Listed here are persons who have identified themselves as theologically agnostic. Also included are individuals who have expressed the view that the veracity of a god's existence is unknown or inherently unknowable.
Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881): Scottish satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher during the Victorian era.[15]
Ariel Dorfman (born 1942): Argentine/Chilean novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist.[16]
Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930): Scottish physician and writer; known for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes; a prolific writer whose other works include science fiction stories, plays, romances, poetry, non-fiction and historical novels.[17]
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928): English novelist and poet; while his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.[28]
James Joyce (1882–1941): Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde movement of the early 20th century; best known for his novel Ulysses.[36]
Lucretius (99 BC–55 BC): Roman poet and philosopher.[46]
Bernard Malamud (1914–1986): American author of novels and short stories; one of the great American Jewish authors of the 20th century.[47]
H. L. Mencken (1880–1956): German-American journalist, satirist, social critic, cynic and freethinker, known as the "Sage of Baltimore".[48]
Thomas Mann (1875–1955): German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual.[49]
Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977): Russian novelist, poet and short story writer; known for his novel Lolita.[50]
Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935): Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic and translator, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in Portuguese.[53]
Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837): Russian author of the Romantic era, considered by many to be the greatest Russian poet and the founder of modern Russian literature.[58]
Mary Shelley (1797–1851): English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein (1818).[62]
Edward Snowden (born 1983): American computer specialist, privacy activist and former CIA employee and NSA contractor; disclosed classified details of several top-secret United States and British government mass surveillance programs.[63]
Boris Strugatsky (1925–2012): Soviet-Russian science fiction author who collaborated with his brother, Arkady Strugatsky, on various works; their novel Piknik na obochine was translated into English as Roadside Picnic in 1977 and was filmed by Andrei Tarkovsky under the title Stalker.[68]
Thucydides (c. 460–c. 395): Greek historian and author from Alimos. His History of the Peloponnesian War recounts the 5th-century BC war between Sparta and Athens to the year 411 BC. Thucydides has been dubbed the father of "scientific history", because of his strict standards of evidence-gathering and analysis in terms of cause and effect without reference to intervention by the gods, as outlined in his introduction to his work.[70][71][72]
Mark Twain (1835–1910): American humorist, satirist, lecturer and writer, most noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer;[74][75] has also been identified a deist.[76]
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797): English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.[81]
Warren Buffett (born 1930): American investor; identified himself as agnostic in response to Warren Allen Smith, who had asked him whether he believed in God[85]
Simon Baker (born 1969): Australian television and movie actor[92]
David Bazan (born 1976): American singer, songwriter, musician and former frontman of Pedro The Lion, an indie rock outfit associated with Christian rock that was controversial among Christians for their language and off-kilter views about religion; his solo career has been focused around his newfound agnosticism.
Dick Cavett (born 1936): American television talk show host[108]
Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977): English comic actor, film director and composer best known for his work in the United States during the silent film era[109]
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989): Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres, Spain. Dalí, a skilled draftsman, became best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed[by whom?] to the influence of Renaissance masters. His arguably best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media. He allegedly claimed to be both an agnostic and a Roman Catholic.[111]
Miles Davis (1926–1991): American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer.[112]
Thomas Eakins (1844–1916): American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator; widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history[117][118][119][120]
Carrie Fisher (1956–2016): American actress, screenwriter and novelist[124]
Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924): French composer, organist, pianist and teacher; one of the foremost French composers of his generation; his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers[125][126]
Gilberto Gil (born 1942): Brazilian singer, guitarist, and songwriter, known for both his musical innovation and political commitment[130]
Jean-Luc Godard (1930–2022): French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic; often identified with the 1960s French film movement La Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"[131]
Neil Patrick Harris (born 1973): American actor, producer, singer, and director; best known for Doogie Howser, M.D. and How I Met Your Mother; as a child, belonged to an Episcopal Church with his family, where he sang in choir, but has designated himself as an agnostic on his Myspace
Gustav Holst (1874–1934): English composer, arranger and teacher; best known for his orchestral suite The Planets; composed a large number of works across a range of genres, although none achieved comparable success[134][135]
John Humphrys (born 1943): English radio and television presenter who hosted a series of programmes interviewing religious leaders, Humphrys in Search of God[136]
Stan Lee (1922–2018) American comic book writer, editor, actor, producer, publisher, television personality; former president and chairman of Marvel Comics[143]
Lemmy (1945–2015): English rock singer and bass guitarist; founder of the rock band Motörhead[144]
Joe Lipari also known as J.R. Lipari, (born October 5, 1979) is an American comedian, artist, agnostic minister & yoga teacher.
Andrew Lloyd Webber (born 1948): Lloyd Webber views Jesus as "one of the great figures of history" and wrote the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar about him. The opera was controversial with conservative Christian groups.[147]
Brian May (born 1947): English musician and astrophysicist most widely known as the guitarist, songwriter and occasional singer of the rock band Queen[157]
Joe Rogan (born 1967): American comedian, podcaster, social critic and UFC color commentator
Andy Rooney (1919–2011): American broadcast personality; specified that he was an agnostic and not an atheist,[173] but also called himself an atheist[174][175]
Tim Rice (born 1944): Wrote the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar about Jesus. The opera was controversial with conservative Christians.[147]
Matt Stone (born 1971): American co-creator of the cartoon series South Park; considers himself an agnostic Jew (his mother is Jewish),[186] though he has also denied the existence of God[187]
Montel Williams (born 1956): American television host, actor and motivational speaker.[192]
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958): British composer. Despite the variety of his works with religious connections, Vaughan Williams was decidedly not a believer. According to his classmate Bertrand Russell, Williams was an atheist while attending Cambridge. According to his widow, he later became an agnostic.[193]
Billie Joe Armstrong (born 1972): American Musician and band member of Green Day
Philosophy
Idealistic agnostics
Confucius (551BC–479BC): Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher of the Spring and Autumn Period of Chinese history. The philosophy of Confucius emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice and sincerity. His followers competed successfully with many other schools during the Hundred Schools of Thought era only to be suppressed in favor of the Legalists during the Qin Dynasty. Following the victory of Han over Chu after the collapse of Qin, Confucius's thoughts received official sanction and were further developed into a Chinese religious system known as Confucianism.[194][195][196]
Laozi (born 604 BC): Chinese religious philosopher; author of the Tao Te Ching; this association has led him to be traditionally considered the founder of philosophical religion Taoism[203]
Unclassified philosophers-agnostics
Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997): British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, thought by many to be the dominant scholar of his generation[204]
Noam Chomsky (born 1928): American linguist, philosopher, political activist, author; lecturer, Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; credited with the creation of the theory of generative grammar[205][206]
Democritus (460 BC – 370 BC): Ancient Greek philosopher; influential pre-Socratic philosopher and pupil of Leucippus, who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos[207]
John Dewey (1859–1952): American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer; his ideas have been influential in education and social reform[208]
Epicurus (341BCE–270BCE): Ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism[209]
Fred Edwords (born 1948): longtime Humanist activist; national director of the United Coalition of Reason[210]
Sidney Hook (1902–1989): American philosopher of the Pragmatist school known for his contributions to the philosophy of history, the philosophy of education, political theory, and ethics[212]
Anthony Kenny (born 1931): president of Royal Institute of Philosophy, wrote in his essay "Why I'm not an atheist" after justifying his agnostic position that "a claim to knowledge needs to be substantiated; ignorance need only be confessed".[216]
Thomas Kuhn (1922–1996): American historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was deeply influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term "paradigm shift," which has since become an English-language staple[217]
G. E. Moore (1873–1958): English philosopher; one of the founders of the analytic tradition in philosophy[218]
Karl R. Popper (1902–1994): Philosopher of science; promoted falsifiability as a necessary criterion of empirical statements in science[219]
Protagoras (died 420 BCE): Greek Sophist; first major Humanist; wrote that the existence of the gods was unknowable[220]
Pyrrho (360 BC – c. 270 BC): Greek philosopher of classical antiquity; credited as being the first Skeptic philosopher and the inspiration for the school known as Pyrrhonism, founded by Aenesidemus in the 1st century BC[221][222]
Bertrand Russell (1872–1970): British philosopher and mathematician; considered himself a philosophical agnostic, but said that the label "atheist" conveyed a more accurate impression to "the ordinary man in the street"[223]
Michael Schmidt-Salomon (born 1967): German philosopher, author and former editor of MIZ (Contemporary Materials and Information: Political magazine for atheists and the irreligious)[224] Schmidt-Salomon has specified that he is not a "pure atheist, but actually an agnostic."[225]
Herbert Spencer (1820–1903): English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era[226]
Theophrastus (c. 371 BC – 287 BC): Greek philosopher; a native of Eresos in Lesbos; the successor to Aristotle in the Peripatetic school.[227]
Norman Angell (1872–1967): English lecturer, journalist, author, and politician; member of parliament for the Labour Party in England; awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933[231]
Clarence Darrow (1857–1938): American lawyer; defended John T. Scopes' right to teach Darwin's theory of evolution in the famous Tennessee "Monkey Trial"[238]
Alan Dershowitz (born 1938): American lawyer, jurist and political commentator; author of Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law (2013)[239]
Cenk Uygur (born 1970): Turkish American columnist, political commentator, activist, former MSNBC host, co-founder of the American liberal/progressive political and social internet commentary program The Young Turks, founder of Wolf PAC[269]
John Logie Baird (1888–1946): Scottish engineer and inventor of the world's first practical, publicly demonstrated television system, and of the world's first fully electronic colour television tube[282]
Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922): Eminent scientist, inventor, engineer and innovator; credited with inventing the first practical telephone[285][286]
Jagadish Chandra Bose (1858–1937): Indian polymath: physicist, biologist, botanist, archaeologist, early writer of science fiction; pioneered the investigation of radio and microwave optics, made very significant contributions to plant science, and laid the foundations of experimental science in the Indian subcontinent; invented the crescograph[296]
Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974): Polish-Jewish British mathematician, biologist, historian of science, theatre author, poet and inventor; presenter and writer of the 1973 BBC television documentary series The Ascent of Man, and the accompanying boo[297]
Wallace Carothers (1896–1937): American chemist and inventor; credited with the invention of nylon[301]
Henry Cavendish (1731–1810): British scientist; noted for his discovery of hydrogen or what he called "inflammable air"; known for the Cavendish experiment, his measurement of the Earth's density, and early research into electricity[302][303]
Francis Crick (1916–2004): Nobel-laureate co-discoverer of the structure of DNA; described himself as a skeptic and an agnostic with "a strong inclination towards atheism"[304]
Émile Durkheim (1858–1917): French sociologist; had a Jewish bar mitzvah at thirteen, was briefly interested in Catholicism after a mystical experience, but later became an agnostic[315]
Lee de Forest (1863–1961): American inventor with over 180 patents to his credit; invented the Audion; considered to be one of the fathers of the "electronic age", as the Audion helped to usher in the widespread use of electronics; credited with one of the principal inventions that brought sound to motion pictures[323][324]
Edward Frankland (1825–1899): British chemist; expert in water quality and analysis; originated the concept of combining power, or valence, in chemistry[325]
William Froude (1810–1879): English engineer, hydrodynamicist and naval architect; first to formulate reliable laws for the resistance that water offers to ships (such as the hull speed equation) and for predicting their stability[330]
Dennis Gabor (1900–1979): Hungarian-British electrical engineer and inventor; known for his invention of holography and received the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics[331][332]
Francis Galton (1822–1911): English Victorian polymath: anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician; a cousin of Charles Darwin[333]
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1979): English-American astronomer who in 1925 was first to show that the Sun is mainly composed of hydrogen, contradicting accepted wisdom at the time[334]
David Hilbert (1862–1943): German mathematician, recognized as one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries.[349][350][351][352]
Fred Hoyle (1915–2001): English astronomer and mathematician.[356]
Edwin Hubble (1889–1953): American astronomer who played a crucial role in establishing the field of extragalactic astronomy and is generally regarded as the leading observational cosmologist of the 20th century. Hubble generally is known for Hubble's law. He is credited with the discovery of the existence of galaxies other than the Milky Way and his galactic red shift discovery that the loss in frequency—the redshift — observed in the spectra of light from other galaxies increased in proportion to a particular galaxy's distance from Earth. This relationship became known as Hubble's law. His findings fundamentally changed the scientific view of the universe.[357][358]
Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859): German naturalist and explorer. His quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography.[359]
Andrew Huxley (1917–2012): English physiologist and biophysicist. He (along with Alan Hodgkin) won the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his experimental and mathematical work on the basis of nerve action potentials, the electrical impulses that enable the activity of an organism to be coordinated by a central nervous system.[360]
August Kekulé (1829–1896): German organic chemist. He was one of the most prominent chemists in Europe, especially in theoretical chemistry. He was the principal founder of the theory of chemical structure.[366][367]
Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736–1813): Italian-French mathematician and astronomer. He made significant contributions to all fields of analysis, number theory, and classical and celestial mechanics.[372][373][374][375][376]
James Lovelock (1919–2022): British scientist, environmentalist and futurologist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis.[382]
Percival Lowell (1855–1916): American businessman, author, mathematician, and astronomer who fueled speculation that there were canals on Mars, founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, and formed the beginning of the effort that led to the discovery of Pluto 14 years after his death.[383]
Frank Malina (1912–1981): American aeronautical engineer and painter, especially known for becoming both a pioneer in the art world and the realm of scientific engineering.[384]
Nathan Myhrvold (born 1959): American computer scientist, technologist, mathematician, physicist, entrepreneur, nature and wildlife photographer, master chef.[397]
David Nalin (born 1941): American physiologist. Nalin had the key insight that Oral rehydration therapy (ORT) would work if the volume of solution patients drank matched the volume of their fluid losses, and that this would drastically reduce or completely replace the only current treatment for cholera, intravenous therapy. Nalin's discoveries have been estimated to have saved over 50 million lives worldwide.[398]
Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930): Norwegian explorer, scientist, diplomat, humanitarian and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In 1922, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on behalf of the displaced victims of the First World War and related conflicts.[399]
Paul Nurse (born 1949): 2001 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, called himself an atheist, but specified that "sceptical agnostic" was a more "philosophically correct" term.[405]
Bill Nye (born 1955): American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, mechanical engineer and scientist. Popularly known as "Bill Nye the Science Guy".[406]
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.[408]
Carolyn Porco (born 1953): American planetary scientist. She is best known for her work in the exploration of the outer Solar System, beginning with her imaging work on the Voyager missions to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in the 1980s.[274]
C. V. Raman (1888–1970): Indian physicist whose work was influential in the growth of science in India. He was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1930 for the discovery that when light traverses a transparent material, some of the light that is deflected changes in wavelength. This phenomenon is now called Raman scattering and is the result of the Raman effect.[419][420]
Lisa Randall (born 1962): American theoretical physicist and a student of particle physics and cosmology. She works on several of the competing models of string theory in the quest to explain the fabric of the universe. Her best known contribution to the field is the Randall–Sundrum model, first published in 1999 with Raman Sundrum.[421]
Grote Reber (1911–2002): American amateur astronomer and pioneer of radio astronomy. He was instrumental in investigating and extending Karl Jansky's pioneering work, and conducted the first sky survey in the radio frequencies. His 1937 radio antenna was the second ever to be used for astronomical purposes and the first parabolic reflecting antenna to be used as a "radio telescope".[423][424]
Józef Rotblat (1908–2005): Polish-British physicist. Along with the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.[428]
Homer Smith (1895–1962): American physiologist. His research work focused on the kidney and he discovered inulin at the same time as A.N. Richards.[438]
William Smith (geologist) (1769–1839): English geologist, credited with creating the first nationwide geological map. He is known as the "Father of English Geology" for collating the geological history of England and Wales into a single record, although recognition was very slow in coming.[439]
Piero Sraffa (1898–1983): Influential Italian economist whose book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities is taken as founding the Neo-Ricardian school of Economics.[442]
Thorvald N. Thiele (1838–1910): Danish astronomer, actuary and mathematician, most notable for his work in statistics, interpolation and the three-body problem. He was the first to propose a mathematical theory of Brownian motion. Thiele introduced the cumulants and (in Danish) the likelihood function; these contributions were not credited to Thiele by Ronald A. Fisher, who nevertheless named Thiele to his (short) list of the greatest statisticians of all time on the strength of Thiele's other contributions.[448]
John Tyndall (1820–1893): Prominent 19th century experimental physicist. Known for producing a number of discoveries about processes in the atmosphere.[450][451]
Neil deGrasse Tyson (born 1958): American astrophysicist, science communicator, the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and a Research Associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History.[452]
Rudolf Virchow (1821–1902): German doctor, anthropologist, pathologist, prehistorian, biologist and politician. Referred to as "the father of modern pathology", he is considered one of the founders of social medicine.[455][456]
Norbert Wiener (1894–1964): American mathematician and child prodigy. He is regarded as the originator of cybernetics.[465]
Eugene Wigner (1902–1995): Hungarian American theoretical physicist and mathematician. He received a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1963 "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles"; the other half of the award was shared between Maria Goeppert-Mayer and J. Hans D. Jensen. Wigner is important for having laid the foundation for the theory of symmetries in quantum mechanics as well as for his research into the structure of the atomic nucleus. It was Eugene Wigner who first identified Xe-135 "poisoning" in nuclear reactors, and for this reason it is sometimes referred to as Wigner poisoning. Wigner is also important for his work in pure mathematics, having authored a number of theorems.[466]
Frank Wilczek (born 1951): American theoretical physicist. Along with David J. Gross and Hugh David Politzer, won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2004.[467]
Hubert Yockey (1916–2016): American physicist and information theorist.[470]
Hans Zinsser (1878–1940): American bacteriologist and a prolific author. He is known for his work in isolating the typhus bacterium and developing a protective vaccine.[471][472]
Kristy Hawkins (born 1980): American IFBB professional bodybuilder and scientist.[474]
Edmund Hillary (1919–2008): New Zealand mountaineer, explorer and philanthropist. He along with Tenzing Norgay became the first climbers confirmed as having reached the summit of Mount Everest.[475]
Pat Tillman (1976–2004): American professional football player and U.S. Army veteran.[476]
Nicholas Von Hoffman (2010). Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky. Nation Books. pp.108–109. ISBN9781568586250. He passed the word in the Back of the Yards that this Jewish agnostic was okay, which at least ensured that he would not be kicked out the door.
Charles E. Curran (2011). The Social Mission of the U.S. Catholic Church: A Theological Perspective. Georgetown University Press. p.32. ISBN9781589017436. Saul D. Alinsky, an agnostic Jew, organized the Back of the Yards neighbourhood in Chicago in the late 1930s and started the Industrial Areas Foundation in 1940 to promote community organizations and to train community organizers.
Deal Wyatt Hudson (1987). Deal Wyatt Hudson; Matthew J. Mancini (eds.). Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend. Mercer University Press. p.40. ISBN9780865542792. Saul Alinsky was an agnostic Jew for whom the religion of any kind held very little importance and just as little relation to the focus of his life's work: the struggle for economic and social justice, for human dignity and human rights, and the alleviation of the sufferings of the poor and downtrodden.
Piers Anthony. "Piers Anthony Interview". Archived from the original on 12 May 2013. Retrieved 13 May 2012. I am agnostic because I feel each person should make up his mind about his religion.
.Peter Baehr (2010). Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Social Sciences. Stanford University Press. p.66. ISBN9780804756501. Both Hannah Arendt and Aron were assimilated, agnostic Jews (so were Mannheim and Riesman), who became politically radicalized only with the rise of the Nazi movement;...
"They were both agnostics, though both set a high associative value on the language in which the traditional religions of their forebears had been expressed, and in conversation and writing were not averse to ironic reference to certain metaphysical concepts." Anthony Cronin, Samuel Beckett: the last modernist (1999), page 90
"Contrary to McWilliams's claim, however, in the public arena Bierce was not merely an agnostic but a staunch unbeliever regarding the question of Jesus' divinity." Donald T. Blume, Ambrose Bierce's Civilians and soldiers in context: a critical study, page 323.
I. Shenker (6 April 1971). "Borges, a Blind Writer With Insight". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 21 January 2018. Retrieved 19 February 2017. "Being an agnostic means all things are possible, even God, even the Holy Trinity. This world is so strange that anything may happen, or may not happen. Being an agnostic makes me live in a larger more fantastic kind of world, almost uncanny. It makes me more tolerant."
Henry Cadbury stated in a 1936 lecture to Harvard Divinity School students: "Most students... wish to know whether I believe in the existence of God on immortality, and if so why. They regard it impossible to leave these matters unsettled – or at least extremely detrimental to religion not to have the basis of such conviction. Now for my pa, rt I do not find it impossible to leave them op..... I can describe myself as no ardent theist or atheist."
"I have recently argued that this linguistic indeterminacy, or as J. Hillis Miller terms it, undecidability, places Carlyle as a perhaps unwilling and yet important contributor to the upsurge of aanti-religiousus agnosticism that would set in motion the demise of orthodox belief both prophesied and dreaded by Nietzsche." Paul E. Kerry, Marylu Hill, Thomas Carlyle Resartus: Reappraising Carlye's Contribution to the Philosophy of History, Political Theory, and Cultural Criticism (2010), page 69.
Golgotha Pres (2011). The Life and Times of Arthur Conan Doyle. BookCaps Study Guides. ISBN9781621070276. In time, he would reject the Catholic religion and become an agnostic.
"To be clear, in all the annals of American and African American history, one will probably not find another agnostic as preoccupied with and as familiar with so much biblical, religious, and spiritual rhetoric as WEB Du Bois." Brian Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois: Toward Agnosticism, 1868–1934, page 3.
V.Bernet (23 April 2008). "Agnostic's questions have biblical answers". Kansas City Star. In the church of his youth in Lawrence, Kansas, with nearly every pew at capacity last week, Bart D. Ehrman, chairman of the department of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, announced that he was an agnostic. He joked that atheists think agnostics are wimpy atheists and that agnostics think atheists are arrogant agnostics.
David G. Riede (2005). Allegories Of One'n Mind: Melancholy In Victorian Poetry. Ohio State University Press. p.188. ISBN978-0-8142-1008-6. Unlike Tennyson and the Brownings, however, Fitzgerald was an agnostic, and consequently he lacked the strong sense of conscience and duty that might have disciplined and given shape to his anomic imagination.
"To be sure, when she wrote her groundbreaking book, Friedan considered herself an "agnostic" Jew, unaffiliated with any religious branch or institution." Kirsten Fermaglich, American Dreams and Nazi Nightmares: Early Holocaust Consciousness and Liberal America, 1957–1965 (2007), page 59.
Ramesh Chopra (2005). Academic Dictionary Of Philosophy. Gyan Books. p.142. ISBN9788182052246. His agnosticism is best seen in his 'Moods, Songs, and Doggerels'.
Neil Gaiman (January 1989). Neil Gaiman interviewed by Steve Whitaker. FA No. 109. pp.24–29. I think we can say that God exists in the DC Universe. I would not stand up and beat the drum for the existence of God in this universe. I don't know, I think there's probably a 50/50 chance. It doesn't matters to me.
"...Gorky – a religious agnostic praised as a social realist by the communist regime during the demise of imperial Russia..." James Redmond, Drama and Philosophy, p. 161.
"Gorky had long rejected all organized religions. Yet he was not a materialist, and thus he could not be satisfied with Marx's ideas on religion. When asked to express his views about religion in a questionnaire sent by the French journal Mercure de France on April 15, 1907, Gorky replied that he was opposed to the existing religions of Moses, Christ, and Mohammed. He defined religious feeling as an awareness of a harmonious link that joins man to the universe and as an aspiration for synthesis, inherent in every individual." Tova Yedlin, Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography, p. 86.
Geoffrey Harvey (2003). The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy. Routledge. p.23. ISBN9780415234917. Although Hardy's agnosticism was less forceful than Stephen's, significantly it was Hardy whom he chose to witness his renunciation of Holy Orders on 23 March 1875.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr (2006). Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present: Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy. SUNY Press. pp.166–167. ISBN9780791467992. Also Iran's most famous modern writer, Sadegh Hedayat, who was an agnostic and antireligious activist, did much to introduce the nescepticalal view of Khayyam among modernized Persians to the extent that some by mistake think of him as the founder of Khayyam studies in Iran.
J. Neil Schulman (1999). "Job: A Comedy of Justice Reviewed by J. Neil Schulman". Robert Heinlein Interview: And Other Heinleiniana. Pulpless. Com. p.62. ISBN9781584450153. Lewis converted me from atheism to Christianity – Rand converted me back to atheism, with Heinlein standing on the sidelines rooting for agnosticism.
Carole M. Cusack (2010). Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p.57. ISBN9780754693604. Heinlein, like Robert Anton Wilson, was a lifelong agnostic, believing that to affirm that there is no God was as silly and unsupported as to affirm that there was a God.
Joseph Heller; Adam J. Sorkin (1993). Adam J. Sorkin (ed.). Conversations With Joseph Heller. Univ. Press of Mississippi. p.75. ISBN9780878056354. Mandel: You are expressing an agnostic attitude toward reality and I am glad to see you so healthy. Heller: I realize that even if I received convincing physical evidence that there is a God and a heaven and hell, it wouldn't affect me one bit. I think the experience of life is more important than the experience of eternity. Life is short. Eternity never runs out.
Alexander Herzen; Kathleen Parthé; Robert Neil Harris (2012). A Herzen Reader. Northwestern University Press. p.367. ISBN9780810128477. Zernov writes: "Herzen was the only leader of the intelligentsia who was more an agnostic than a dogmatic atheist and for this reason he remained on the fringe of the movement."
Harold Bloom, ed. (2003). Aldous Huxley. Infobase Publishing. p.27. ISBN978-0-7910-7040-6. As late as 1962 he wrote to Reid Gardner, "I remain an agnostic who aspires to be a gnostic" (Letters 935).
During an interview on his book The Year of Living Biblically with George Stroumboulopoulos on the CBC Program 'The Hour' Jacobs states "I'm still an agnostic, I don't know whether there's a god."Archived 22 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine
" Neither Joyce's agnosticism nor his sexual libertinism were known to his mentors at Belvedere and he remained to the end a Prefect of the Sodality of Mary." Bruce Stewart, James Joyce (2007), p. 14.
"Kafka did not look at writing as a "gift" in the traditional sense. If anything, he considered both his talent for writing and what he produced as a writer curses for some unknown sin. Since Kafka was agnostic or even an atheist, it is best to assume his sense of sin and curse were metaphors." Franz Kafka – The Absurdity of EverythingArchived 8 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine, Tamer i.com.
"Kafka was also alienated from his heritage by his parents' perfunctory religious practice and minimal social formality in the Jewish community, though his style and influences were sometimes attributed to Jewisfolklorere. Kafka eventually declared himself a socialist atheistand, Spinoza, Darwin and Nietzsche e some of his influences." C. D. Merriman, Franz KafkaArchived 6 November 2020 at the Wayback Machine.
"Keats shared Hunt's dislike of institutionalized Christianity, parsons, and the Christian belief in man's innate corruption, but, as an unassertive agnostic, held well short of Shelley's avowed atheism." John Barnard, John Keats, pp. 38–39.
Chris Mullen (7 March 1983). "Korczak's Children: Flawed Faces in a Warsaw Ghetto". The Heights. p.24. Archived from the original on 25 August 2013. Retrieved 25 August 2013. An assimilated Jew, he changed his name from Henryk Goldschmidt and was an agnostic who did not believe in forcing religion on children.
The Month, Volume 39. Simpkin, Marshall, and Company. 1968. p.350. WheDrr. Janusz Korczak, a Jewish philanthropist and agnostic, voluntarily chooses to follow the Jewish orphans under his care to the Nazi extermination camp in Treblinka.
"Lucretius did not deny the existence of gods either, but he felt that human ideas about gods combined with the fear of death make human beings unhappy. He followed the same materialist lines as Epicurus, and by denying that the gods had any way of influencing our world he said that humankind not needed to fear the supernatural." Ancient AtheistsArchived 10 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine. BBC.
Markose Abraham (2011). American Immigration Aesthetics: Bernard Malamud and Bharati Mukherjee As Immigrants. AuthorHouse. p.146. ISBN978-1-4567-8243-6. An agnostic humanist, Malamud has unflinching faith in man's ability to choose and make "hin world" from the "usable past".
Catherine Patricia Riesenman (1966). The early reception of Thomas Mann's "Doktor Faustus": history and main problems. Indiana University. p.158. Mann's "agnostic humanism" admits the existence of God as an incontestable fact but refuses a dogmatic definition of the nature of God (p. 77).
"O'Neill, an agnostic ann anarchist, maintained little hope in religion or politics and saw institutions not serving to preserve liberty but standing in the way of the birth of true freedom." John P. Diggins, Eugene O'Neill's America: desire under democracy (2007), p. 130.
Fernando Pessoa; Richard Zenith (2002). The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa. Grove Press. ISBN9780802139146. Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.
"Marcel Proust was the son of a Christian father and a Jewish mother. He was baptized (on 5 August 1871, at the church of Saint-Louis d'Antin) and later confirmed as a Catholic, but he nevepractiseded that faith and as an adult could best be described as a mystical atheist, someone imbued with spirituality who nonetheless did not believe in a personal God, much less in saviour." Edmund White, Marcel Proust: A Life (2009).
Finch, Alison (1959). The Oxford Companion to French Literature: Marcel Proust. Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-866104-7. Proust's mother was Jewish; he and his younger brother were brought up as Catholics. He no doubt grew up with an awareness of the diversity of religious and cultural traditions; this awareness is part of what gives A la Recherche du temps perdu its breadth. The adult Proust seems to have been an atheist or agnostic (albeit one with a keen sense of awe and mystery); certain, ly his mature work shows, in religious and other areas, a scepticism by turns quizzical or delighted or anguished. Such scepticism has been part of the French literary tradition for centuries, but Proust was to foreground it in a particularly modern mode.
Miller, Laura. "Far From Narnia"(Life and Letters article). The New Yorker. Archived from the original on 10 May 2013. Retrieved 31 October 2007. he is one of England's most outspoken atheists.... He added, "Although I call myself an atheist, I am a Church of England atheist, and a 1662 Book of Common Prayer atheist because that's the tradition I was brought up in and I cannot escape those early influences."
David M. Bethea (1998). Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet. Univ of Wisconsin Press. p.12. ISBN978-0-299-15974-0. For Pushkin himself was agnostic, in the sense that, exquisitely perched between paganism and Orthodoxy, violence and civilization, east and west, he would have loved to believe, but he felt too attached to this world, too fascinated by it, to come to rest in any stance other than the simultaneously exhilarating and wearying stand-in-relation-to.
Adel Iskander; Hakem Rustom (2010). Edward Said: A Legacy of Emancipation and Representation. University of California Press. ISBN978-0-520-24546-4. Said was of Christian background, a confirmed agnostic, perhaps even an atheist, yet he had a rage for justice and a moral sensibility lacking in most believers. Said retained his ethical compass without God and persevered in an exile once forced and now chosen, affected by neither malice nor fear.
John Cornwell (2010). Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint. Continuum International Publishing Group. p.128. ISBN9781441150844. A hundred and fifty years on, Edward Said, an agnostic of Palestinian origins, who strove to correct false Western impressions of 'Orientalism', would declare Newman's university discourses both true and 'incomparably eloquent'...
Antonio Mond a (2007). Do You Believe?. Vintage. pp.141, 146. I am an agnostic...I began not to believe in the existence of God when I was in high school.
Helen M. Buss; D. L. Macdonald; Anne McWhir (2001). Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives. Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press. p.141. ISBN9780889209435. Its implicit antagonist-reader and protagonist-editor are his Roman Catholic wife Mary Jane, and his troubled agnostic daughter, Mary Shelley:...
Broder, John M.; Shane, Scott (15 June 2013). "For Snowden, a Life of Ambition, Despite the Drifting". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 24 February 2021. Retrieved 15 June 2013. Toward the end of 2003Mrr. Snowden wrote that he was joining the Army, listing Buddhism as his religion ("agnostic is strangely absent", he noted parenthetically about the military recruitment form). He tried to define a still-evolving belief system. "I feel that religion, adopted purely, is ultimately representative of blindly making someone else's beliefs your own."
Patrick A. McCarthy (1982). Olaf Stapledon. Twayne. ISBN9780805768268. There may be a God or universal spirit apart from man, as Victor admits; but he maintains Stapledon's consistently agnostic position that we should "be true to our little insect intelligence...
Jackson J. Benson (1984). The true adventures of John Steinbeck, writer: a biography. Viking Press. p.248. ISBN9780670166855. Ricketts did not convert his friend to a religious point of view – Steinbeck remained an agnostic and, essentially, a materialist – but Ricketts's religious acceptance did tend to work on his friend...
"It must be extremely consoling, he admitted, to have faith in religion, yet even for an agnostic, like himself, life held many beautiful realities – the art of Raphael or Titian, the prose of Voltaire and the poetry of Byron in Don Juan." F. C. Green, Stendhal (2011), p. 200.
"The Modern Spirit". Thucydides. Taylor & Francis. 1925. p.16. Thucydidesn attitude towards the gods is that of a well-poised agnostic: If there be any, they do not concern themselves with human affairs.
Joseph Mali (2003). "1". Mythistory: The Making of a Modern Historiography. University of Chicago Press. p.19. ISBN9780226502625. For Thucydides held to an agnostic conception of history: he did not believe in any supernatural or merely natural forces in it; rather, he conceived history — in overtly dramatic terms — to be a test of character, an ongoing attempt of men to assert themselves in, and over against the reality that they could not fully understand not change.
Mary Frances Williams (1998). Ethics in Thucydides: The Ancient Simplicity. University Press of America. p.6. ISBN9780761810568. As scholars came to accept, around the turn of the century, arguments that proclaimed Thucydides' agnosticism or atheism, religion was considered to be either of no interest to the author or to be actively despised by him, and this likewise influenced the treatment of ethics in the 'History'.
"For example, Leonard Schapiro, Turgenev, His Life and Times (New York: Random, 1978) 214, writes about Turgenev's agnosticism as follows: "Turgenev was not a determined atheist; there is ample evidence which shows that he was an agnostic who would have been happy to embrace the consolations of religion, but was, except perhaps on some rare occasions, unable to do so"; and Edgar Lehrman, Turgenev's Letters (New York: Knopf, 1961) xi, presents still another interpretation for Turgenev's lack of religion, suggesting literature as a possible substitution: "Sometimes Turgenev's attitude toward literature makes us wonder whether, for him, literature was not a surrogate religion – something in which he could believe unhesitatingly, unreservedly, and enthusiastically, something that somehow would make man in general and Turgenev in particular, a little happier." - Harold Bloom, Ivan Turgenev, Chelsea House Publishers (2003), pp. 95–96. ISBN 9780791073995
"In one of our walks about Hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of his agnosticism, he declared that Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions..." William Dean Howells, My Mark TwainArchived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine.
"William Dean Howells and Mark Twain had much in common. They were agnostic but compassionate of the plight of man in an indifferent world..." Darrel Abel (2002), Classic Authors of the Gilded Age, iUniverse, ISBN0-595-23497-6
"At the most, Mark Twain was a mild agnostic, usually he seems to have been an amused Deist. Yet, at this late da, te hin daughter has refused to allow his comments on religion to be published." Kenneth Rexroth, "Humor in a Tough Age;" The Nation, 7 March 1959. Archived 24 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine
Adam Bruno Ulam (2002). Understanding the Cold War: A Historical Reflections (2ed.). Transaction Publishers. p.24. ISBN9781412840651. While very religious when very young, by sixteen I had turned agnostic.
Evenhuis, Anthony (1998). Messiah Or Antichrist?: A Study of the Messianic Myth in the Work of Zola. University of Delaware Press. ISBN978-0-87413-634-0. Given Émile Zola's reputation as an agnostic and a radical thinker, he has often been avoided by scholars with a religious background.
"The first Nobel Peace Prize went, in 1901, to Henri Dunant. Dunant was the founder of the Red Cross, but he could not become its first elective head-so it is widely believed – because of his agnostic views." Oscar Riddle, The Unleashing of Evolutionary Thought (2007), p. 343.
Elon Musk. "Going to Mars with Elon Musk". The Henry Ford. Archived from the original on 6 October 2014. Retrieved 14 July 2013. Well, I do. Do I think that there's some sort of master intelligence architecting all of this stuff? I think probably not because then you have to say: "Where does the master intelligence come from?" So it sort of begs the question. So I think really you can explain this with the fundamental laws of physics. You know its complex phenomenon from simple elements.
"Elon Musk and Rainn Wilson discuss colonizing Mars, global warming, and the fear of failure". 19 March 2013. Archived from the original on 8 August 2017. Retrieved 14 July 2013. Wilson: "What do you worship?" Musk: "Well, I don't really worship anything, but I do devote myself to the advancement of humanity, uh, using technology." Wilson: "Can science and religion coexist?" Musk: "Probably not." Wilson: "Do you pray?" Musk: "I didn't even pray when I almost died of Malaria."
On his religious beliefs:
ANNO: "I don't belong to any kind of organized religion, so I guess I could be considered agnostic. Japanese spiritualism holds that there is kami (spirit) in everything, and that's closer to my own beliefs." Anno's Roundtable Discussion.
"I was religious when I was younger. I was Catholic, raised Catholic. I had certain issues about that. I consciously lapsed. I made a conscious decision to avoid it. I'm agnostic. I'm not saying I don't have faith; I absolutely have faith but don't necessarily have faith in God. I have faith in humanity." Guardian's' Simon Baker refocuses anger of youth into busy career by Luane Lee, Scripps Howard News Service, 2 January 2003.
Monica Bellucci. "Monica-Bellucci.net". Monica Bellucci. Archived from the original on 23 June 2012. Retrieved 12 June 2012. I am an agnostic, even though I respect and am interested in all religions. If there's something I believe in, it's a mysterious energy; the one that fills the oceans during tides, the one that unites nature and beings.
Raphael Shargel (2007). Ingmar Bergman: Interviews. Univ. Press of Mississippi. p.174. ISBN978-1-57806-218-8. A religious reconciliation, for example, appears unlikely for Mr. Bergman, an agnostic. "I hope I never get so old I get religious," he said.
"'God Bless America,' a favorite song of believers, was written by Irving Berlin. It now turns out that Berlin was an agnostic. In Freethought Today (Madison, Wisconsin, Freedom From Religion Foundation, May 2004) Dan Barker documents that Berlin, the son of a Jewish cantor, was an agnostic, that 'patriotism was his religion.'" Warren Allen Smith, Gossip from Across the Pond: Articles Published in the United Kingdom's Gay and Lesbian Humanist, 1996–2005, p. 106.
David Cairns (2003). Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness, 1832–1869 (2ed.). University of California Press. p.136. ISBN9780520240582. Berlioz spoke of himself as an atheist, at most as an agnostic.
Andrew Ford (2011). Illegal Harmonies: Music in the Modern Age (3ed.). Black Inc. p.77. ISBN9781921870217. In place of the Frenchman's unquestioning faith, for example, there was Britten's agnosticism; and in contrast to the uxorious Messiaen, Britten was a homosexual: this, at a time when homosexual practices were still illegal in the United Kingdom.
Jeremy Begbie; Steven R. Guthrie, eds. (2011). Resonant witness: conversations between music and theology. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. pp.192–193. ISBN9780802862778. I have already cited British composers whom one might describe as "mystical agnostics", yet it is striking that these (with the arguable exceptions of Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten), are scarcely to be counted among the major innovators in twentieth-century music.
Mervyn Cooke (1996). Britten: War Requiem. Cambridge University Press. p.16. ISBN9780521446334. From the Tribunal's subsequent report we learn (intriguingly) that Britten also declared, "I do not believe in the Divinity of Christ, but I think his teaching is sound and his example should be followed."
Bradley Bambarger (23 January 1999). "Classical – Keeping Score". Billboard. p.40. Although an agnostic myself," says English composer Gavin Bryars, "I find that the conventions of religion – the rituals – can be very consoling. If you have ever been to a secular funeral, you know that they tend to be chaotic things.
"Actress Rose Byrne on 'Knowing' Religion & the End of the World" in BBook.com: Archived 26 April 2012 at the Wayback Machine "Yeah, I'd say I'm agnostic".
Dick Cavett (7 February 2007). "Ghost Stories". Archived from the original on 18 January 2021. Retrieved 30 June 2013. I'm not an atheist exactly, but remain what you might call "suggestible". (Is there a category of almost-atheist? A person who does not have the courage of his nonconvictions? I guess Woody Allen has, as so often, had the ultimate comic word on the subject. "You cannot prove the nonexistence of God; you just have to take it on faith.")
Charles Chaplin, Jr. My Father, Charlie Chaplin. pp.239–240. "I'm not an atheist," I can remember him saying on more than one occasion. "I'm definitely an agnostic. Some scientists say that if the world were to stop revolving we'd all disintegrate. But the world keeps on going. Something must be holding us all in place—some Supreme Force. But what it is I couldn't tell you.
Howard Pollack (1999). Aaron Copland:: The Life and Work of an Uncommon Man. University of Illinois Press. p.28. ISBN9780252069000. Arnold Dobrin similarly reported, "Aaron Copland has not followed the religion of his parents. He is an agnostic but one who is deeply aware of the grandeur and mystery of the universe."
Robert Descharnes; Gilles Néret (1994). Salvador Dalí, 1904–1989. Benedikt Taschen. p.166. ISBN9783822802984. Dalí, dualist as ever in his approach, was now claiming to be both an agnostic and a Roman Catholic.
George Grella (22 October 2015). Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN9781628929454. Miles, by consistently going against the prevailing flow, was not just demonstrating that he was his own man, he was marking himself as an apostate. Not that he cared: he was agnostic. But jazz cared.
Hiatt, Brian (5 August 2010). "Leonardo DiCaprio Faces His DemonsArchived 2 November 2016 at the Wayback Machine". Rolling Stone. "I'm not an atheist, I'm agnostic. What I honestly think about is the planet, not my specific spiritual soul floating around."
Akela Reason (2010). Thomas Eakins and the Uses of History. University of Pennsylvania Press. p.119. ISBN9780812241983. Eakins's selection of this subject has puzzled some art historians who, unable to reconcile what appears to be an anomalous religious image by a reputedly agnostic artist, have related it solely to Eakins's desire for realism, thus divesting the painting of its religious content. Lloyd Goodrich, for example, considered this illustration of Christ's suffering completely devoid of "religious sentiment" and suggested that Eakins intended it simply as a realist study of the male nude body. As a result, art historians have frequently associated 'Crucifixion' (like Swimming) with Eakins's strong interest in anatomy and the nude.
Amy Beth Werbel (2007). Thomas Eakins: Art, Medicine, and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia. Yale University Press. p.37. ISBN9780300116557. Given Eakins' outspoken agnosticism, his motivation to paint a crucifixion scene is frankly curious.
Sidney Kirkpatrick (2006). The Revenge of Thomas Eakins. Yale University Press. p.55. ISBN9780300108552. Further, Eakins' agnosticism and his views on such topics as science and technology, evident in his youth and carried on throughout his career, more directly coincided with the accepted doctrine and practices of Jefferson faculty members than perhaps with any other fraternity of like-minded professionals in the city.
"I was raised agnostic, so we never practiced religion..." "Zac Efron – the new American hearthrob", Strauss, Neil Rolling Stone, 23 August 2007, p. 43.
Émile Vuillermoz; Steven Smolian (1969). Gabriel Fauré. Chilton Book Co. p.74. We have just said that Faure was not a religious man. He was incapable of intolerance or sectarianism, but his agnosticism was complete.
Richard L. Smith; Caroline Potter, eds. (2006). French music since Berlioz. Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. p.174. ISBN9780754602828. The resolutely agnostic Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) was certainly one of its greatest alumni.
In response to the question "Do you believe in God?", Fox said "I would love to, but I wonder sometimes what he believes in. Religion seems to have been created by man to help and guide humankind. I've no idea, really.""Analyse this: Inside the mind of actress Emilia Fox". iconocast.com.[permanent dead link]
Brent Lang (12 April 2013). "Director William Friedkin on Clashes With Pacino, Hackman and Why an Atheist Couldn't Helm 'Exorcist'". The Wrap. Archived from the original on 25 June 2021. Retrieved 4 October 2020. My personal beliefs are defined as agnostic. I'm someone who believes that the power of God and the soul are unknowable, but that anybody who says there is no God is not being honest about the mystery of fate. I was raised in the Jewish faith, but I strongly believe in the teachings of Jesus.
Steven Dillon (2004). Derek Jarman and Lyric Film: The Mirror and the Sea. University of Texas Press. p.20. ISBN9780292702240. Le Fanu characterizes Tarkovsky as a metaphysical opposite of Godard: a spiritual creator contrasted with an ironic one, a believer in the creative power of the word compared to an agnostic.
Bayan Northcott. "Gustav Holst". BBC Music Magazine. Archived from the original on 4 December 2013. Retrieved 12 May 2013. For Holst, the function of the composer was not so much to express his or her personality as to serve as a kind of supra-personal receptor to potentially musical impulses from all around, and not least – though Holst himself seems to have remained essentially agnostic – from above.
About Holst. Barnes Music Festival. 2012. Archived from the original on 16 February 2013. Retrieved 12 May 2013. Both musicians were agnostic and flirted with atheism.
"He [Humphrys] went looking for God and ended up an angry agnostic – unable to believe but enraged by the arrogance of militant atheists." In God we doubtArchived 16 July 2011 at the Wayback Machine, John Humphrys The Sunday Times, 2 September 2007 (Retrieved 1 April 2008)
"When we got married, I said, 'Look, since I'm agnostic, I have no right to tell you not to teach them what you believe. But give them an opening.' So if they ever ask me, I'd tell them the same thing I'm telling you: 'I don't buy that God, I don't know if there's an afterlife.' Pogrebin, Abigail (2005). Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish. New York: Broadway. pp.318–322. ISBN978-0-7679-1612-7.
The Onion: "Is there a God?" Stan Lee: "Well, let me put it this way... [Pauses.] No, I'm not going to try to be clever. I really don't know. I just don't know." Is There A GodArchived 3 November 2013 at the Wayback Machine, The Club, 9 October 2002.
Jacques Meuris (1994). René Magritte, 1898–1967. Benedikt Taschen. p.70. ISBN9783822805466. We shall not at this juncture risk analyzing an agnostic Magritte haunted perhaps by thoughts of ultimate destiny. "We behave as if there were no God" (Marien 1947).
"It is particularly poor salesmanship for Ms. Raabe to cite Mahler's supposed conversion from Judaism to Catholicism. In both law and common understanding, a choice made under duress is discounted as lacking in free will. Mahler converted as a mere formality under compulsion of a bigoted law that barred Jews from directorship of the Vienna Hofoper. Mahler himself joked about the conversion with his Jewish friends, and, no doubt, would view with bitter amusement the obtuseness of Ms. Raabe's understanding of the cruel choice forced on him: either convert to Christianity or forfeit the professional post for which you are supremely destined. When Mahler was asked why he never composed a Mass, he answered bluntly that he could never, with any degree of artistic or spiritual integrity, voice the Credo. He was a confirmed agnostic, a doubter and seeker, never a soul at rest or at peace." Joel Martel, MAHLER AND RELIGION; Forced to Be ChristianArchived 1 November 2020 at the Wayback Machine, The New York Times.
Stuart Feder (2004). "Mahler at Midnight". Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis. Yale University Press. pp.63–64. ISBN9780300103403. Mahler had followed the common path of assimilationist Jews, particularly those who were German-speaking and university-educated: toward a dignified job, a position in the community, and a respectable income. Besides the fact that anti-Semitism was rife in Vienna, the post Mahler sought was a government position and normally open only to those who declared themselves to belong to the state religion, Catholicism. Mahler's superior, the intendant of the opera, reported directly to the emperor. Like the many Jews who were candidates for lesser government jobs, Mahler was officially baptized on 23 February 1897. His appointment arrived soon after.
Norman Lebrecht (2010). Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World. Random House Digital, Inc. p.84. ISBN9780375423819. In January 1897 Mahler is told that "under present circumstances it is impossible to engage a Jew for Vienna." "Everywhere", he bemoans, "the fact that I am a Jew has at the last moment proved an insurmountable obstacle." But he does not despair, having made arrangements to remedy his deficiency. On February 23, 1897, at Hamburgs Little Michael Church, Gustav Mahler is baptized into the Roman Catholic faith. He is the most reluctant, the most resentful, of converts. "I had to go through it," he tells Walter. "This action," he informs Karpath, "which I took out of self-preservation, and which I was fully prepared to take, cost me a great deal." He tells a Hamburg writer: "I've changed my coat." There is no false piety here, no pretense. Mahler is letting it be known for the record that he is a forced convert, one whose Jewish pride is undiminished, his essence unchanged. "An artist who is a Jew," he tells a critic, "has to achieve twice as much as one who is not, just as a swimmer with short arms has to make double efforts". After the act of conversion he never attends Mass, never goes to confession, never crosses himself. The only time he ever enters a church for a religious purpose is to get married.
"He was born a Jew but has been described as a life-long agnostic. At one point he converted to Catholicism, purely for the purpose of obtaining a job that he coveted – director of the Court Opera of Vienna. It was unthinkable for a Jew to hold such a prestigious position, hence the utilitarian conversion to the state religion." Warren Allen Smith, Celebrities in Hell, pp. 76–77.
Otto Klemperer (1986). Martin J. Anderson (ed.). Klemperer on Music: Shavings from a Musician's Workbench. London: Toccata Press. pp.133–147. Mahler was a thoroughgoing child of the nineteenth century, an adherent of Nietzsche, and typically irreligious. For all that, he was – as all his compositions testify – devout in the highest sense, though his piety was not to be found in any church prayer-book.
Kenneth Lafave (2002). "Mahler, Gustav". Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and Dying. Encyclopedia.com. Archived from the original on 25 December 2013. Retrieved 29 June 2013. From the beginning, Mahler declared that his music was not for his own time but for the future. An agnostic, he apparently saw long-term success as a real-world equivalent of immortality. "Mahler was a thoroughgoing child of the nineteenth century, an adherent of Nietzsche, and typically irreligious," the conductor Otto Klemperer recalled in his memoirs, adding that, in his music, Mahler evinced a "piety. . . not to be found in any church prayer-book." This appraisal is confirmed by the story of Mahler's conversion to Catholicism in 1897. Although his family was Jewish, Mahler was not observant, and when conversion was required to qualify as music director of the Vienna Court Opera—the most prestigious post in Europe—he swiftly acquiesced to baptism and confirmation, though he never again attended mass. Once on the podium, however, Mahler brought a renewed spirituality to many works, including Beethoven's Fidelio, which he almost single-handedly rescued from a reputation for tawdriness.
"'It would be safe to say that I'm agnostic,' Matthews says. 'However, I do feel as though we owe a faith to the world and to ourselves. We owe a grace and gratitude to things that have brought us here. But I think it's very ignorant to say, 'Well, for everything, God has a plan.' That's like an excuse.... Maybe the real faithful act is to commit to something, to take action, as opposed to saying, 'Well, everything is in the hand of God.'" See Boston Globe Article 'Dave Matthews Gets Serious – and Playful' by Steve MorseArchived 22 January 2009 at the Wayback Machine (4 March 2001)
Edvard Munch; Arne Eggum (1978). Edvard Munch: symbols & images, Volume 1978, Part 2. National Gallery of Art. p.237. But Munch was not completely averse to every form of religion; one might rather say that throughout his life he remained a thoughtful agnostic.
Joe Staines (2010). The Rough Guide to Classical Music (5ed.). Penguin. p.398. ISBN9781405383219. Parry was an avowed agnostic yet he produced some of Britain's finest sacred choral music.
"I'm a linear thinking agnostic, but not an atheist folks." Peart, Neil (1996). The Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa. ECW Press. ISBN978-1-55022-667-6.
When asked whether he believed in God, he replied: "I generally am wary of the black and white veering more towards the grey with regard to these matters but am closer to atheism when push comes to shove in terms of not believing the extravagant claims of theology. After all "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" – Carl Sagan If the following definition of an atheist is correct then I would certainly nail my flag to that mast! :o) "An atheist is a man who has no invisible means of support." – John Buchan" Brendan believe in God or something??[permanent dead link].
"BILD: Do you believe in God? Brad Pitt (smiling): 'No, no, no!' BILD: Is your soul spiritual? Brad Pitt: 'No, no, no! I'm probably 20 per cent atheist and 80 per cent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it.'" Brad Pitt interview: "With six kids each morning it is about surviving!"Archived 24 November 2009 at the Wayback Machine By Norbert Körzdörfer, Bild.com, 23 July 2009
Sidney Poitier (2009). Life Beyond Measure: Letters to My Great-Granddaughter. HarperCollins. p.84. ISBN978-0-06-149620-2. The question of God, the existence or nonexistence, is a perennial question, because we don't know. Is the universe the result of God, or was the universe always there?
Sidney Poitier (2009). Life Beyond Measure. HarperCollins. pp.85–86. ISBN9780061737251. I don't see a God who is concerned with the daily operation of the universe. In fact, the universe may be no more than a grain of sand compared with all the other universes.... It is not a God for one culture, or one religion, or one planet.
Daniel Harrison (1994). Harmonic Function in Chromatic Music: A Renewed Dualist Theory and an Account of Its Precedents. University of Chicago Press. p.256. ISBN9780226318080. On the matter of undertones, then, we may fairly conclude that Hugo Riemann was a churchgoing agnostic.
Rooney wrote: "I call myself an agnostic, not an atheist, because in one sense atheists are like Christians or Muslims. They're sure of themselves. A Christian says with certainty, there is a god; an atheist says with certainty, there is no god. Neither knows" Sincerely, Andy Rooney (2001), Public Affairs ISBN1-58648-045-6
Rooney said: "Why am I an atheist? I ask you: Why is anybody not an atheist? Everyone starts out being an atheist. No one is born with belief in anything. Infants are atheists until they are indoctrinated. I resent anyone pushing their religion on me. I don't push my atheism on anybody else. Live and let live. Not many people practice that when it comes to religion." Marian Christy, "Conversations: We make our own destiny", Boston Globe, 30 May 1982 (from Newsbank).
Elizabeth Norman McKay (1996). Franz Schubert: a biography. Clarendon Press. p.308. ISBN978-0-19-816523-1. ...quite what he expected: no doubt on account of both his agnosticism and his lack of money or sure prospects...
Arthur Hutchings (1967). Church Music in the Nineteenth Century. London: Oxford University Press. p.166. ISBN978-0837196954. The unctuous style we hear every Christmas is found in church music by Schubert and the Chevalier Neukomm, both known in private letters to be agnostic.
John Daverio (10 April 1997). Robert Schumann: Herald of a "New Poetic Age". Oxford University Press. p.471. ISBN9780199839315. Yet Schumann's religiosity was devoid of dogmatism. In a self-characterization written in 1830, he described himself as "religious, but without religion"; according to Wasielewski, this description held into the 1850s.
Cath Clarke. "Ridley Scott interview". TimeOut London. Archived from the original on 14 October 2012. Retrieved 1 October 2012. God occupies the director's thoughts more than He used to, says Scott, who's an agnostic, converted from atheism. 'You could have ten scientists in this room. You could ask them all: who's religious? About three to four will put their hands up. I've asked these guys from Nasa. And they say: When you get to the end of your theories, you come to a wall... you come to a question. Who thought up this shit?' Scott was turned off religion by his Church of England upbringing ("altar boy... terrible burgundy wine... all that stuff"). Now? "Now my feeling goes with 'could be.'"
Bryan Gilliam (1999). "1: Musical development and early career". The Life of Richard Strauss. Cambridge University Press. p.25. ISBN9780521578950. Strauss was agnostic by his mid-teens and he remained so until the end of his life. Even months before his death, the composer declared: "I shall never be converted, and I will remain true to my old religion of the classics until my life's end!"
"I know intellectually there is no god. But in case there is, I don't want to piss him off by saying it." Howard Stern, Interview w/ Steppin' OutArchived 17 June 2013 at the Wayback Machine, 21 May 2004.
"I am an agnostic and I was interested in reading the pre-Christian idea that winter is more about regeneration than salvation. I stayed away from that triumphal, 'God is in his heaven, isn't everything wonderful?' kind of thing.""Archived copy". Archived from the original on 28 November 2010. Retrieved 5 October 2010.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
Stone said "...I'm Jewish simply because... my mom is Jewish... but... I grew up completely secular and completely agnostic... I am the worst Jew in the world. I know nothing about the religion. I'm completely agnostic (my poor mother)." 'South Park' Creator Matt Stone on Fighting TerrorismArchived 31 May 2021 at the Wayback Machine on NPR's program Fresh Air, 14 October 2004, (quote begins at 15:05, ends at 16:00)
When asked if there was a God, Stone answered "No." Is there a God?Archived 1 September 2006 at the Wayback Machine, by Stephen Thompson, The Onion A.V. Club, 9 October 2002
Frederik L. Schodt (2007). The Astro Boy Essays: Osamu Tezuka, Mighty Atom, and the Manga/Anime Revolution. Stone Bridge Press, Inc. p.141. ISBN9781933330549. His family was associated with a Zen Buddhist sect, and Tezuka is buried in a Tokyo Buddhist cemetery, but his views on religion were actually quite agnostic and as flexible as his views on politics.
Scott L. Balthazar, ed. (2004). The Cambridge Companion to Verdi. Cambridge University Press. p.13. ISBN9780521635356. Verdi sustained his artistic reputation and his personal image in the last years of his life. He never relinquished his anticlerical stance, and his religious belief verged on atheism. Strepponi described him as not much of a believer and complained that he mocked her religious faith. Yet he summoned the creative strength to write the Messa da Requiem (1874) to honor Manzoni, his "secular saint", and conduct its world premiere.
Arturo Toscanini (2002). Harvey Sachs (ed.). The letters of Arturo Toscanini. Alfred A. Knopf. p.262. ISBN9780375404054. I've asked you whether you're religious, whether you believe! I do – I believe – I'm not an atheist like Verdi, but I don't have time to go into the subject.
"Here we have a man who, while at Cambridge, was 'a most determined atheist'--those were the words of his fellow-undergraduate Bertrand Russell—and who was dismissed at the age of 25 from his post as organist in a church at South Lambeth because he refused to take Communion. Later, according to his widow, he 'drifted into a cheerful agnosticism.'" The Unknown Vaughan WilliamsArchived 13 June 2020 at the Wayback Machine, Michael Kennedy, Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 99. (1972–1973), pp. 31–41.
Lee Dian Rainey (2010). Confucius & Confucianism: The Essentials. John Wiley & Sons. p.62. ISBN9781405188418. Others have read what Confucius said about ritual and the supernatural and concluded that Confucius was an agnostic and not at all interested in the religious side of life.
"While this sounds skeptical, Kant is only agnostic about our knowledge of metaphysical objects such as God. And, as noted above, Kant's agnosticism leads to the conclusion that we can neither affirm nor deny claims made by traditional metaphysics." Andrew Fiala, J. M. D. Meiklejohn, Critique of Pure Reason – Introduction, page xi.
Michael Vlach. "Immanuel Kant". Theological Studies. Archived from the original on 7 March 2012. Retrieved 17 August 2012. Kant's philosophy was even more skeptical in regard to metaphysical issues like God, the soul, and freedom. According to Kant, these types of issues are beyond the limits of reason. Thus, the human mind cannot obtain any rational knowledge of anything beyond the physical world. Kant's theory would have an important influence on philosophy of religion since he asserted that concepts like God and the soul could not be known through reason. His theories have led some to claim that he is the father of agnosticism. Interestingly, Kant did believe in God and originated a form of the moral argument for God's existence.
Gary D. Badcock (1997). Light of Truth and Fire of Love: A Theology of the Holy Spirit. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. p.113. ISBN9780802842886. Kant has no interest in prayer or worship, and is in fact agnostic when it comes to such classical theological questions as the doctrine of God or of the Holy Spirit.
Norman L. Geisler; Paul K. Hoffman, eds. (2006). "The Agnosticism of Immanuel Kant". Why I Am a Christian: Leading Thinkers Explain Why They Believe. Baker Books. p.45. ISBN9780801067129.
Frank K. Flinn (2007). Encyclopedia of Catholicism. Infobase Publishing. p.10. ISBN9780816075652. Following Locke, the classic agnostic claims not to accept more propositions than are warranted by empirical evidence. In this sense an agnostic appeals to Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), who claims in his Critique of Pure Reason that since God, freedom, immortality, and the soul can be both proved and disproved by theoretical reason, we ought to suspend judgement about them.
"It is ridiculous to describe that Laozi had started the Dao religion. In fact Laozi is much more sympathetic to atheism than even Greek philosophers in general. To the most, like Buddha and philosophers of Enlightenment, Laoism is agnostic about God." Chen Lee Sun, Laozi's Daodejing-From the Chinese Hermeneutical and the Western Philosophical Perspectives: The English and Chinese Translations Based on Laozi's Original Daoism (2011), p. 119.
Connie Aarsbergen-Ligtvoet (2006). Isaiah Berlin: A Value Pluralist and Humanist View of Human Nature and the Meaning of Life. Rodopi. p.133. ISBN978-90-420-1929-4. The traditional religious strategies of grounding morality are blocked for Berlin. Being an agnostic, brought up in the empiricist tradition, he cannot refer to a holy book. With his Jewish background, he could have referred to the book of Genesis, to the Seven Laws of Noah as applying to the whole of humankind. As an agnostic, however, he needs a secular justification.
"Like everyone participating I'm what's called here a "secular atheist", except that I can't even call myself an "atheist" because it is not at all clear what I'm being asked to deny." Noam Chomsky, Edge Discussion of Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and SurvivalArchived 13 April 2013 at the Wayback Machine, November 2006 (Retrieved 21 April 2008).
Chomsky, Noam. "Remarks on Religion". Archived from the original on 23 September 2015. Retrieved 7 April 2012. Do I believe in God? Can't answer, I'm afraid.
"Most histories of atheism choose the Greek and Roman philosophers Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius as the first atheist writers. While these writers certainly changed the idea of God, they didn't entirely deny that gods could exist." Ancient AtheistsArchived 10 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine, BBC.
"Dewey started his career as a Christian but over his long lifetime moved towards agnosticism. His philosophical writings start out apologetic; over his life he gradually lost interest in formal religion and focused more on democratic ideals. Moreover, he became very devoted to applying the scientific method of inquiry to both democracy and education." Shawn Olson, John Dewey – American Pragmatic PhilosopherArchived 23 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine, 2005.
"Epicurus taught that the soul is also made of material objects, and so when the body dies the soul dies with it. There is no afterlife. Epicurus thought that gods might exist, but if they did, they did not have anything to do with human beings." Ancient AtheistsArchived 10 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine, BBC.
"Frederick Edwords, Executive Director of the American Humanist Association, who labels himself an agnostic..." Atheism 101Archived 21 January 2021 at the Wayback Machine, by William B. Lindley, Truth Seeker Volume 121 (1994) No. 2, (Retrieved 14 April 2008)
"This faith in rationality emerged early in Hook's life. Even before he was a teenager he proclaimed himself to be an agnostic." Edward S. Shapiro, Letters of Sidney Hook: Democracy, Communism, and the Cold War, 1995, page 2.
Douglas J. Soccio (2009). Archetypes of Wisdom: An Introduction to Philosophy. Cengage Learning. p.291. ISBN9780495603825. James Boswell was troubled that the agnostic Hume, whom many erroneously believed to be an atheist, could be so cheerful in the face of death.
Paul S. Penner (1995). Altruistic Behavior: An Inquiry Into Motivation. Rodopi. p.5. ISBN9789051838923. You can be a realist, an idealist, an agnostic such as Edmund Husserl in his bracketing of the subject, or a synthesizer such as the Buddha in his concept of codependent origination.
Paul Heyer (2003). Harold Innis. Rowman & Littlefield. p.39. ISBN978-0-7425-2484-2. As an agnostic who favorably cites Marx and questions the role of religion in modernity, Innis would certainly have raised eyebrows at the University of Toronto or virtually any other academic institution in Canada at this time.
Mike W. Martin (2007). Creativity: Ethics and Excellence in Science. Lexington Books. p.13. ISBN9780739120538. A softer skepticism, one more sympathetic to the aspirations of science, does not renounce the possibility of objective truth, but instead is agnostic about that possibility. Thomas Kuhn is such a skeptic.
William C. Lubenow (1998). The Cambridge Apostles, 1820–1914: Liberalism, Imagination, and Friendship in British Intellectual and Professional Life. Cambridge University Press. p.405. ISBN978-0-521-57213-2. G. E. Moore was another agnostic Apostle. After an intense religious phase as a boy, Moore came to call himself an infidel.
"Referring to himself as an agnostic and an advocate of critical realism, Popper gained an early reputation as the chief exponent of the principle of falsification rather than verification." Karl Popper: philosopher of critical realismArchived 10 August 2011 at the Wayback Machine, by Joe Barnhart, The Humanist magazine, July–August 1996. (Retrieved 13 October 2006)
Only fragments of Protagoras' treatise On the Gods survive, but it opens with the sentence: "Concerning the gods, I have no means of knowing whether they exist or not or of what sort they may be. Many things prevent knowledge including the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life."
Adrian Kuzminski (2008). Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks Reinvented Buddhism. Lexington Books. pp.41–42. ISBN9780739125069. In particular, Flintoff notes the similarity between Pyrrho's agnosticism and suspension of judgment and the Buddha's refusal to countenance beliefs about the nature of things, including his insistence that such beliefs were to be neither affirmed nor denied.
Don E. Marietta (1998). Introduction to Ancient Philosophy. M.E. Sharpe. p.162. ISBN9780765602169. Pyrrho advocated agnosticism and suspension of judgment about the nature of the world. His Skepticism also applied to matters of ethics; he held that nothing is just or honorable by its nature.
Russell said: "As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist... None of us would seriously consider the possibility that all the gods of Homer really exist, and yet if you were to set to work to give a logical demonstration that Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, and the rest of them did not exist you would find it an awful job. You could not get such proof. Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line." Am I an Agnostic or an Atheist?Archived 21 February 2007 at the Wayback Machine, from Last Philosophical Testament 1943–1968, (1997) Routledge ISBN0-415-09409-7. Russell was chosen by LOOK magazine to speak for agnostics in their well-known series explaining the religions of the U.S., and authored the essay "What Is An Agnostic?" which appeared 3 November 1953 in that magazine.
"Like many other so-called "Atheists" I am also not a pure atheist, but actually an agnostic..." Life without God: A decision for the peopleArchived 25 January 2016 at the Wayback Machine (Automatic Google translation of the originalArchived 17 January 2020 at the Wayback Machine, hosted at Schmidt-Salomon's website), by Michael Schmidt-Salomon 19 November 1996, first published in: Education and Criticism: Journal of Humanistic Philosophy and Free Thinking January 1997 (Retrieved 1 April 2008)
Julie A. Reuben (1996). The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality. University of Chicago Press. p.54. ISBN9780226710204. Herbert Spencer, the agnostic whose ideas were best known in the United States, did not deny the existence of God.
Roland W. Scholz (2011). Environmental Literacy in Science and Society: From Knowledge to Decisions. Cambridge University Press. p.62. ISBN9780521183338. Contrary to his teacher Aristotle, Theophrast was an agnostic naturalist who "denied the existence of a dominant intelligence outside the universe" (Nordenskiöld, 1928, p. 45).
Asok Sen (1977). Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar and his Elusive Milestones. Riddhi-India. p.157. Vidyasagar did not explicitly deny the existence of God. His position was that of an agnostic who refused to be distracted from the ethical and practical tasks of society, by abstract ideals of divine perfection.
William Child (2011). Wittgenstein. Taylor & Francis. p.218. ISBN9781136731372. "Was Wittgenstein religious? If we call him an agnostic, this must not be understood in the sense of the familiar polemical agnosticism that concentrates, and prides itself, on the argument that man could never know about these matters. The idea of a God in the sense of the Bible, the image of God as the creator of the world, hardly ever engaged Wittgenstein's attention..., but the notion of a last judgement was of profound concern to him." – (Engelmann)
"However, by the time he composed his memoirs Angell had come to realize how inappropriate it had been for 'an agnostic, a heretic, a revolutionary' like himself 'to preach his heretical and revolutionary doctrines' to a readership that was not only 'bourgeois' but 'churchy'." Martin Ceadel, Living the great illusion: Sir Norman Angell, 1872–1967 (2009), p. 38.
Ingersoll said that "It seems to me that the man who knows the limitations of the mind, who gives the proper value to human testimony, is necessarily an Agnostic." Why Am I Agnostic?Archived 29 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine, Robert Green Ingersoll, 1889. See also Ingersoll's complete worksArchived 16 June 2021 at the Wayback Machine, which includes many speeches and writings on religion and agnosticism.
Alain Woodrow (1996). "Francois Mitterrand: an agnostic mystic". The Tablet. In spiritual matters Francois Mitterrand was equally ambiguous. Although he always defined himself as an agnostic, he was fascinated by religion and obsessed, if not haunted, by death.
Cecilia Bromleymartin (1996). "The French mourn Francois Mitterrand". Catholic Herald. Although an avowed agnostic, Mitterrand was one of eight children raised in a comfortably-off Catholic family and was educated in Catholic boarding schools before going on to study law in Paris.
P. D. Anthony (2003). The Ideology of Work. Routledge. p.75. ISBN9780415264631. Even an agnostic employer like Robert Owen, unwilling to rest upon the final authority of God, demanded obedience and exercised responsibility for employees whom he regarded as dependent and requiring the moulding influence of a benevolent owner.
W. Devereux Jones (2007). The Flight of the Wasps: The Europrotestants: Their Roots and Culture, from the Earliest Times to the End of the 20th Century. AuthorHouse. p.273. ISBN9781425971717. The earliest major reformer to take an interest in the British workers was not a churchman, but an agnostic named Robert Owen (died 1858).
Ronald W. Walker (1998). Wayward Saints: THE GODBEITES AND BRIGHAM YOUNG. University of Illinois Press. pp.74–75. ISBN9780252067051. Robert Owen, the New Lanark industrialist, social reformer, and religious agnostic, urged factory managers to be more mindful of the men, women, and children they employed; advocated parliamentary regulation of the mills; argued for the organization of workers into unions; and had taken steps to build an American utopian Zion at New Harmony, Indiana.
Rockwell wrote in his autobiography "I am an agnostic, which means that to all proposals and explanations of the mysteries of life and eternity, I say, 'I do not know and I don't believe you or any other human does either.'" This Time the World, chapter 3, George Lincoln Rockwell, ISBN1-59364-014-5
Erik Fossen; Håvard Bjelland (31 December 2011). "Man må tro at det nytter"[One must believe that it is possible]. Bt.no (in Norwegian). Archived from the original on 27 September 2013. Retrieved 17 January 2013.
"The country's Left-leaning Prime Minister, a self-declared agnostic, became a bête noire of the Catholic Church during his first term in office by legalising same-sex marriage, introducing fast-track divorce and allowing embryonic stem-cell research." "The Peninsula On-line: Qatar's leading English Daily". Archived from the original on 16 January 2009. Retrieved 12 August 2008.
"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 CentennialArchived 17 October 2018 at the Wayback Machine.
"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.
Ralph A. Alpher. "COSMOLOGY AND HUMANISM"(PDF). Humanism Today. p.15. Archived from the original(PDF) on 29 September 2011. Retrieved 17 January 2013. This leads inevitably to my identifying philosophically as an agnostic and a humanist, and explains my temerity in sharing my views with you.
"Interview with Sir Michael Atiyah". johndcook.com. 24 September 2013. Archived from the original on 15 February 2021. Retrieved 14 May 2020. I'm an optimist. I believe in new ideas, in progress. It's faith. I've recently been thinking about faith. If you're a religious person, which I'm not, you believe God created the universe.
Brigham Narins, ed. (2001). Notable Scientists from 1900 to the Present: A-C. Gale Group. p.91. ISBN978-0-7876-1752-3. When she became a teenager, Sarah changed her name to Hertha as an expression of her independence, and, although she remained proud of her Jewish heritage, also regarded herself as an agnostic.
R. W. Burns (2000). John Logie Baird, Television Pioneer. IET. p.10. ISBN9780852967973. Even Baird's conversion to agnosticism while living at home does not appear to have stimulated a rebuke from the Reverend John Baird. Moreover, Baird was freely allowed to try to persuade others—including visiting clergy—to his beliefs.
Lillian Hoddeson; Vicki Daitch (2002). True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen. Joseph Henry Press. ISBN9780309169547. John's mother, Althea, had been reared in the Quaker tradition, and his stepmother, Ruth, was Catholic, but John was resolutely secular throughout his life. He was once "taken by surprise" when an interviewer asked him a question about religion. "I am not a religious person," he said, "and so do not think about it very much". He went on in a rare elaboration of his personal beliefs. "I feel that science cannot provide an answer to the ultimate questions about the meaning and purpose of life. With religion, one can get answers on faith. Most scientists leave them open and perhaps unanswerable, but do abide by a code of moral values. For civilized society to succeed, there must be a common consensus on moral values and moral behaviour, with due regard to the welfare of our fellow man. There are likely many sets of moral values compatible with successful civilized society. It is when they conflict that difficulties arise."
Bruce, Robert V (1973). "After the Telephone". Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. Cornell University Press. p.490. ISBN9780801496912. He had remained steadfast in agnosticism and therefore, as Mabel took comfort in remarking, "he never denied God." Neither did he affirm God. He and Mabel occasionally attended Presbyterian services and sometimes Episcopalian, at which Mabel could follow the prayer book. Since otherwise she depended on Alec's interpreting, their church goings were rare; but their children attended Presbyterian services regularly. In 1901 Bell came across a Unitarian pamphlet and found its theology congenially undogmatic. "I have always considered myself as an Agnostic," he wrote Mabel, "but I have now discovered that I am a Unitarian Agnostic."
Gray, Charlotte (2006). "Ring for the Future". Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell. Harper Collins Publishers Ltd. p.151. ISBN978-0002006767. Alec, a skeptical Scot whose family never attended church, gently informed her that he believed "[m]en should be judged not by their religious beliefs but by their lives." He respected Mabel's beliefs, but he himself couldn't accept the notion of life after death: "Concerning Death and Immortality, Salvation, Faith and all the other points of theoretical religion, I know absolutely nothing and can frame no beliefs whatsoever." Mabel quietly accepted Alec's agnosticism, although she firmly informed him, "It is so glorious and comforting to know there is something after this—that everything does not end with this world."
Robert S. Roth, ed. (1986). The Bellman Continuum: A Collection of the Works of Richard E. Bellman. World Scientific. p.4. ISBN9789971500900. He was raised by his father to be a religious skeptic. He was taken to a different church every week to observe different ceremonies. He was struck by the contrast between the ideals of various religions and the history of cruelty and hypocrisy done in God's name. He was well aware of the intellectual giants who believed in God, but if asked, he would say that each person had to make their own choice. Statements such as "By the State of New York and God ..." struck him as ludicrous. From his childhood he recalled a particularly unpleasant scene between his parents just before they sent him to the store. He ran down the street saying over and over again, "I wish there was a God, I wish there was a God."
"Concerning Emile Berliner, The Jew TO BE a Jew may mean one of several identities. For example, the Jew, Emile Berliner, the late inventor, called himself agnostic." B'nai B'rith, The National Jewish monthly: Volume 43; Volume 43.
"In 1899, Berliner wrote a book, Conclusions, that speaks of his agnostic ideas on religion and philosophy." Seymour Brody, Jewish heroes & heroines of America: 151 true stories of Jewish American heroism (2003), p. 119.
John G. Simmons (2002). Doctors and Discoveries: Lives That Created Today's Medicine. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. p.17. ISBN978-0-618-15276-6. Upon his death on February 10, 1878, Bernard received a state funeral - the first French scientist to be so honored. The procession ended at Pere Lachaise cemetery, and Gustave Flaubert described it later with a touch of irony as "religious and very beautiful". Bernard was an agnostic.
"By the time he reached his late teens, he had become firmly agnostic." F. David Peat, Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm (1997), page 21.
International Association for Semiotic Studies, International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, International Social Science Council (1995). "A tale of two amateurs". Semiotica, Volume 105. Mouton. p.56. MacHale's biography calls George Boole 'an agnostic deist'. Both Booles' classification of 'religious philosophies' as monistic, dualistic, and trinitarian left little doubt about their preference for 'the unity religion', whether Judaic or Unitarian.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
International Association for Semiotic Studies, International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies, International Social Science Council (1996). Semiotica, Volume 105. Mouton. p.17. MacHale does not repress this or other evidence of the Boole's nineteenth-century beliefs and practices in the paranormal and in religious mysticism. He even concedes that George Boole's many distinguished contributions to logic and mathematics may have been motivated by his distinctive religious beliefs as an 'agnostic deist' and by an unusual personal sensitivity to the sufferings of other people.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
Bhabani Prasad Sahu (December 2008). "Lessons of Scientific Temper from Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose"(PDF). pp.25–26. Retrieved 10 July 2012. Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose had consciously broken this idea of a religious temple. He upheld the other meanings of 'mandir' (temple), according to the dictionary, which also originally means a house or even ocean. His 'Basu Bijnan Mandir' was actually the house or ocean of knowledge, scientific knowledge, which does not base on mere belief but on scientific methods to eradicate ignorance. He also explained the basics of this scientific methods. While discussing the similarities and dissimilarities between a poet and a scientist, he clearly said: "The path, a scientist has to follow, is quite uneven and he had to control himself in this not-so-easy path of observation and experiment." (ibid) Not mere imagination and belief, but 'observation and experiment' are the ultimate way of gaining scientific knowledge or reaching the goal of acquiring truth. The idealistic mentality of the blind believers of supernatural power or god and of the so-called religious people, propagates the idea that man cannot completely know 'Him', the ultimate power or God.... Sir Jagadish Chandra Bose might not be an atheist in the strictest sense of the term as it is used today. In several of his speeches and writings he had casually mentioned of God; for example: "I had never been deprived of blessings of God" (Asha O Biswas), or "if God has directed for any special pilgrimage for science" (Bijnan Prachare Bharater Daan) etc. But if we carefully consider him in totality, it will be obvious that these are the outcome of the general mode of literal expression, as is done colloquially in day-to-day life and not the manifestation of his blind belief in god or religionism. Actually he might not be an uncompromising and militant (so impractical) fighter against the concept of God, but Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose was well against various superstitious notions and practices.
"As an agnostic scientist and a Fabian socialist in politics, I had the normal contempt for the Establishment, but I cherished the feeling that I could look anyone on earth in the eye and feel certain he would approve of what I was doing." Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet, Endurance of Life: The Implications of Genetics for Human Life (1980), p. 198.
John Brande Trend (1965). The Origins of Modern Spain. Russell & Russell. p.82. Cajal was a liberal in politics, an evolutionist in philosophy, an agnostic in religion...
Dan Barker (2011). The Good Atheist: Living a Purpose-Filled Life Without God. Ulysses Press. p.170. ISBN9781569758465. He did not attend church and was considered an agnostic. "As to Cavendish's religion, he was nothing at all," writes his biographer Dr. G. Wilson.
George Wilson (1851). The life of the Hon. Henry Cavendish: including abstracts of his more important scientific papers, and a critical inquiry into the claims of all the alleged discoverers of the composition of water. Printed for the Cavendish Society. pp.181–185. A Fellow of the Royal Society, who had good means of judging, states that, "As to Cavendish's religion, he was nothing at all. The only subjects in which he appeared to take any interest, were scientific. ..." ...From what has been stated, it will appear that is would be vain to assert that we know with any certainty what doctrine Cavendish held concerning Spiritual things; but we may with some confidence affirm, that the World to come did not engross his thoughts; that he gave no outward demonstration of interest in religion, and did join his fellow men in worshipping God. ...He died and have no sign, rejecting human sympathy, and leaving us no means of determining whether he anticipated annihilation, or looked forward to an endless life.... He did not love; he did not hate; he did not hope; he did not fear; he did not worship as others do. He separated himself from his fellow men, and apparently from God.
Reid, Robert William (1974). Marie Curie. London: Collins. p.19. ISBN978-0-00-211539-1. Unusually at such an early age, she became what T. H. Huxley had just invented a word for: agnostic.
Virginia Trimble; Thomas Williams; Katherine Bracher; Richard Jarrell; Jordan D. Marché; F. Jamil Ragep, eds. (2007). Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Springer. p.265. ISBN9780387310220. Although remaining a theist, Curtis declared himself an agnostic on some of the "great unanswered questions" that "may be forever beyond us".
Darwin wrote: "my judgment often fluctuates... In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind." The Life and Letters of Charles DarwinArchived 11 December 2005 at the Wayback Machine, Ch. VIII, p. 274. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1905. See Charles Darwin's views on religion
Luís F. Rodrigues (2010). "David Deutsch". Open Questions: Diverse Thinkers Discuss God, Religion, and Faith. ABC-CLIO. ISBN9780313386442. He is also agnostic.
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. 1972. ISBN978-0-06-131622-7.
Denis Brian, ed. (2001). The Voice Of Genius: Conversations With Nobel Scientists And Other Luminaries. Basic Books. p.69. ISBN9780738204475. Mrs. Dirac: "My husband wasn't an atheist. In Italy, once, he said, "If there is a God, he's a great mathematician."" Interviewer: "Ah, if there is a God. He did say if."
Denis Brian, ed. (2001). The Voice Of Genius: Conversations With Nobel Scientists And Other Luminaries. Basic Books. pp.28–29. ISBN9780738204475. Interviewer: "Did you know Dirac was religious? His wife told me he believed in Jesus Christ." Pauling: "In what respect? Some say there was never any such person in existence." Interviewer: "I presume she meant as God." Pauling: "I don't think she's reliable, any more than Eugene Wigner is. He is emotional about nuclear weapons and questions about the Soviet Union, in the same way that Teller is.... In each case I felt that the person, Hungarian, with that sort of experience involving the Soviet Union was governed to such an extent by his emotional feelings and convictions that he was no longer rational when it came to discussing problems of that sort. Rational enough on scientific matters, of course. Both Wigner and Teller are very able scientists.... But when it came to political matters the emotional factor overcame them. In the same way, Mrs. Dirac might be speaking from an emotional basis when she said he had believed in Christ, by saying something she would like to believe about Dirac. Interviewer: "She also said she believed in telepathy — when she was thinking of her daughter, the daughter phoned, that sort of thing." Pauling: "I'm not surprised."
Helge Kragh (1990). Dirac: A Scientific Biography. Cambridge University Press. pp.256–257. ISBN9780521380898. It could be that it is extremely difficult to start life. It might be that it is so difficult to start life that it has happened only once among all the planets. ...Let us consider, just as a conjecture, that the chance life starting when we have got suitable physical conditions is 10^-100. I don't have any logical reason for proposing this figure, I just want you to consider it as a possibility. Under those conditions... it is almost certain that life would not have started. And I feel that under those conditions it will be necessary to assume the existence of a god to start off life. I would like, therefore, to set up this connexion between the existence of a god and the physical laws: if physical laws are such that to start off life involves an excessively small chance, so that it will not be reasonable to suppose that life would have started just by blind chance, then there must be a god, and such a god would probably be showing his influence in the quantum jumps which are taking place later on. On the other hand, if life can start very easily and does not need any divine influence, then I will say that there is no god.
"As far as I know Dubois never expressed any atheistic ideas, but he did sometimes show evidence of fiercely anti-Catholic sentiments. His attitude towards religious belief as such can best be characterised as agnostic." Bert Theunissen, Eugène Dubois and the ape-man from Java: the history of the first missing link and its discoverer (1989), p. 24.
On Durkheim, Larry R. Ridener, referencing a book by Lewis A. Coser, wrote: "Shortly after his traditional Jewish confirmation at the age of thirteen, Durkheim, under the influence of a Catholic woman teacher, had a short-lived mystical experience that led to an interest in Catholicism. But soon afterwards he turned away from all religious involvement, though emphatically not from interest in religious phenomena, and became an agnostic." See Ridener's page on famous dead sociologistsArchived 14 August 2007 at the Wayback Machine. See also Coser's book: Masters of Sociological Thought: Ideas in Historical and Social Context, 2nd Ed., Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1977, pp. 143–144.
"Officially, he calls himself an agnostic, but his writings make it clear that his agnosticism is tinged with something akin to deism." Karl Giberson, Donald A. Yerxa, Species of origins: America's search for a creation story (2002), p. 141.
"A theologically more modest version is offered by physicist Freeman Dyson (2000), who describes himself as "a practicing Christian but not a believing Christian"" Garrett G. Fagan, Archaeological fantasies: how pseudoarchaeology misrepresents the past and misleads the public (2006), p. 360.
"My position concerning God is that of an agnostic." Albert Einstein in a letter to M. Berkowitz, 25 October 1950; Einstein Archive 59–215; from Alice Calaprice, ed., The Expanded Quotable Einstein, Princeton University Press, 2000, p. 216. As quoted at stephenjaygould.orgArchived 25 October 2002 at the Wayback Machine (Retrieved 20 June 2007)
Robert G. Ingersoll (2009). The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll. Cosimo, Inc. p.319. ISBN9781605208886. "...Infidels have contributed their share, but never one of them has reached the grandeur of originality." This, I think, so far as invention is concerned, can be answered with one name – John Ericsson, one of the profoundest agnostics I ever met.
"Enrico Fermi's attitude to the church eventually became one of indifference, and he remained an agnostic all his adult life." Emilio Segre, Enrico Fermi: Physicist (1995), page 5.
Trevor Illtyd Williams (1984). Howard Florey, Penicillin and After. Oxford University Press. p.363. ISBN978-0-19-858173-4. As an agnostic, the chapel services meant nothing to Florey but, unlike some contemporary scientists, he was not aggressive in his disbelief.
James A. Hijiya (1992). Lee De Forest and the Fatherhood of Radio. Lehigh University Press. ISBN978-0-934223-23-2. In 1957, four years after urging Americans to go to church, he described himself as an agnostic.
Mike Adams (2011). Lee de Forest: King of Radio, Television, and Film. Springer. p.31. ISBN978-1-4614-0417-0. This was more than a gradual change, and it would cause De Forest to adopt of life of agnosticism, determinism, and Darwinism. He began to believe that he is the master of his destiny, that science can explain all, rather than a god or an unseen divine force. It was said about his philosophy that,"His position shifted gradually from the faith of his father to a rationalistic, scientific one."
"This flat declaration prompted Ellis Franklin to accuse his strong-willed daughter of making science her religion. He was right. Rosalind sent him a four-page declaration, eloquent for a young woman just over 20 let alone a scientist of any age. ..."It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of a creator. A creator of what?.... I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our insignificant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more insignificant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith – as I have defined it." Brenda Maddox, Mother of DNAArchived 28 October 2020 at the Wayback Machine, NewHumanist.org.uk – Volume 117 Issue 3 Autumn 2002.
In correspondence with conservative Christian commentator John Lofton, Milton Friedman wrote: "I am an agnostic. I do not 'believe in' God, but I am not an atheist, because I believe the statement, 'There is a god' does not admit of being either confirmed or rejected." An Exchange: My Correspondence With Milton Friedman About God, Economics, Evolution And "Values", by John Lofton, The American ViewArchived 9 March 2021 at the Wayback Machine, October–December 2006, (Retrieved 12 January 2007)
Brigham Narins (2001). Notable Scientists from 1900 to the Present: D-H. Gale Group. p.797. ISBN9780787617530. Although Gabor's family became Lutherans in 1918, religion appeared to play a minor role in his life. He maintained his church affiliation through his adult years but characterized himself as a "benevolent agnostic".
"The family adopted the Lutheran faith in 1918, and although Gabor nominally remained true to it, religion appears to have had little influence in his life. He later acknowledged the role played by an antireligious humanist education in the development of his ideas and stated his position as being that of a "benevolent agnostic". "Gabor, Dennis." Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 2008. Encyclopedia.com. (30 January 2012). Archived 11 January 2020 at the Wayback Machine
"The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species totally transformed his intellectual life, giving him a sense of evolutionary process without which much of his later work would have been unimaginable. Galton became a "religious agnostic", recognising the social value of religion but not its transcendental basis". Robert Peel, Sir Francis Galton FRS (1822–1911) – The Legacy of His Ideas - .
Keith James Laidler (2002). Energy and the Unexpected. Oxford University Press. p.109. ISBN9780198525165. Much of our understanding of the composition of the Sun came originally from the work of Cecilia Paync-Gaposchkin (1900–1979).... Since she actually got better marks in the prayerless group she became, and remained, a devout agnostic.
Paolo Mazzarello; Henry A. Buchtel; Aldo Badiani (1999). The hidden structure: a scientific biography of Camillo Golgi. Oxford University Press. p.34. ISBN9780198524441. It was probably during this period that Golgi became agnostic (or even frankly atheistic), remaining for the rest of his life completely alien to the religious experience.
"Feynman, Gell-Man, Weinberg, and their peers accept Newton's incomparable stature and shrug off his piety, on the kindly thought that the old man got into the game too early.... As for Gell-Mann, he seems to see nothing to discuss in this entire God business, and in the index to The Quark and the Jaguar God goes unmentioned. Life he called a "complex adaptive system" which produces interesting phenomena such as the jaguar and Murray Gell-Mann, who discovered the quark. Gell-Mann is a Nobel-class tackler of problems, but for him the existence of God is not one of them." Herman Wouk, The Language God Talks: On Science and Religion (2010).
"So we don't have to assume these principles as separate metaphysical postulates. They follow from the fundamental theory. They are what we call emergent properties. You don't need something more to get something more. That's what emergence means. Life can emerge from physics and chemistry, plus a lot of accidents. The human mind can arise from neurobiology, and a lot of accidents. The way the chemical bond arises from physics and certain accidents. Doesn't diminish the importance of these subjects, to know that they follow from more fundamental things, plus accidents. That's a general rule, and it's critically important to realize that. You don't need something more in order to get something more. People keep asking that when they read my book, The Quark and the Jaguar, and they say 'isn't there something more beyond what you have there?' Presumably they mean something supernatural. Anyway, there isn't. (Laughs) You don't need something more to explain something more." Murray Gell-Mann, Beauty and truth in physics: Murray Gell-Mann on TED.comArchived 10 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine (2007), Ted.com.
"...I certainly felt bemused by the anomaly of my role as a Jewish agnostic, trying to reassure a group of Catholic priests that evolution remained both true and entirely consistent with religious belief." Nonoverlapping MagisteriaArchived 4 January 2017 at the Wayback Machine, by Stephen Jay Gould, Natural History 106 (March 1997): 16–22; Reprinted from Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of WormsArchived 11 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine, New York: Harmony Books, 1998, pp. 269–283.
Robert Leonard (2010). Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science, 1900–1960. Cambridge University Press. pp.122–123. ISBN9780521562669.
Alan Hale; Dan Barker (2011). The Good Atheist: Living a Purpose-Filled Life Without God. Ulysses Press. pp.175–176. ISBN9781569758465. Oh, I have plenty of biases, all right. I'm quite biased toward depending upon what my senses and my intellect tell me about the world around me, and I'm quite biased against invoking mysterious mythical beings that other people want to claim exist but which they can offer no evidence for. By telling students that the beliefs of a superstitious tribe thousands of years ago should be treated on an equal basis with the evidence collected with our most advanced equipment today is to completely undermine the entire process of scientific inquiry.
"Internet Infidels Honorary Board". Archived from the original on 7 August 2017. Retrieved 15 June 2012. He is a member of the Honorary Board of the online group, Internet Infidels.
J Scott Rankin (March 2006). "William Stewart Halsted". Annals of Surgery. 243 (3): 418–425. doi:10.1097/01.sla.0000201546.94163.00. PMC1448951. PMID16495709. He was a heavy smoker of cigarettes, but rarely imbibed more than an occasional glass of wine. As noted earlier, in matters of religion, he was agnostic. A letter to Professor Adolf Meyer in 1918 thanked Dr. Meyer for a gift of the 13 volume set of the Golden Bough by Frazer, which Halsted then described as: "Such a stupendous and bloodcurdling work." Halsted also stated: "What a fearful thing is ignorance. Its disciples, from the Khonds to Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and modern clergymen, all seem to have the same genes. Walking encyclopedias may still live in the dark ages. By the time I have absorbed the 13 volumes, I shall probably release my pew in the church, and break loose from the pious bloodthirsty cruel soul savers."
"Though Hayek was a self-professed agnostic, we show that his treatment of individual liberty was more consistent with a Judeo-Christian worldview than with that of his naturalist peers and postmodernist successors." Kenneth G. Elzinga, Matthew R. Givens, Christianity and HayekArchived 16 February 2017 at the Wayback Machine (2009), p. 53.
Alan O. Ebenstein (2003). Hayek's journey: the mind of Friedrich Hayek. Palgrave Macmillan Limited. p.224. ISBN9781403960382. He apparently composed the conclusion of the work on page 140, Hayek's "final word". Emphasis on Hayek's agnostic religious views was not as prominent in Hayek's own versions of "The Fatal Conceit".
Joseph McCabe (1945). A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Freethinkers. Haldeman-Julius Publications. Archived from the original on 13 January 2013. Retrieved 30 June 2012. He was equally distinguished in physics and physiology and was the discoverer of the law of the conservatism of energy. Although he was the most eminent and most honored of German scientists, he was all his life an outspoken agnostic.
Paul Hertz; Moritz Schlick; Malcolm F. Lowe; Robert Sonné Cohen; Yehúda Elkana, eds. (1977). Epistemological Writings: The Paul Hertz/Moritz Schlick Centenary Edition of 1921 with Notes and Commentary by the Editors. Springer. p.xxv. ISBN9789027705822. Lenin found Helmholtz to be inconsistent, at one place a materialist about human knowledge, at another place agnostic and sceptic, and at yet other place a Kantian idealist, in sum a 'shame-faced materialist'.
Constance Reid (1996). Hilbert (2ed.). Springer. p.92. ISBN9780387946740. Perhaps the guests would be discussing Galileo's trial and someone would blame Galileo for failing to stand up for his convictions. "But he was not an idiot," Hilbert would object. "Only an idiot could believe that scientific truth needs martyrdom – that may be necessary in religion, but scientific results prove themselves in time."
"Mathematics is a presuppositionless science. To found it I do not need God, as does Kronecker, or the assumption of a special faculty of our understanding attuned to the principle of mathematical induction, as does Poincaré, or the primal intuition of Brouwer, or, finally, as do Russell and Whitehead, axioms of infinity, reducibility, or completeness, which in fact are actual, contentual assumptions that cannot be compensated for by consistency proofs." David Hilbert, Die Grundlagen der Mathematik, Hilbert's program, 22C:096, University of IowaArchived 23 February 2021 at the Wayback Machine.
"Also, when someone blamed Galileo for not standing up for his convictions Hilbert became quite irate and said, "But he was not an idiot. Only an idiot could believe that scientific truth needs martyrdom; that may be necessary in religion, but scientific results prove themselves in due time." Anton Z. Capri, Quips, quotes, and quanta: an anecdotal history of physics (2007), p. 135.
"Gerardus 't Hooft – Science Video Interview". 2004. Archived from the original on 26 December 2018. Retrieved 25 April 2012. When asked by the interviewer about his view of the universe and the design or non-design of the universe, Hooft replied, "Well absolutely amazing fact that it seems that the entire universe is now in grasp of theoretical physics. It still highly premature to make theories that includes how the big bang originated as and things like that. Although, people are tying that every day.... As far as I'm concerned, everything seems to behave completely rationally. The laws of physics is all we need to understand how the universe got into being. And then eventually we end up with this religious question as to why is the universe is the way it is and how can it be it is a place for humans to live in, that is a miracle. I don't have really any answers here, but as a physicist I've learn to appreciate the fact that everything seems to have totally rational explanations and as far as I'm concerned, I expect the entire universe now also to be something you can explain in completely rational terms. That what I expect now, just because of past experience."
"Gerardus 't Hooft – Science Video Interview". 2004. Archived from the original on 26 December 2018. Retrieved 25 April 2012. When asked by the interviewer about his belief in an afterlife, Hooft replied, "Well, such beliefs I think I related to religions of the past and I don't think that notions such as 'afterlife' has any... scientific basis. Not in terms of modern science. So I can only say no."
The Editor (19 June 2008). "Fred Hoyle – Astronomer Extraordinaire". Archived from the original on 1 September 2018. Retrieved 22 April 2012. Hoyle was reportedly an atheist during most of his early life, but became agnostic when he found that he could not feel comfortable trying to explain the finer workings of physics and the Universe as simply "an accident".{{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
Gale E. Christianson (1996). Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae. University of Chicago Press. p.183. ISBN9780226105215. One morning, while driving north with Grace after the failed eclipse expedition of 1923, he broached Whitehead's idea of a God who might have chosen from a great many possibilities to make a different universe, but He made this one. By contemplating the universe, one might approximate some idea of its Creator. As time passed, however, he seemed even less certain: "We do not know why we are born into the world, but we can try to find out what sort of a world it is — at least in its physical aspects." His life was dedicated to science and the objective world of phenomena. The world of pure values is one which science cannot enter, and science is unconcerned with the transcendent, however compelling a private revelation or individual moment of ecstasy. He pulled no punches when a deeply depressed friend asked him about his belief: "The whole thing is so much bigger than I am, and I can't understand it, so I just trust myself to it; and forget about it."
Tom Bezzi (2000). Hubble Time. iUniverse. p.93. ISBN9780595142477. John terribly depressed, and asked Edwin about his belief. Edwin said, "The whole thing is so much bigger than I am, and I can't understand it, so I just trust myself to it, and forget about it." It was not his nature to speculate. Theories, in his opinion, were appropriate cocktail conversation. He was essentially an observer, and as he said in The Realm (J the Nebulae: "Not until the empirical resources are exhausted, need we pass on to the dreamy realms of speculation." Edwin never exhausted those empirical resources. "I am an observer, not a theoretical man," he attested, and a lightly spoken word in a lecture or in a letter showed that observation was his choice.
"Humboldt, by contrast, was an agnostic in religious sentiment and a Heraclitean in his cosmology; he regarded change, and species mutability, as being as natural as changing wind patterns or ocean currents." Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Century (1996), page 157.
"Obituary: Andrew Huxley". The Economist. 16 June 2012. Archived from the original on 26 December 2018. Retrieved 14 May 2013. He did not even mind the master's duty of officiating in chapel, since he was, he explained, not atheist but agnostic (a word usefully invented by his grandfather), and was "very conscious that there is no scientific explanation for the fact that we are conscious".
"Every variety of philosophical and theological opinion was represented there, and expressed itself with entire openness; most of my colleagues were ists of one sort or another; and, however kind and friendly they might be, I, the man without a rag of a label to cover himself with, could not fail to have some of the uneasy feelings which must have beset the historical fox when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he presented himself to his normally elongated companions. So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of agnostic. Part 2 – AgnosticismArchived 17 March 2021 at the Wayback Machine, by T. H. Huxley, from Christianity and Agnosticism: A ControversyArchived 25 January 2021 at the Wayback Machine, New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1889. Hosted at the Secular Web. (Retrieved 5 April 2008)
Edwin T. Jaynes (2003). G. Larry Bretthorst (ed.). Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. Cambridge University Press. p.74. ISBN978-0-521-59271-0. We agnostics often envy the True Believer, who thus acquires so easily that sense of security which is forever denied to us.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (2004). The Future of Man. Random House LLC. p.212. ISBN9780385510721. We can hardly wonder, in the circumstances, that agnostics such as Sir James Jeans and Marcel Boll, and even convinced believers like Guardini, have uttered expressions ol amazement (tinged with heroic pessimism or triumphant detachment) at the apparent insignificance of the phenomenon of Life in terms of the cosmos— a little mold on a grain of dust...
Russell, Colin (2003). Edward Frankland: Chemistry, Controversy and Conspiracy in Victorian England. Cambridge University Press. ISBN978-0-521-54581-5. It may be noticed in passing that the connection once made between Kolbe's cautious attitude to molecular structure and his alleged agnosticism in religion now seems thoroughly misplaced. Kolbe, son of a Lutheran pastor and apparently sharing his faith, is in sharp contrast to his rivals who were 'younger upper-middle class urban liberals and agnostics, such as Kekule'.
Toye, J. (2000). Keynes on Population. Oxford University Press. p.136. ISBN978-0-19-829362-0. Like Nietzsche, the young Keynes was both very aware of religion, and hostile to it. Formally speaking, in religion he was an aggressive agnostic. As described by his younger brother Geoffrey, "he always felt an intellectual interest in religion, but at the age of seventeen or eighteen passed painlessly, as did my sister and I, into a natural state of agnosticism."
"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), p. 274.
Joseph McCabe (1945). A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Freethinkers. Haldeman-Julius Publications. Archived from the original on 13 January 2013. Retrieved 7 April 2013. He was so brilliant that he solved the most difficult problems of the science at the age of 19 and a few years later won the prize of the Paris Academy of Science and was appointed Director of the Berlin Academy. He served the Republic and was head of the Commission that installed the decimal system, and was ennobled by Napoleon. He was never reconciled with the restored royalty and the Church – he was an agnostic – but he was too famous for them to touch him.
"About his inattention to religion, his usual response was, "Never believe anything that can't be proved."" Irving Langmuir, NNDB.com.Archived 10 June 2016 at the Wayback Machine
Albert Rosenfeld (1961). The Quintessence of Irving Langmuir. Pergamon Press. p.150. Though Marion herself was not an assiduous churchgoer and had no serious objection to Irving's agnostic views, her grandfather had been an Episcopalian clergyman.
Adam Frank (1 August 2006). "The Einstein Dilemma". Discover Magazine. Archived from the original on 17 March 2012. Retrieved 11 May 2012. "TeVeS does everything," says Mario Livio with enthusiasm. A self-described agnostic in the MOND debate, but one with an obvious love for the underdog, Livio says that Bekenstein's work is "a phenomenal paper".
"I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty. Revere and respect Gaia. Have trust in Gaia. But not faith." James Lovelock, James Lovelock, Gaia's grand old manArchived 9 March 2021 at the Wayback Machine, Lawrence E. Joseph, 17 August 2000.
David Strauss (2001). Percival Lowell: The Culture and Science of a Boston Brahmin. Harvard University Press. p.280. ISBN9780674002913. Though Lowell claimed to "stick to the church" (doubtless from my early religious training)," he was an agnostic and hostile to Christianity.
Kendrick Oliver (2012). To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957–1975. JHU Press. p.22. ISBN9781421407883. Frank Malina, who engineered the rockets for which Parsons supplied the fuel and who was subsequently appointed as the first director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, had become an agnostic in college after reading Darwin's Descent of Man.
"The Dutch Nobel prize-winner, Simon van der Meer expressed this as follows: "As a physicist, you have to have a split personality to be still able to believe in a god."" Alfred Driessen, Antoine Suarez, Mathematical undecidability, quantum nonlocality, and the question of the existence of God (1997).
Naukowe, Łódzkie (2003). Bulletin de la Société des sciences et des lettres de Łódź: Série, Recherches sur les déformations, Volumes 39–42. Société des sciences et des lettres de Łódź. p.162. Michelson's biographers stress, that our hero was not conspicuous by religiousness. His father was a free-thinker and Michelson grew up in secular family and have no opportunity to acknowledge the belief of his forebears. He was agnostic through his whole life and only for the short period he was a member of the 21st lodge in Washington.
Dorothy Michelson Livingston; One Pass Productions; Cinema Guild (1984). The Master of Light: A Biography of Albert A. Michelson. University of Chicago Press. p.106. On the religious question, Michelson disagreed with both these men. He had renounced any belief that moral issues were at stake in...
"Indeed, for someone who was an agnostic, Mises wrote a great deal about religion. The number of references he makes to religion is staggering, actually numbering over twenty-five hundred in his published corpus." Laurence M. Vance, Mises Debunks the Religious Case for the StateArchived 4 January 2014 at the Wayback Machine, Thursday, 10 February 2005.
"Ludwig von Mises, who was agnostic, skeptical, and non-political." Block, Walter and Rockwell Jr., Llewellyn H., Man, Economy, and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard, page 168.
Jörg Guido Hülsmann (2007). "7: The Great War". Mises: The Last Knight of Liberalism. Ludwig von Mises Institute. pp.257–258. ISBN9781610163897. But for now he thought that he – the agnostic Jew, cultural German, political individualist, scientific cosmopolitan, and Austrian patriot – had to fight the nationalists' war.
J. M. Cohen. The Life of Ludwig Mond. Taylor & Francis. p.16. Ludwig therefore learned sufficient Hebrew to go through the Barmitzvah ceremony, though he rapidly became an agnostic in outlook as he grew up.
Charlie Rose: "What is your sense of religion and spiritual being?" Myhrvold: "Not. It's –" Charlie: "Not?" Myhrvold: "There is a bunch of wonderful stories that people tell themselves and each other that they take as a matter of faith rather than evidence – I'm not saying it's bad, and they get a tremendous amount of comfort from it. I like things that can be proven and I worry about things where i might be believing exactly what I would like to hear. So it would be wonderful if, after we die here, we go to a much better place, just like it would be wonderful if we were the most important things in the world, but in the past we thought we were really important. We discovered afterwards we weren't. As a result, I am much more focused on things that I can understand in a scientific way which kind of – lets faith out of it." Charlie Rose interview, Nathan Myhrvold, CEO And Founder, Intellectual VenturesArchived 31 December 2011 at the Wayback Machine, 20 May 2010."Charlie Rose - Friday, May 21, 2010 - mReplay Livedash TV Transcript - Livedash - Search what is being mentioned across national TV". Archived from the original on 27 January 2013. Retrieved 4 March 2012.
Billy Woodward; Joel Shurkin; Debra Gordon (2009). Scientists Greater Than Einstein: The Biggest Lifesavers of the Twentieth Century. Quill Driver Books. p.138. ISBN978-1-884956-87-4. Through the years, David Nalin collected art wherever he went. Although he does not consider himself religious or spiritual, he was attracted to personal items of worship more than grandiose objects.
Bernard S. Schlessinger; June H. Schlessinger (1996). The who's who of Nobel Prize winners, 1901–1995 (3ed.). Oryx Press. p.28. ISBN9780897748995. Nationality: British. Religion: Agnostic; from Methodist background.
Enric Brillas Coso (2004). Enric Brillas; Pere-Lluis Cabot (eds.). Trends in Electrochemistry and Corrosion at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Dedicated to Professor Dr. Josep M. Costa on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday. Edicions Universitat Barcelona. p.1216. ISBN9788447526390. They were "not the same", because they were different in their personalities and their approaches to scientific research. Eyring was a deeply religious man, while Norrish had no religious beliefs.
Leslie Berlin (2005). The Man Behind The Microchip: Robert Noyce And The Invention Of Silicon Valley. Oxford University Press. p.235. ISBN9780195163438. The minister, who had hidden himself in a closet, stepped forward to marry the couple in a ceremony from which Bowers had excised every reference to God. "Bob agreed to that. Neither of us could decide about God," Bowers says. "I remember Bob saying, 'Some people who believe in God are good, and some people who believe in God are not good. So where does that leave you? He had [also] looked around and decided that religion is responsible for a lot of trouble in the world." Noyce, always pushing against the limits of accepted knowledge, told Bowers that what bothered him most about organized religions was that "people don't think in churches."
Steve Wartenberg: "'So, do you believe in God?' I asked".
"'You really can't know,' answered Bill Nye the Controversial Guy." Steve Wartenberg, The Morning CallArchived 4 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine, 6 April 2006.
"Today, I consider myself, in Thomas Huxley's terms, an agnostic. I don't know whether there is a God or creator, or whatever we may call a higher intelligence or being. I don't know whether there is an ultimate reason for our being or whether there is anything beyond material phenomena. I may doubt these things as a scientist, as we cannot prove them scientifically, but at the same time we also cannot falsify (disprove) them. For the same reasons, I cannot deny God with certainty, which would make me an atheist. This is a conclusion reached by many scientists." George Olah, A Life of Magic Chemistry
"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 BombArchived 2 December 2013 at the Wayback Machine.
Ernest Hamlin Abbott; Lyman Abbott; Francis Rufus Bellamy; Hamilton Wright Mabie (1912). The Outlook, Volume 101. Outlook Co. p.650. Among the conflicting voices of present-day biologists there are those who, with Karl Pearson, an agnostic, affirm that physics and chemistry "can only describe, but cannot explain".
Wolfgang Yourgrau (1979). Variational Principles in Dynamics and Quantum Theory (3ed.). Courier Dover Publications. p.170. ISBN9780486637730. Poincare's general agnostic outlook culminated in his profound criticism for which the notion of simplicity had been made the occasion.
Henri Poincare (2012). "VII". The Value of Science: Essential Writings of Henri Poincare. Random House LLC. ISBN9780307824066. This hypothesis is indeed crude and incomplete, because this supreme intelligence would be only a demigod; infinite in one sense, it would be limited in another, since it would have only an imperfect recollection of the past; and it could have no other, since otherwise all recollections would be equally present to it and for it there would be no time. And yet when we speak of time, for all which happens outside of us, do we not unconsciously adopt this hypothesis; do we not put ourselves in the place of this imperfect God; and do not even the atheists put themselves in the place where God would be if he existed? What I have just said shows us, perhaps, why we have tried to put all physical phenomena into the same frame. But that can not pass for a definition of simultaneity, since this hypothetical intelligence, even if it existed, would be for us impenetrable. It is therefore necessary to seek something else.
Poincaré, Henri (1 January 1913). Dernières Pensées(PDF). p.138. Archived from the original(PDF) on 12 April 2012. 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.
Lorraine Daston (1995). Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton University Press. p.381. ISBN9780691006444. Poisson's understanding of causes, both natural and moral, was totally agnostic.
"Now Ibn al-Haytham was a devout Muslim – that is, he was a supernaturalist. He studied science because he considered that by doing this he could better understand the nature of the god that he believed in – he thought that a supernatural agent had created the laws of nature. The same is true of virtually all the leading scientists in the Western world, such as Galileo and Newton, who lived after al-Haytham, until about the middle of the twentieth century. There were a few exceptions – Pierre Laplace, Siméon Poisson, Albert Einstein, Paul Dirac and Marie Curie were naturalists for example." John Ellis, How Science Works: Evolution: A Student Primer, p. 13.
Harold D. Taylor; Loretta Taylor (1993). George Pólya: master of discovery 1887–1985. Dale Seymour Publications. p.50. ISBN9780866516112. Plancherel was a military man, a colonel in the Swiss army, and a devout Catholic; Polya did not like military ceremonies or activities, and he was an agnostic who objected to hierarchical religions.
"Vilayanur S. Ramachandran interview". BBC Radio 4. Archived from the original on 1 June 2017. Retrieved 12 May 2012. Like most scientists I'm agnostic. If you're talking about God in some very abstract sense, like in India the Dance of Shiva or in the Spinoza sense of the word God, then I'll say I have no problem with it. But if you're talking about an old guy there who's watching me and making sure I behave myself and that I pray to him every day and that I will be punished in Hell if I do something wrong, I don't believe in that. And I don't want to offend anybody here, but that's my personal view.
Ramananda Chatterjee, ed. (1981). The Modern review, Volume 145. Prabasi Press Private, Ltd. p.154. CV Raman recehed the Nobel prize for physics in 1930 – and Lc was the first Asian scientist to get a Nobel award. Raman, born into an orthodox South Indian Brahmin family, was in agnostic.
Uma Parameswaran (2011). C.V. Raman: A Biography. Penguin Books India. p.5. ISBN9780143066897. His readings in Herbert Spencer's philosophy and his leanings towards agnosticism (he avidly read R.G. Ingersoll – the American political leader, and Charles Bradlaugh – the English founder of the National Secular Society) and mainly his lack of money to repeat the courses, led him back to the village.
Corey S. Powell (29 July 2006). "The Discover Interview: Lisa Randall". Discover Magazine. Archived from the original on 20 November 2019. Retrieved 17 April 2013. Interviewer: So does your science leave space for untestable faith? Do you believe in God? Randall: There's room there, and it could go either way. Faith just doesn't have anything to do with what I'm doing as a scientist. It's nice if you can believe in God, because then you see more of a purpose in things. Even if you don't, though, it doesn't mean that there's no purpose. It doesn't mean that there's no goodness. I think that there's a virtue in being good in and of itself. I think that one can work with the world we have. So I probably don't believe in God. I think it's a problem that people are considered immoral if they're not religious. That's just not true. This might earn me some enemies, but in some ways they may be even more moral. If you do something for a religious reason, you do it because you'll be rewarded in an afterlife or in this world. That's not quite as good as something you do for purely generous reasons.
Dorothy Michelson Livingston; One Pass Productions; Cinema Guild (1984). The Master of Light: A Biography of Albert A. Michelson. University of Chicago Press. p.106. Rayleigh was more tolerant. An Anglican with agnostic tendencies, he avoided direct questions as to his religious beliefs but when pressed would admit that he thought of Christ as a gifted man who could see further and truer than he. But he liked the idea of a power beyond what men see and an afterlife in which they may hope to take part.
"I submit that Hubble was looking for this principle of tired light. A hundred years from now, people will look back on the Big Bang Creationists and their antics with laughter much as we laugh at those who argued over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!" Grote Reber, The Big Bang is BunkArchived 8 May 2016 at the Wayback Machine, page 49.
"Eugenie Richet was a highly religious woman; Charles made his first communion with real devotion and fleetingly promised to enter the priesthood, but he abandoned his childhood faith during his adolescence. As an adult, he became an agnostic, a freethinker and a Freemason, who was nonetheless fairly tolerant of his wife Amelie's continued faith." Mark S. Micale, The mind of modernism: medicine, psychology, and the cultural arts in Europe and America, 1880–1940 (2004), page 220.
Rotblat: "I have to admit, however, that there are really many things that I do not know. I am not a particularly religious person, and this is the reason for my agnosticism. To be an agnostic simply means that I do not know and will keep seeking the answer for eternity. This is my response to questions about religion." Joseph Rotblat, Daisaku Ikeda, A quest for global peace: Rotblat and Ikeda on war, ethics, and the nuclear threat, p. 94.
"Famed scientist Carl Sagan was also a renowned sceptic and agnostic who during his life refused to believe in anything unless there was physical evidence to support it." "Unbeliever's Quest" by Jerry Adler, in Newsweek, 31 March 1997. Excerpt[dead link]
Hargittai, István (April 1999), "Interview: Frederick Sanger", The Chemical Intelligencer, 4 (2), New York: 6–11. This interview, which took place on 16 September 1997, was republished in: Hargittai, István (2002), "Chapter 5: Frederick Sanger", Candid science II: conversations with famous biomedical scientists, London: Imperial College Press, pp.73–83, ISBN978-1-86094-288-4
Clifford E. Olstrom (2011). Undaunted By Blindness, 2nd Edition. eBookIt.com. ISBN9780982272190. Saunderson, brutally frank in conversations and arguments, didn't miss many opportunities to make his opinion known. He could be profane and was an outspoken agnostic, causing much concern among his friends.
Schuster, Peter. "Interview with Peter Schuster". National Catholic Reporter. Archived from the original on 5 April 2008. Retrieved 25 April 2008. I was a Catholic, but I no longer consider myself one. I suppose I am agnostic. Let's put it his way – I have difficulties with the idea of a personal God. I don't have trouble with God as creator of the world as a whole.
Kragh, Helge (2004). Matter and spirit in the Universe: scientific and religious preludes to modern cosmology. OECD Publishing. p.237. ISBN978-1-86094-469-7. Shapley was not committed to any particular model of the expanding universe, but he did have strong opinions about the relationship between astronomy and religion. A confirmed agnostic, in the postwar period he often participated in science-religion discussions, and in 1960 he edited a major work on the subject — Science Ponders Religion.
I. S. Glass (2006). "Harlow Shapley: Defining our galaxy". Revolutionaries of the Cosmos: The Astro-physicists. Oxford University Press. pp.265–266. ISBN9780198570998. Although a declared agnostic, Shapley was deeply interested in religion and was a genuinely "religious" person from a philosophical point of view. "I never go to church," he told Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, "I am too religious."
"Pavlov also sharply criticised Sherrington's agnosticism. "I am all the more surprised," Pavlov went on to say, "that for some reason or other he regards knowledge of this soul as something pernicious and clearly expresses this point of view; according to him..." George Windholz, Psychopathology and psychiatry (1994), page 419.
"By his early teens, Simpson had given up being a Christian, although he had not formally declared himself an atheist. At college he began the gradual development of what might best be called positivistic agnosticism: a belief that the world could be known and explained by ordinary empirical observation without recourse to supernatural forces. Ultimate causation, he considered unknowable." Léo F. Laporte, Simple curiosity; letters from George Gaylord Simpson to his family, 1921–1970 (1987), p. 16.
Sol Sherry (1993). Reflections and reminiscences of an academic physician. Lea & Febiger. p.79. ISBN978-0-8121-1666-3. Another story deals with Homer Smith. As I noted previously, besides being the foremost renal physiologist of his time he was a devout agnostic.
Dan Barker (2011). The Good Atheist: Living a Purpose-Filled Life Without God. Ulysses Press. p.184. ISBN9781569758465. Biographer Simon Winchester, reporting that Smith's "agnosticism was well-known", writes that "For the first time the earth had a provable history, a written record that paid no heed or obeisance to religious teaching and dogma, that declared its independence from the kind of faith that is no more than the blind acceptance of absurdity. A science... had now at last broken free from the age-old constraints of doctrine and canonical instruction."
John Winthrop Hammond (1924). Charles Proteus Steinmetz: a biography. The Century & Co. p.447. This has placed him before the public as an atheist.*The title he did not deny. The writer, however, would put him down as a confirmed agnostic, for an atheist is a person who knows there is no God, and Steinmetz was not of that...
Roncaglia, Alessandro. "Piero Sraffa"(PDF). pp.22–23. Archived(PDF) from the original on 6 November 2020. Retrieved 24 July 2012. Sraffa liked walks and bike rides. In Cambridge, he always moved around by bike. He used to get up late in the morning and work late into the night. In Trinity as well as when associated with King's, he regularly dined in the college. As I noticed when he invited me to dinner at Trinity, he took care to arrive after supper was served, so as to skip the benedicite prayer (he was agnostic, with a leaning for atheism).
Edward Teller (2002). Memoirs: A Twentieth Century Journey In Science And Politics. Basic Books. p.32. ISBN978-0-7382-0778-0. Religion was not an issue in my family; indeed, it was never discussed. My only religious training came because the Minta required that all students take classes in their respective religions. My family celebrated one holiday, the Day of Atonement, when we all fasted. Yet my father said prayers for his parents on Saturdays and on all the Jewish holidays. The idea of God that I absorbed was that it would be wonderful if He existed: We needed Him desperately but had not seen Him in many thousands of years.
"Though research activities dominated his working days, Faraday never neglected to meet with his Christian friends for worship and prayer. We quote again from John Tyndall who, it should be said, was an agnostic: "I think that a good deal of Faraday's week-day strength and persistency might be referred to his Sunday Exercises. He drinks from a fount on Sunday which refreshes his soul for a week."" The Biblical Creation Society, Michael Faraday pioneer scientist – Christian Man of ScienceArchived 26 April 2011 at the Wayback Machine, 2002.
"The odd subtext of that offer was that Faraday was intensely religious, and Tyndall was as fascinated with Faraday's convictions as he was with prayer, miracles, and cosmology. Faraday "drinks from a fount on Sunday which refreshes his soul for a week," said the agnostic Tyndall with obvious fascination – and, perhaps, a trace of envy." John H. Lienhard, Science, Religion, and John Tyndall[permanent dead link], The Engines of our Ingenuity.
"I'm an agnostic. Sometimes I muse deeply on the forces that are for me invisible. When I am almost close to the idea of God, I feel immediately estranged by the horrors of this world, which he seems to tolerate..." Later Ulam expressed his opinions about matters that have very little in common with science." Polska Agencja Międzyprasowa, Poland: Issue 9 (1976).
"Virchow had no use for teleology in pathology: 'The teleo-logical purists were always forced to go back to original sin, without finding this way much recognition.' We found Virchow to be an agnostic as early as 1845." Erwin Heinz Ackerknecht, Rudolf Virchow: doctor, statesman, anthropologist (1953), p. 51.
William Poundstone (1993). Prisoner's Dilemma. Random House Digital, Inc. ISBN9780385415804. Of this deathbed conversion, Morgenstern told Heims, "He was of course completely agnostic all his life, and then he suddenly turned Catholic – it doesn't agree with anything whatsoever in his attitude, outlook and thinking when he was healthy." The conversion did not give von Neumann much peace. Until the end he remained terrified of death, Strittmatter recalled.
Norman MacRae (1992). John Von Neumann: The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer, Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence, and Much More (2ed.). American Mathematical Soc. p.379. ISBN9780821826768. But Johnny had earlier said to his mother, "There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't." He also admitted jovially to Pascal's point: so long as there is the possibility of eternal damnation for nonbelievers it is more logical to be a believer at the end.
Abraham Pais (2006). J. Robert Oppenheimer: A Life. Oxford University Press. p.109. ISBN9780195166736. He had been completely agnostic for as long as I had known him. As far as I could see this act did not agree with the attitudes and thoughts he had harbored for nearly all his life. On February 8, 1957, Johnny died in the Hospital, at age 53.
Robert Dransfield; Don Dransfield (2003). Key Ideas in Economics. Nelson Thornes. p.124. ISBN9780748770816. He was brought up in a Hungary in which anti-Semitism was commonplace, but the family were not overly religious, and for most of his adult years von Neumann held agnostic beliefs.
Alfred Russel Wallace (October 2000). My Life. A record of events and opinions. Elibron.com. p.358. ISBN9781402184291. I soon became intimate with him, and we were for some years joint investigators of spiritualistic phenomena. He was, like myself at that time, an agnostic, well educated, and of a more positive character than myself.
Paul Betz, Mark Christopher Carnes, American Council of Learned Societies (2002). Paul Betz; Mark Christopher Carnes (eds.). American national biography: Supplement, Volume 1. Oxford University Press. p.676. ISBN9780195150636. Although as a lifelong agnostic he may have been somewhat bemused by Simone Weil's preoccupations with Christian mysticism, he remained a vigilant guardian of her memory....{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
Karl Pearson (2011). Walter Frank Raphael Weldon 1860–1906: A Memoir Reprinted from Biometrika. Cambridge University Press. p.5. ISBN9781107601222. He was through the many years the present writer knew him, like his hero Huxley, a confirmed Agnostic.
"On June 2, 1964, Swami Sarvagatananda presided over the memorial service at MIT in remembrance of Norbert Wiener – scion of Maimonides, father of cybernetics, avowed agnostic – reciting in Sanskrit from the holy books of Hinduism, the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita." Flo Conway, Jim Siegelman, Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search Of Norbert Wiener—Father of Cybernetics (2006), p. 329.
Eugene Paul Wigner; Andrew Szanton (1992). Andrew Szanton (ed.). The Recollections of Eugene P. Wigner As Told to Andrew Szanton. Basic Books. p.60. ISBN9780306443268. Neither did I want to be a clergyman. I liked a good sermon. But religion tells people how to behave and that I could never do. Clergymen also had to assume and advocate the presence of God, and proofs of God's existence seemed to me quite unsatisfactory. People claimed that He had made our earth. Well, how had He made it? With an earth-making machine?
"Although Wilczek grew up in the Roman Catholic faith, he now considers himself agnostic. He still has a fondness for the Church, so this book should not offend Christians. In fact Wilczek cites Father James Malley for a Jesuit Credo that states: "It is more blessed to ask forgiveness than permission."" Jim Walker, nobeliefs.com. Archived 16 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine
Wozniak, Steven. "Letters-General Questions Answered". woz.org. Archived from the original on 16 September 2007. Retrieved 26 September 2007. ... 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.
Jesse Hong Xiong (2009). "Seven". The Outline of Parapsychology. Rowman & Littlefield. p.322. ISBN9780761849452. When a reporter asked him: "Do you believe there is a Creator who creates all in the universe?" Professor Chen Ning Yang (born 1922), a Chinese Nobel Prize winner in physics in 1957, answered: "I think it is hard for me to directly say 'yes' or 'no'. I can only say that when we more and more understand the wonderful structures in the nature, no matter whether we directly or indirectly ask the question, there does exist the question you ask: is there someone or God who takes charge of all? I think it is a question that will never be finally answered. (The reporter asked: 'Is it because what man knows is too limited?') On one hand, yes; on the other hand, we can have a feeling that the universe will not be created so wonderful without an ultimate goal." Professor Yang held agnosticism here. And many outstanding scientists are clear-cut theists.
Eric D. Schneider; Dorion Sagan (2005). Into the Cool: Energy Flow, Thermodynamics, and Life. University of Chicago Press. p.22. ISBN9780226739366. Physicist Hubert Yockey (1992, 1995) disparages thermodynamics, arguing that life is too improbable to have evolved. Yockey, who worked under Robert Oppenheimer on the bomb, claims to be agnostic. Although critical of creationists, he argues that the primeval soup taught in textbooks is not plausible.
Zinsser, Hans; Gerald N. Grob (2007). Rats, Lice, and History. Transaction Publishers. p.xxvii. ISBN978-1-4128-0672-5. "...I, for one, must be content to remain an agnostic." Zinsser was gratified that death was coming with due warning rather than suddenness, and in his last months achieved a degree of philosophical tranquility and resignation.
Giri, Raj (8 July 2013). "Steve Austin Talks 'Grown Ups 2' Role, Stacy Keibler Is Single Again, Austin Talks Religion". Wrestling Inc. Archived from the original on 6 July 2018. Retrieved 21 May 2018. Speaking of Austin, UFC heavyweight fighter Josh Barnett recently appeared on his podcast and the two discussed what you'd expect; music, books and religion. It was definitely very interesting and is worth a listen. During the podcast, Barnett discussed being an atheist while Austin admitted to being somewhat of an agnostic. Austin said that while he feels like something greater has looked out over him every now and then, he believes that when he's gone, he's gone, and that he doesn't think there is a heaven or hell.
Shaun Barnett. "Hillary, Edmund Percival". Archived from the original on 17 January 2013. Retrieved 14 May 2012. Hillary absorbed some of his father's passion for social justice and Christian ideals, which he later tempered into an agnostic but compassionate and optimistic world-view.
Krakauer, Jon Where Men Win Glory, Doubleday, 2009, pp. 116 and 314. "Tillman was an agnostic, perhaps even an atheist". See also quotes from Tillman's brother Kevin.