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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.
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.
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.
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.
I am agnostic because I feel each person should make up his mind about his religion.
"Serene agnostic" Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) was the first woman, in 1848, to call for woman suffrage, launching the women's movement. She was joined by sister agnostic Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906).
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;...
Dorfman is a confirmed agnostic and it would be a mistake to ascribe too close an affinity between him and Jeremiah.
In time, he would reject the Catholic religion and become an agnostic.
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.
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.
[...] Furnivall was a deeply committed socialist and (until his later agnosticism set in), a somewhat enthusiastic Christian [...]
His agnosticism is best seen in his 'Moods, Songs, and Doggerels'.
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.
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.
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.
Lewis converted me from atheism to Christianity – Rand converted me back to atheism, with Heinlein standing on the sidelines rooting for agnosticism.
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.
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.
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."
As late as 1962 he wrote to Reid Gardner, "I remain an agnostic who aspires to be a gnostic" (Letters 935).
You know I am an agnostic, but I understood: Pedagogy, tolerance, and all that.
An assimilated Jew, he changed his name from Henryk Goldschmidt and was an agnostic who did not believe in forcing religion on children.
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.
An agnostic humanist, Malamud has unflinching faith in man's ability to choose and make "hin world" from the "usable past".
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).
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)Whether or not they exist, we're slaves to the gods.
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.
I suppose technically, you'd have to put me down as an agnostic.
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."
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.
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.
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'...
I am an agnostic...I began not to believe in the existence of God when I was in high school.
Its implicit antagonist-reader and protagonist-editor are his Roman Catholic wife Mary Jane, and his troubled agnostic daughter, Mary Shelley:...
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."
"Serene agnostic" Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) was the first woman, in 1848, to call for woman suffrage, launching the women's movement. She was joined by sister agnostic Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906).
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...
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...
I was an atheist, or as it is now for some reason, say, an agnostic. I (unfortunately or fortunately cannot bring myself to believe in the existence of a conscious self Omnipotence that controls my life and the life of humanity.
Thucydidesn attitude towards the gods is that of a well-poised agnostic: If there be any, they do not concern themselves with human affairs.
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.
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'.
While very religious when very young, by sixteen I had turned agnostic.
...White experienced an enormous spiritual change, moving from Unitarianism through theism, then becoming an agnostic, and finally finding more peace in resignation and acceptance of life without a deity.
The first influential feminist book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, was written by deist-turned-agnostic Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) in 1792, urging that women be treated as "rational creatures".
Given Émile Zola's reputation as an agnostic and a radical thinker, he has often been avoided by scholars with a religious background.
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.
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."
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.
A religious reconciliation, for example, appears unlikely for Mr. Bergman, an agnostic. "I hope I never get so old I get religious," he said.
Berlioz spoke of himself as an atheist, at most as an agnostic.
Introduced as an "angry agnostic" on Comedy Central's Bar Mitzvah Bash.
Brassens, agnostic, could never be certain about the existence of God, one way or the other.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.")
"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.
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."
Dalí, dualist as ever in his approach, was now claiming to be both an agnostic and a Roman Catholic.
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.
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.
Given Eakins' outspoken agnosticism, his motivation to paint a crucifixion scene is frankly curious.
Samuel Murray, himself a Catholic, "believed that Eakins never was a Christian"; Bregler described TE as an agnostic.
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.
And I know – I'm no longer so certain. I – so I guess I would have to say agnostic now.
I would describe myself as an enthusiastic agnostic who would be happy to be shown that there is a God.
We have just said that Faure was not a religious man. He was incapable of intolerance or sectarianism, but his agnosticism was complete.
The resolutely agnostic Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924) was certainly one of its greatest alumni.
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.
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.
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.
Both musicians were agnostic and flirted with atheism.
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).
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.
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.
Mahler's ambivalent Jewish-Christian Nietzschean agnostic personality found a living, breathing, sweating counterpart in Bernstein's muscles, bones and flesh.
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.
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.
But Munch was not completely averse to every form of religion; one might rather say that throughout his life he remained a thoughtful agnostic.
Newman was an agnostic.
Parry was an avowed agnostic yet he produced some of Britain's finest sacred choral music.
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?
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.
On the matter of undertones, then, we may fairly conclude that Hugo Riemann was a churchgoing agnostic.
...quite what he expected: no doubt on account of both his agnosticism and his lack of money or sure prospects...
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.
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.
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.'"
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!"
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)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.
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.
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.
Confucius was an agnostic, but he did not deny the existence of supernatural beings.
The second, Confucius, was a humanist, an agnostic, and a supreme realist.
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.
It is in this sense that modern atheism rests heavily upon the skepticism of David Hume and the agnosticism of Immanuel Kant.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do I believe in God? Can't answer, I'm afraid.
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.
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.
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.
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.
G. E. Moore was another agnostic Apostle. After an intense religious phase as a boy, Moore came to call himself an infidel.
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.
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.
Herbert Spencer, the agnostic whose ideas were best known in the United States, did not deny the existence of God.
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).
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.
"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)
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.
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.
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.
The earliest major reformer to take an interest in the British workers was not a churchman, but an agnostic named Robert Owen (died 1858).
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.
Zelf ben ik agnost
This leads inevitably to my identifying philosophically as an agnostic and a humanist, and explains my temerity in sharing my views with you.
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.
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.
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.
Although anti-Semitism was again on the rise in Austria, it is unlikely that anti-Semitism was a factor in the hostility toward Bárány because he was an agnostic who did not believe in Zionism.
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."
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."
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."
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."
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.
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)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)Bosch was an agnostic who funneled large sums of money to the Lutheran Church of Württemberg led by Bishop Theophil Wurm, a leader in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church movement.
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.
There is no absolute knowledge. And those who claim it, whether they are scientists or dogmatists, open the door to tragedy.
In that sense, it was interesting to learn that Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the great pioneer of modern neuroanatomy, was agnostic but still used the term soul without any shame.
Cajal was a liberal in politics, an evolutionist in philosophy, an agnostic in religion...
Carothers, the agnostic, joked with friends that he was praying daily for his idea to pan out.
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.
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.
Unusually at such an early age, she became what T. H. Huxley had just invented a word for: agnostic.
Although remaining a theist, Curtis declared himself an agnostic on some of the "great unanswered questions" that "may be forever beyond us".
The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic.
He is also agnostic.
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."
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."
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.
"...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.
As an agnostic, the chapel services meant nothing to Florey but, unlike some contemporary scientists, he was not aggressive in his disbelief.
In 1957, four years after urging Americans to go to church, he described himself as an agnostic.
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."
However, if we consider that Frankland was a "born-again" Christian during much of this period (before he began to fall into agnosticism himself), that the term agnostic did not even exist at that time....
Part of Newman's inspiration for writing the Grammar of Assent came from his correspondence with William Froude. Froude, a friend of Newman's, was a scientist and an agnostic.
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".
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.
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.
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.
He is a member of the Honorary Board of the online group, Internet Infidels.
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."
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".
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.
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'.
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."
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."
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."
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)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."
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.
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".
We agnostics often envy the True Believer, who thus acquires so easily that sense of security which is forever denied to us.
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...
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'.
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."
In Berlin, Lagrange staunchly maintained his "I don't know" position, and he came to be almost an agnostic.
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.
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.
"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".
Though Lowell claimed to "stick to the church" (doubtless from my early religious training)," he was an agnostic and hostile to Christianity.
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.
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.
Morley was deeply religious. His original training had been in theology and he only turned to chemistry, a self-taught hobby, when he was unable to enter the ministry. Michelson, by contrast, was a religious agnostic.
On the religious question, Michelson disagreed with both these men. He had renounced any belief that moral issues were at stake in...
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.
Ludwig therefore learned sufficient Hebrew to go through the Barmitzvah ceremony, though he rapidly became an agnostic in outlook as he grew up.
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.
Nationality: British. Religion: Agnostic; from Methodist background.
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.
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."
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".
Poincare's general agnostic outlook culminated in his profound criticism for which the notion of simplicity had been made the occasion.
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.
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.
Poisson's understanding of causes, both natural and moral, was totally agnostic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Toward the end of his life he became an agnostic, expressing the view that revealed religion had no place in the Universe that he had explored.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Another story deals with Homer Smith. As I noted previously, besides being the foremost renal physiologist of his time he was a devout agnostic.
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."
... Astrophysicist George Smoot (an agnostic) said, "If you're religious, it's like looking at God."
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...
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).
He is what he seems to be: an idealist devoted to the task. As his consciousness, however, is materialistic, leaning to experimenting, and agnostic, he fails to understand himself, same as the world...
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.
Professor Thiele, who made a deep impression on us all, was a scholar devoted equally to astronomy and mathematics. His lectures affected us strongly by their fervour and by an atmosphere of mysticism which permeated them – which was unusual for a man of such pronounced agnostic views.
For his abrasive antiroyalist as well as agnostic views, Virchow was made to suffer in the subsequent period of political reaction; his meager salary was cut off and he was effectively dismissed from Charite.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)He was through the many years the present writer knew him, like his hero Huxley, a confirmed Agnostic.
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?
... 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.
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.
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.
"...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.
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.
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.
Agnosticism is the view or belief that the existence of God, the divine, or the supernatural is either unknowable in principle or unknown in fact. It can also mean an apathy towards such religious belief and refer to personal limitations rather than a worldview. Another definition is the view that "human reason is incapable of providing sufficient rational grounds to justify either the belief that God exists or the belief that God does not exist."
Leon Max Lederman was an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for research on neutrinos. He also received the Wolf Prize in Physics in 1982, along with Martin Lewis Perl, for research on quarks and leptons. Lederman was director emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois. He founded the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy, in Aurora, Illinois in 1986, where he was resident scholar emeritus from 2012 until his death in 2018.
Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.
The relationship between religion and science involves discussions that interconnect the study of the natural world, history, philosophy, and theology. Even though the ancient and medieval worlds did not have conceptions resembling the modern understandings of "science" or of "religion", certain elements of modern ideas on the subject recur throughout history. The pair-structured phrases "religion and science" and "science and religion" first emerged in the literature during the 19th century. This coincided with the refining of "science" and of "religion" as distinct concepts in the preceding few centuries—partly due to professionalization of the sciences, the Protestant Reformation, colonization, and globalization. Since then the relationship between science and religion has been characterized in terms of "conflict", "harmony", "complexity", and "mutual independence", among others.
John Charlton Polkinghorne was an English theoretical physicist, theologian, and Anglican priest. A prominent and leading voice explaining the relationship between science and religion, he was professor of mathematical physics at the University of Cambridge from 1968 to 1979, when he resigned his chair to study for the priesthood, becoming an ordained Anglican priest in 1982. He served as the president of Queens' College, Cambridge, from 1988 until 1996.
Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm was a Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Mikhailovich Frank, for their 1934 discovery and demonstration of Cherenkov radiation. He also predicted the quasi-particle of sound: the phonon; and in 1951, together with Andrei Sakharov, proposed the Tokamak system.
Vitaly Lazarevich Ginzburg, ForMemRS was a Russian physicist who was honored with the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2003, together with Alexei Abrikosov and Anthony Leggett for their "pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids."
Charles Hard Townes was an American physicist. Townes worked on the theory and application of the maser, for which he obtained the fundamental patent, and other work in quantum electronics associated with both maser and laser devices. He shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics with Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov. Townes was an adviser to the United States Government, meeting every US president from Harry S. Truman (1945) to Bill Clinton (1999).
Atheism, in the broadest sense, is an absence of belief in the existence of deities. Less broadly, atheism is a rejection of the belief that any deities exist. In an even narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Atheism is contrasted with theism, which is the belief that at least one deity exists.
Christian agnosticism is a theological position drawing influences from Christianity as well as agnosticism. Christian agnostics hold that it is difficult or impossible to be sure of anything beyond the basic tenets of the Christian faith. They believe that God or a higher power might exist, that Jesus may have a special relationship with God, might in some way be divine, and that God might perhaps be worshipped. This belief system has deep roots in the early days of the Church.
The relationship between the level of religiosity and the level of education has been studied since the second half of the 20th century.