Sept. 1986), pp. 320–27.

203.    ^ Harris, Sam. "Letter to A Christian Nation". SamHarrisOrg. http://www.samharris.org/site/book_letter_to_christian_nation/. Retrieved 5 June 2010. Quoting Penrose's blurb for Harris's book Letter to a Christian Nation.

204.    ^ "Big Bang follows Big Bang follows Big Bang". BBC News. 25 September 2010. http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9032000/9032626.stm. Retrieved 1 Dec 2010.

205.    ^ "After retirement, he remained politically active, defending Andrei Sakharov, and was President of the French Atheists' Union." D S Bell, 'Obituary: Francis Perrin', The Independent (London), July 18, 1992, Pg. 44.

206.    ^ New Trends in Fluorescence Spectroscopy: Applications to Chemical and Life Sciences. Springer. 2001. p. 17. ISBN 978-3-540-67779-6. "Jean and Francis Perrin held similar political and philosophical ideas. Both were socialists and atheists."

207.    ^ "Dr Perutz, said: "It is one thing for scientists to oppose creationism which is demonstrably false but quite another to make pronouncements which offend people's religious faith -- that is a form of tactlessness which merely brings science into disrepute. My view of religion and ethics is simple: even if we do not believe in God, we should try to live as though we did."" Kam Patel, Perutz rubbishes Popper and Kuhn, 25 November 1994.

208.    ^ "...I'm an atheist..." Enough blasting Dennett and Dawkins, all right?, from Rationally Speaking, the blog of Massimo Pigliucci, October 30, 2006 (Accessed April 15, 2008)

209.    ^ "I never outgrew my conversion to atheism at 13, but at various times was a serious cultural Jew." The Guardian Profile (November 6, 1999). "Steven Pinker: the mind reader". London: Guardian News and Media Limited. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3926387,00.html. Retrieved 2006-12-10.

210.    ^ "During sixty years from 1937 he also wrote over forty articles on the origins, distribution, and nature of life, taking the stance of a 'dogmatic atheist'." David F. Smith, 'Pirie, Norman Wingate [Bill] (1907–1997)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edition, October 2005 (accessed May 2, 2008).

211.    ^ "Ronald Plasterk (1957) is a convinced atheist. But he says expressly that he does not strive for atheism. "My own view cannot be gospel which I will defend at any cost. I respect belief, as long as people do not force it." (In Dutch: "Ronald Plasterk (1957) is een overtuigd atheïst. Maar hij zegt er nadrukkelijk bij dat hij niet streeft naar atheïsme. «Mijn eigen opvatting mag geen heilsleer zijn die ik ten koste van alles ga verdedigen. Ik respecteer geloof, zolang mensen het maar niet opdringen.» ") Interview with Ronald Plasterk, «Er is geen verband tussen altruïsme en God» ("There is no connection between altruism and God"), De Groene Amsterdammer, December 22, 2001 (accessed August 6, 2008).

212.    ^ Joseph McCabe (1945). A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Freethinkers. Haldeman-Julius Publications. http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/joseph_mccabe/dictionary.html. Retrieved 10 April 2012. "In his last words (published as Last Thoughts, 1913) he entirely rejects Christianity and believes in God only in the sense that he is the moral ideal. In effect he was an atheist."

213.    ^ Poincaré, Henri (January 1, 1913). Dernières Pensées. p. 138. http://www.ac-nancy-metz.fr/enseign/philo/textesph/Dernierespensees.pdf. Retrieved 10 April 2012. "Les dogmes des religions révélées ne sont pas les seuls à craindre. L'empreinte que le catholicisme a imprimée sur l'âme occidentale a été si profonde que bien des esprits à peine affranchis ont eu la nostalgie de la servitude et se sont efforcés de reconstituer des Eglises ; c'est ainsi que certaines écoles positivistes ne sont qu'un catholicisme sans Dieu. Auguste Comte lui- même rêvait de discipliner les âmes et certains de ses disciples, exagérant la pensée du maître, deviendraient bien vite des ennemis de la science s'ils étaient les plus forts."

214.    ^ "...my father [Derek] was a British Atheist... from a rather well known Sephardic Jewish family..." de Solla Price, Mark (2007-12-09). "Are you Jewish?". Archived from the original on 2008-04-30. http://web.archive.org/web/20080430221804/http://www.markandvinny.com/Mark.html. Retrieved 2008-08-01.

215.    ^ "His tolerance and good humour enabled him to disagree strongly without giving or taking offence, for example with his brother Michael Ramsey whose ordination (he went on to become archbishop of Canterbury) Ramsey, as a militant atheist, naturally regretted." D. H. Mellor, 'Ramsey, Frank Plumpton (1903–1930)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, October 2005 (accessed May 2, 2008).

216.    ^ Ranum, Marcus. "Ranum's supports Dawkins's "out campaign" for atheists.". http://www.ranum.com/stock_content/anarchy.html. Retrieved 12 April 2012. "Generally, I do not get a lot of satisfaction out of being identified with causes or logos. But - a couple of years ago, when Richard Dawkins started his "out campaign" for atheists, I thought that showing my support was not a bad idea."

217.    ^ "Big bang to big bucks: Atheist astronomer accepts £1m religious prize". Dailymail.co.uk. 7 April 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1374348/Templeton-Prize-2011-Athiest-astronomer-Martin-Rees-accepts-1m-religious-prize.html. Retrieved 15 May 2012.

218.    ^ International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968). Ricardo, David. Encyclopedia.com. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F4O5Q8ov48gJ:www.encyclopedia.com/topic/David_Ricardo.aspx+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=ca. Retrieved 6 July 2012. "He became a Unitarian after his marriage but was probably as near to atheism as Bentham was."

219.    ^ Henry William Spiegel (1991). Henry William Spiegel. ed. The Growth of Economic Thought. Duke University Press. p. 310. ISBN 9780822309734. "Like Ricardo, Mill had abandoned his faith."

220.    ^ "Oscar Riddle". NNDB.com. http://www.nndb.com/people/133/000172614/. Retrieved 18 July 2012.

221.    ^ "The Nobel Laureate Dr Richard Roberts will give a public lecture entitled A Bright Journey from Science to Atheism..." A bright journey to atheism, or a road that ignores all the signs?, The Irish Times, April 20, 2006. Retrieved July 24, 2007.

222.    ^ "...Rich Roberts... delivered a public lecture on his Bright journey from Science to Atheism in April 2006." Events listing on the website of Humani, The Humanist Association of Northern Ireland, Retrieved July 24, 2007.

223.    ^ Roberts versus God: No Contest, review of Roberts' talk A Bright Journey from Science to Atheism, written by Les Reid, and published on the Belfast Humanist Group website. Retrieved July 24, 2007.

224.    ^ "Have you ever broken one of the ten commandments? As an atheist from an early age, I can't readily remember them. But I expect I have." Lifeline: Steven Rose, Lancet Vol. 355 Issue 9213 p. 1472, April 22, 2000.

225.    ^ I was Rosenbluth's last student, and collaborated with him on numerous research projects during and after my graduation. Near the end of his life, we more frequently discussed personal and political issues. On more than one occasion, he freely admitted to me that he was an atheist. Statement by J. Candy, 22 January 2009.

226.    ^ "All of which makes the Wingate Prize a matter of bemusement. "Yes, tell me," he says, frowning. "What is it, and why are they giving it to an old Jewish atheist who has unkind things to say about Zionism?" “Oliver Burkeman interviewing Sacks, 'Inside Story: Sacks appeal', The Guardian, May 10, 2002, Features Pages, Pg. 4.

227.    ^ a b Achenbach, Joel (2006-04-23). "Worlds Away". Washington Post: p. W15. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/18/AR2006041801870.html. "By most definitions he would be called an atheist, but he hated the term. 'An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid.'"

228.    ^ "...he was a confirmed atheist. 'I would lose my integrity if I accepted a belief system that did not stand up to sceptical scrutiny,' he said recently." Ian Katz, 'Sagan, Man Who Brought Cosmos to Earth, Dies', The Guardian, December 21, 1996, Pg. 3.

229.    ^ "In the end, Sagan... died an uncompromising atheist." Robin Mckie, 'Beauty is... in the measurements', The Observer, August 24, 1997, Review Pages, Pg. 14.

230.    ^ Head, Tom. "Conversations with Carl". Skeptic 13 (1): 32–38.Excerpted in Head, Tom, ed. (2006). University of Mississippi Press. ISBN 1-57806-736-7..

231.    ^ Sagan, Carl (1996). The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. New York: Ballantine Books. p. 278. ISBN 0-345-40946-9.

232.    ^ "They rose (if prayers do rise) to the heaven Sagan had never seen in all his years of searching the sky, and were heard (if prayers are heard) by the God Sagan never called on... But he died in what amounted, for him, to a state of grace: resisting the one temptation to which almost everyone submits in the end, the temptation to believe... For most of the last decade of his life he engaged in a wide-ranging dialogue with religious leaders on the question...: does God exist? He argued the negative, although his formal position was agnostic, awaiting proof... 'You're so smart, why do you believe in God?' [Sagan] once exclaimed to [Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, general secretary of the National Council of Churches]... 'You're so smart, why don't you believe in God?' she answered... His friends prayed harder, but Sagan never wavered in his agnosticism. ¶ 'There was no deathbed conversion,' Druyan says. 'No appeals to God, no hope for an afterlife, no pretending that he and I, who had been inseparable for 20 years, were not saying goodbye forever.' ¶ Didn't he want to believe? she was asked. ¶ 'Carl never wanted to believe,' she replies fiercely. 'He wanted to know.'" "Unbeliever's Quest", by Jerry Adler, Newsweek (United States Edition), March 31, 1997, Pg. 64

233.    ^ Meghnad Saha, scientist with a vision. National Book Trust, India. 1984. p. 5. "Even though he later came to be known as an atheist, Saha was well-versed in all religious texts— though his interest in them was purely academic."

234.    ^ Robert S. Anderson (2010). Nucleus and Nation: Scientists, International Networks, and Power in India. University of Chicago Press. p. 602. ISBN 9780226019758. "a self-described atheist, Saha loved swimming in the river and his devout wife loved the sanctity of the spot. swimming and walking were among the few things they could do together."

235.    ^ The World of Andrei Sakharov: A Russian Physicist's Path to Freedom. Oxford University Press. 2005. p. 356. ISBN 9780195156201. "Apparently Sakharov did not need to delve any deeper into it for a long time, remaining a totally nonmilitant atheist with an open heart."

236.    ^ The World of Andrei Sakharov: A Russian Physicist's Path to Freedom. Oxford University Press. 2005. p. 158. ISBN 9780195156201. "Sakharov was not invited to this seminar. Like most of the physicists of his generation, he was an atheist."

237.    ^ Todd K. Shackelford, Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford, ed. (2012). The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War. Oxford University Press. p. 465. ISBN 9780199738403. "The Soviet dissident most responsible for defeating communism, Andrei Sakharov, was an atheist."

238.    ^ Dan Barker: "When we invited Robert Sapolsky to speak at one of out national conventions to receive our 'Emperor Has No Clothes Award', Robert wrote to me, 'Sure! Get the local Holiday Inn to put up a sign that says Welcome, Hell-bound Atheists!' [...] So, welcome you hell-bound atheist to Free thought Radio, Robert." Sapolsky: "Well, delighted to be among my kindred souls." [...] Annie Laurie Gaylor: So how long have you been a kindred non-soul, what made you an atheist Robert?" Sapolsky: "Oh, I was about fourteen or so... I was brought up very very religiously, orthodox Jewish background and major-league rituals and that sort of thing [...] and something happened when I was fourteen, and no doubt what it was really about was my gonads or who knows what, but over the course of a couple of weeks there was some sort of introspective whatever, where I suddenly decided this was all gibberish. And, among other things, also deciding there's no free will, but not in a remotely religious context, and deciding all of this was nonsense, and within a two week period all of that belief stuff simply evaporated." Free thought Radio podcast (mp3), February 3, 2007 (accessed April 22, 2008).

239.    ^ "Wallace Sargent". NNDB.com. http://www.nndb.com/people/405/000172886/. Retrieved 17 July 2012.

240.    ^ Manabendra Nath Roy, ed. (1973). The Radical humanist, Volume 37. Radical Humanist. p. 18. "It cannot be said that Dr. Sarkar was a confirmed atheist."

241.    ^ du Sautoy, Marcus (2008-10-28). "Science Extra: Marcus du Sautoy steps into Dawkins' boots". London: The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/blog/audio/2008/oct/28/marcus-du-sautoy-richard-dawkins. Retrieved 2008-10-29.

242.    ^ Walter J. Moore (1994). A Life of Erwin Schrödinger. Cambridge University Press. pp. 289–290. ISBN 9780521469340. "In one respect, however, he is not a romantic: he does not idealize the person of the beloved, his highest praise is to consider her his equal. "When you feel your own equal in the body of a beautiful woman, just as ready to forget the world for you as you for her - oh my good Lord - who can describe what happiness then. You can live it, now and again - you cannot speak of it." Of course, he does speak of it, and almost always with religious imagery. Yet at this time he also wrote, "By the way, I never realized that to be non-believing, to be an atheist, was a thing to be proud of. It went without saying as it were." And in another place at about this same time: "Our creed is indeed a queer creed. You others, Christians (and similar people), consider our ethics much inferior, indeed abominable. There is that little difference. We adhere to ours in practice, you don't." Whatever problems they may have had in their love affair, the pangs of conscience were not among them. Sheila was as much an unbeliever as Erwin, but in a less complex, more realistic way. She was never entirely convinced by his vedantic theology."

243.    ^ Andrea Diem-Lane. Spooky Physics. MSAC Philosophy Group. p. 42. ISBN 9781565430808. "In terms of religion, Schrodinger fits in the atheist camp. He even lost a marriage proposal to his love, Felicie Krauss, not only due to his social status but his lack of religious affiliation. He was known as a freethinker who did not believe in god. But interestingly Schrodinger had a deep connection to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Eastern philosophy in general. Erwin studied numerous books on Eastern thought as well as the Hindu scriptures. He was enthralled with Vedanta thought and connected ideas of oneness and unity of mind with his research on quantum physics, specifically wave mechanics."

244.    ^ Moore, Walter (1994). A Life of Erwin Schrödinger. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-46934-0. "Schopenhauer often called himself an atheist, as did Schrodinger, and if Buddhism and Vedanta can be truly described as atheistic religions, both the philosopher and his scientific disciple were indeed atheists. They both rejected the idea of a "personal God," and Schopenhauer thought that "pantheism is only a euphemism for atheism.""

245.    ^ Moore, Walter (1989). Schrödinger: Life and Thought. ISBN 0-521-43767-9. "He rejected traditional religious beliefs (Jewish, Christian, and Islamic) not on the basis of any reasoned argument, nor even with an expression of emotional antipathy, for he loved to use religious expressions and metaphors, but simply by saying that they are naive."

246.    ^ Walter J. Moore (1992). Schrödinger: Life and Thought. Cambridge University Press. p. 4. ISBN 9780521437677. "He claimed to be an atheist, but he always used religious symbolism and believed his scientific work was an approach to the godhead."

247.    ^ "Erwin Schrodinger". http://www.norskfysikk.no/nfs/old/epsbiografer/SCHROD~1.PDF. Retrieved 22 June 2012. "He claimed to be an atheist, but he used religious symbolism and believed that his scientific work was 'an approach to God'."

248.    ^ "Educator Resources | Facing History and Ourselves". Facinghistory.org. http://www.facinghistory.org/Campus/reslib.nsf/Campus/reslib.nsf/themeandconceptpublic/872E6F4F8B5E996085256F8900771ED9?opendocument. Retrieved 2012-06-03.

249.    ^ Self-proclaimed[dead link]

250.    ^ "Presentation". Info.worldbank.org. 2001-07-25. http://info.worldbank.org/etools/BSPAN/PresentationView.asp?EID=354&PID=688. Retrieved 2012-06-03.

251.    ^ "Rediff On The NeT Business News: Market economy not the panacea, says Sen". Rediff.com. 1998-12-28. http://www.rediff.com/business/1998/dec/28sen.htm. Retrieved 2012-06-03.

252.    ^ "Shannon described himself as an atheist and was outwardly apolitical." William Poundstone, Fortune's Formula, Hill and Wang: New York (2005), page 18.

253.    ^ "The other day Vernette said he [Shneidman] was blessed. True enough, he thought, but not quite right, not blessed. On a napkin on the TV tray he scribbled down the Greek prefix, eu, for good, and then through association and sound, fell upon doria... this would be the word for his good fortune. Eudoria... gratitude without an object, no one to credit, no one to thank. No Jesus, no Yahweh, Muhammad, Vishnu or Buddha. Because he believes life isn't contingent upon god or upon prayers. There is no heaven, no hell. Happiness lies in te here and now and the satisfaction of living a good life without religion or myth to guide you." Waiting for death, alone and unafraid, Thomas Curwen, Los Angeles Times, 28 February 2009 (Accessed 18 May 2009)

254.    ^ Joel N. Shurkin (2008). Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 133. ISBN 9780230551923. "He considered himself an atheist and never went to church."

255.    ^ Doug Renselle. "A Review of Amy Wallace's The Prodigy". Quantonics, Inc.. http://www.quantonics.com/The_Prodigy_Review.html. Retrieved 20 June 2012. "Rabid atheist by age six. (His father, Boris, was too, but intensely studied great religious works.)"

256.    ^ Steve Batterson (2007). Steven Smale: The Mathematician Who Broke the Dimension Barrier. American Mathematical Soc.. p. 11. ISBN 9780821826966. "Jack and Norm were religious individuals, whereas Steve was an atheist who had never been inside a church."

257.    ^ Smith, Michael. Michael Smith: Autobiography. Nobel Prize.org. Retrieved February 3, 2007.

258.    ^ "Another aspect of this is that a scientific cosmology can contain no residue of the idea that the world was constructed by some being who is not a part of it. As the creatures who makes things, it is our most natural impulse to ask: When we come upon something beautifully or intricately structured, who made it? We must learn to give up this impulse if we are to do scientific cosmology. As there can, by definition, be nothing outside the universe, a scientific cosmology must be based on a conception that the universe made itself." Lee Smolin, What is the Future of Cosmology?, pbs.org.

259.    ^ "Biblical scholar Jacques Berlinerblau points out, in an interesting recent book, The Secular Bible: Why Nonbelievers Must Take Religion Seriously (2005), that most contemporary atheists and agnostics — myself included, I must confess - are astoundingly ignorant of the details of the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament and the Qur'an. (not to mention the Bhagavad Gita and the Tripitaka, one could add)...When all is said and done, I see no reason to amend my judgment that the existence of the Jewish, Christian, Islamic or Hindu gods is about as plausible, given the currently available evidence, as the existence of Zeus or Thor." - Alan Sokal, Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture (2008).

260.    ^ "Stallman's former personal ad". Stallman.org. http://www.stallman.org/extra/personal.html. Retrieved 2012-06-03.

261.    ^ "...Steinhaus answered that, "God is always present." It should be noted that Steinhaus was an outspoken atheist." Steven George Krantz, Mathematical Apocrypha: Stories and Anecdotes of Mathematicians and the Mathematical (Spectrum) (2002), page 202.

262.    ^ "God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (9781591024811): Victor J. Stenger: Books". Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/dp/1591024811. Retrieved 2012-06-03.

263.    ^ [10][dead link]

264.    ^ "Suchet's father Jack, an atheist and eminent surgeon, emigrated from South Africa to England in the 1930s and never spoke about his family's past." 'Suchet traces Russian Jewish roots', The Press Association, 9 September 2008 (accessed 9 September 2008).[dead link]

265.    ^ "I read a few sentences. It was written in beautiful Biblical Hebrew. The language was like that of the Psalms.' One of these was the Isaiah scroll, which I saw recently in the Rockefeller Museum in East Jerusalem: sections of goat-skin parchment, sewn together, 27 feet long. I felt in the presence of something numinous, although I have been a convinced atheist since boyhood. But this document is a testament to the inexplicable persistence of the human mind, in the face of all the evidence, in believing that we are on earth for a divine purpose." Eleazar Sukenik, quoted in Justin Cartwright, 'The indestructible power of belief', The Guardian, May 27, 2000, Saturday Pages, Pg. 3.

266.    ^ Sulston, John. "Another 50 Renowned Academics Speaking About God". http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Gt4WSK_NlQ&feature=fvwrel. Retrieved 8 April 2012. "I believe atheism makes coherent sense."

267.    ^ In a review of Susskind's book The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, Michael Duff writes that Susskind is "a card-carrying atheist." Life in a landscape of possibilities, December 2005. Retrieved May 30, 2007.

268.    ^ "He is a passionate atheist who hates materialistic interpretations of our minds." Interview: Raymond Tallis, The ardent atheist, Guardian Review, April 29, 2006 (accessed April 14, 2008).

269.    ^ Vitaliĭ Lazarevich Ginzburg (2005). About Science, Myself and Others. CRC Press. p. 253. ISBN 9780750309929. "Nowadays, when we are facing manifestations of religious and. more often, pseudoreligious feelings, it is appropriate to mention that Igor Evgenevich was a convinced and unreserved atheist."

270.    ^ Physicists: Epoch and Personalities (2 ed.). World Scientific. 2011. p. 86. ISBN 9789812834164.

271.    ^ "They became correspondents and, surprisingly since Tansley was an avowed atheist, friends." - Peter G. Ayres, Shaping Ecology: The Life of Arthur Tansley, page 139.

272.    ^ "Most of the Socialist Party members were also in favor of assimilation, and Tarski's political allegiance was socialist at the time. So, along with its being a practical move, becoming more Polish than Jewish was an ideological statement and was approved by many, though not all, of his colleagues. As to why Tarski, a professed atheist, converted, that just came with the territory and was part of the package: if you were going to be Polish then you had to say you were Catholic." Anita Burdman Feferman, Solomon Feferman, Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic (2004), page 39.

273.    ^ Deirdre Barrett (2010). Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose. W. W. Norton & Company. pp. 21–22. ISBN 978-0-393-06848-1. "Tinbergen had never been a religious man. Wartime atrocities, however, had highlighted the absence of a deity for him while both sides invoked one aligned with themselves, and this turned him into a militant atheist."

274.    ^ "Some say God is living there [in space]. I was looking around very attentively, but I did not see anyone there. I did not detect either angels or gods. ... I don't believe in God. I believe in man-his strength, his possibilities, his reason." Gherman Titov, comments made at World Fair, Seattle, Washington, May 6, 1962, reported in The Seattle Daily Times, May 7, 1962, p. 2.

275.    ^ "[I am] completely a-religious—atheist. I find that people seem to think religion brings morals and appreciation of nature. I actually think it detracts from both." Interview: Linus Torvalds in Linux Journal November 1, 1999. Retrieved January 18, 2007.

276.    ^ "This loss shattered Turing's religious faith and led him into atheism..." Time 100 profile of Alan Turing, p. 2

277.    ^ "He was an atheist..." Alan Turing: Father of the computer, BBC News, April 28, 1999. Retrieved June 11, 2007.

278.    ^ "In religion he was raised as a theist, but in 1782, in an Answer to Dr. Priestley, on the Existence of God, a response to Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever, he described himself as a freethinker (p. 5). This work, first published under the pseudonym William Hammon, was subsequently republished by Richard Carlile in 1826. In the pamphlet Turner declared that he was an atheist, though he did admit that the 'vis naturae', gravity, and matter's elasticity and repulsive powers demonstrated that the universe was permeated by 'a principle of intelligence and design' (ibid., 17). Despite the 'perpetual industry' of nature, he denied that this intelligence entailed that philosophers needed to posit the existence of a deity extraneous to the material world." E. I. Carlyle, 'Turner, Matthew (d. 1789?)', rev. Kevin C. Knox, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 (accessed May 2, 2008).

279.    ^ Text of Answer to Dr. Priestley's Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever at Project Guttenberg.

280.    ^ R. L. Wysong (1976). "5: Origin of Proteins". The Creation-evolution Controversy (implications, Methodology and Survey of Evidence): Toward a Rational Solution. Wysong Institute. p. 75. ISBN 9780918112026. "Recently, at a seminar, Harold Urey, the noted scientist who won a Nobel prize for his experiments on the origin of life.... ...Dr. Urey, a somewhat outspoken confirmed atheist and evolutionist, answered:..."

281.    ^ "Harold C. Urey". NNDB.com. http://www.nndb.com/people/873/000092597/. Retrieved 18 July 2012.

282.    ^ Peter Pringle (2008). The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century. Simon and Schuster. p. 137. ISBN 978-0-7432-6498-3. "Despite his strict upbringing in the Orthodox Church, Vavilov had been an atheist from an early age. If he worshipped anything, it was science."

283.    ^ Steve Kroft asked Venter on CBS' Sixty Minutes, 21 November 2010: "Do you believe in God?" Venter replied, "No. The universe is far more wonderful."

284.    ^ Lynn Margulis; Dorion Sagan (2000). What Is Life?. University of California Press. p. 170. ISBN 978-0-520-22021-8. "Both the French paleontologist-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Russian atheist Vladimir Vernadsky agreed that Earth is developing a global mind."

285.    ^ Donald E. Johnson (2010). Programming of Life. Big Mac Publishers. p. 123. ISBN 9780982355466. "Biologist George Wald dismissed anything besides physicalism with, “I will not believe that philosophically because I do not want to believe in God. Therefore, I choose to believe in that which I know is scientifically impossible: spontaneous generation arising to evolution."

286.    ^ "A firm atheist, he was interested in, though unconvinced by, the paranormal, and also did research on hypnosis." Ray Cooper, 'Walter, (William) Grey (1910–1977)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edition, May 2007 (accessed May 2, 2008).

287.    ^ Watson is identified as an atheist by his acquaintance, Rabbi Marc Gellman. Trying to Understand Angry Atheists: Why do nonbelievers seem to be threatened by the idea of God?, by Rabbi Marc Gellman, Newsweek, April 28, 2006. Retrieved November 11, 2006.

288.    ^ When asked by a student if he believed in God, Watson replied "Oh, no. Absolutely not... The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to understand." JoAnne Viviano (October 19, 2007). "Nobel Prize-winning scientist wows some, worries others". The Vindicator. http://www.vindy.com/local_news/279051929445300.php. Retrieved 2007-10-19.[dead link]

289.    ^ "We typically never squabbled very much. If we disagreed, it was about scientific issues. He didn't believe the observational evidence for the cosmological constant, and I think it's highly probable. He was raised as an Orthodox Jew and we both attended Temple Beth Emet in Anaheim. He was actually an atheist, who wanted to maintain Jewish traditions. It was another thing we didn't have to disagree about. We both agreed that modern cosmology provided a better picture of the early universe than does the book of Genesis." Virginia Trimble, Weber's wife, quoted in Physics and Society, Vol. 30 No. 4, p.24-25.

290.    ^ Azpurua: "Would it be accurate to say that you are an atheist?" Weinberg: "Yes. I don't believe in God, but I don't make a religion out of not believing in God. I don't organize my life around that." In Search of the God Particle, by Ana Elena Azpurua, Newsweek Web Exclusive, March 24, 2008, p. 3 (Accessed March 25, 2008)

291.    ^ In a review of Susskind's book The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, string theorist Michael Duff identifies Steven Weinberg as an "arch-atheist".[11]

292.    ^ In the book The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins identifies Steven Weinberg as an atheist.richarddawkins.net.

293.    ^ "...Victor Weisskopf, who describes himself as an atheist Viennese Jew...." Quoting from page 14 of The Prism of Science, by Edna Ullmann-Margalit, Springer, 1986.

294.    ^ John Golley (2010). Jet: Frank Whittle and the Invention of the Jet Engine. Eloy Gutierrez. p. 34. ISBN 9781907472008. "Although he had occasionally cut Church Parade, he had once held very strong religious beliefs, but these had eroded to such an extent that he had come to regard himself as an atheist. "By degrees", he said "I was forced to the conclusion that my beliefs were inconsistent with scientific teaching. Once the seeds of doubt were sown the whole structure of my former religious beliefs rapidly collapsed, and I swung to the other extreme"."

295.    ^ Gregory E. Pence (1998). Who's Afraid of Human Cloning?. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 9. ISBN 978-0-8476-8782-4. "Ian Wilmut is a regular guy. ...Although not a believer in God himself, he believes in ethics."

296.    ^ Angier, Natalie (2002-12-24). "The Origin of Religions, From a Distinctly Darwinian View". New York Times: p. F5. Archived from the original on 2007-10-16. http://web.archive.org/web/20071016083127/http://nytimes.com/2002/12/24/science/social/24CONV.html. Retrieved 2007-06-11. "...I don't believe in God. I tell people I'm an atheist, but a nice atheist."

297.    ^ Edward Witten (26 Jun 2008). "Must God exist to explain how the universe began?". TakeOnIt. http://www.takeonit.com/question/86.aspx. Retrieved 29 June 2012. "I'd probably speculate that near the big bang, the notion of time really breaks down, and so the question of what was the beginning and what was before the beginning - that kind of question - will ultimately turn out to not quite make sense."

298.    ^ "I grew up in a Jewish family but I gave it all up at 16 when I prayed to God for something I really wanted and it didn't happen. I have been an atheist ever since. I believe in proof and I know of no evidence for the existence of God, but I am in no way hostile to religion provided it does not interfere in the lives of others or come into conflict with science." Easter special: I believe..., Independent on Sunday, April 16, 2006 (accessed April 18, 2008).

299.    ^ Wozniak, Steven. "Letters – General Questions Answered". woz.org. http://www.woz.org/letters/general/72.html. Retrieved 2007-09-26. "... I am also atheist or agnostic (I don't even know the difference). I've never been to church and prefer to think for myself. I do believe that religions stand for good things, and that if you make irrational sacrifices for a religion, then everyone can tell that your religion is important to you and can trust that your most important inner faiths are strong."

300.    ^ In Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist: Elizur Wright and the Reform Impulse, Wright's biographer Lawrence B. Goodheart describes him as "an evangelical atheist, an impassioned actuary, a liberal who advocated state regulation, an individualist who championed social cooperation, and a very private public crusader" (op. cit., page x)

301.    ^ "When Wright was nine his father died of leukaemia and he moved with his mother and younger sister to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. There he enrolled in the Episcopal High School and duly became an atheist." Ajesh Partalay interviewing Wright, 'Master of the Universe', The Observer, 14 September 2008 (accessed 15 September 2008).

302.    ^ "At this point the reasons which led to the ascription of animal forms, often grotesque, to various divinities cease to have weight; the gods become entirely anthropomorphic, with nothing but the persistence of particular attributes to remind us of their original character. The motives of astonishment and fear aroused from the very first by the sublimity of natural phenomena acquire a new function, and impel the myth-making imagination to endow the gods with a more than human measure of all those qualities which it discovers in the corresponding forms of human activity." Wilhelm Wundt, Ethics: The Facts of Moral Life, pages 86-87.

303.    ^ Listed as an Atheist on NNDB.com, Wilhelm Wundt, NNDB.com.

304.    ^ Eliezer Yudkowsky. "Quote by Eliezer Yudkowsky". goodreads.com. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/533670. Retrieved 17 July 2012. "[...] intelligent people only have a certain amount of time (measured in subjective time spent thinking about religion) to become atheists. After a certain point, if you're smart, have spent time thinking about and defending your religion, and still haven't escaped the grip of Dark Side Epistemology, the inside of your mind ends up as an Escher painting."

305.    ^ Carol Parikh (2008). The Unreal Life of Oscar Zariski. Springer. p. 5. ISBN 9780387094298. "And yet it did, even though since moving into the boarding house he had become an atheist and most of his friends, including his best friend, were Russians."

306.    ^ Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich (2004). R.A. Sunyaev. ed. Zeldovich: Reminiscences. CRC Press. p. 69. ISBN 9780415287906. "I think that you know me well enough: I am an absolute atheist, and all days of the week are completely the same to me."

307.    ^ Andrei Sakharov: Facets of a Life. Atlantica Séguier Frontières. 1991. p. 599. ISBN 9782863320969. "Speaking about religion, Yakov Borisovich could say unambiguously, "I'm an absolute atheist"."

308.    ^ Jane Smiley (2010). The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer. Random House Digital, Inc.. ISBN 9780385527132. "Like Alan Turing, Zuse was educated in a system that focused on a child's emotional and philosophical life as well as his intellectual life, and at the end of school, like Turing, Zuse found himself to be something of an outsider—to the disappointment of his very conventional parents, he no longer believed in God or religion."

309.    ^ Konrad Zuse (1993). The Computer, My Life. Springer. pp. 12–13. ISBN 978-3-540-56453-9. "The only problem was that the progressive spirit at our school did not always correspond to my parents' ideas. This was particularly true for religious instruction, which now and again seemed even to us pupils to be rather too enlightened. After the 'Abitur' my parents wanted to go to communion with me; is was a terrible disappointment to them when I wouldn't go. They had lived under the illusion that I was a good student when it came to religion, too, which wasn't the case. ...I remember a poem presented by a student, which made a great impression on me. The essence of the poem read, "Basically, you are always alone." I have forgotten the name of the poet, but have often experienced the truth of these words in later life.""

310.    ^ "To base the unexplainabilty and the immense wonder of nature onto an other miracle (God) is unnecessary and not acceptable for any serious thinker." - Fritz Zwicky Diary entry, 1971., NNDB.com. [12]

[edit] External links

•        Twentieth Century Atheists on University of Cambridge's investigating atheism website

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