List of deists

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Carl Friedrich Gauss
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Charles Sanders Peirce
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Dmitri Mendeleev
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Hermann Weyl
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Humphry Davy
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James Watt
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Jules Verne
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Ludwig Boltzmann
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Max Born
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Max Planck
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Mikhail Lomonosov
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Neil Armstrong
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Thomas Jefferson
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Thomas Paine
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Voltaire
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Wolfgang Pauli

This is a partial list of people who have been categorized as Deists, the belief in a deity based on natural religion only, or belief in religious truths discovered by people through a process of reasoning, independent of any revelation through scriptures or prophets. They have been selected for their influence on Deism or for their notability in other areas.

Contents

Born before 1700

Born 1700–1800

Born 1800–1900

Born after 1900

See also

Related Research Articles

Deism is the philosophical position and rationalistic theology that generally rejects revelation as a source of divine knowledge and asserts that empirical reason and observation of the natural world are exclusively logical, reliable, and sufficient to determine the existence of a Supreme Being as the creator of the universe. More simply stated, Deism is the belief in the existence of God, solely based on rational thought without any reliance on revealed religions or religious authority. Deism emphasizes the concept of natural theology—that is, God's existence is revealed through nature.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theism</span> Belief in the existence of at least one deity

Theism is broadly defined as the belief in the existence of at least one deity. In common parlance, or when contrasted with deism, the term often describes the philosophical conception of God that is found in classical theism—or conception found in monotheism—or gods found in polytheistic religions—or a belief in God or gods without the rejection of revelation as is characteristic of deism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Antony Flew</span> English analytic and evidentialist philosopher (1923–2010)

Antony Garrard Newton Flew was an English philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, Flew worked on the philosophy of religion. During the course of his career he taught philosophy at the universities of Oxford, Aberdeen, Keele, and Reading in the United Kingdom, and at York University in Toronto, Canada.

Atheism is the rejection of an assertion that a deity exists. In a narrower sense, hard atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities, effectively taking the stance of a positive claim in regards to the existence of any goddess or god. The English term 'atheist' was used at least as early as the sixteenth century and atheistic ideas and their influence have a longer history.

Religious skepticism is a type of skepticism relating to religion. Religious skeptics question religious authority and are not necessarily anti-religious but rather are skeptical of either specific or all religious beliefs and/or practices. Socrates was one of the most prominent and first religious skeptics of whom there are records; he questioned the legitimacy of the beliefs of his time in the existence of the Greek gods. Religious skepticism is not the same as atheism or agnosticism, and some religious skeptics are deists.

Criticism of atheism is criticism of the concepts, validity, or impact of atheism, including associated political and social implications. Criticisms include positions based on the history of science, philosophical and logical criticisms, findings in both the natural and social sciences, theistic apologetic arguments, arguments pertaining to ethics and morality, the effects of atheism on the individual, or the assumptions that underpin atheism.

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 in its most general form is the belief that at least one deity exists.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Atheism during the Age of Enlightenment</span>

Atheism, as defined by the entry in Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, is "the opinion of those who deny the existence of a God in the world. The simple ignorance of God doesn't constitute atheism. To be charged with the odious title of atheism one must have the notion of God and reject it." In the period of the Enlightenment, avowed and open atheism was made possible by the advance of religious toleration, but was also far from encouraged.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christian deism</span> Philosophy of religion

Christian deism is a standpoint in the philosophy of religion stemming from Christianity and Deism. It refers to Deists who believe in the moral teachings—but not the divinity—of Jesus. Corbett and Corbett (1999) cite John Adams and Thomas Jefferson as exemplars.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philosophical theism</span> Belief that a deity exists or must exist

Philosophical theism is the belief that the Supreme Being exists independent of the teaching or revelation of any particular religion. It represents belief in God entirely without doctrine, except for that which can be discerned by reason and the contemplation of natural laws. Some philosophical theists are persuaded of God's existence by philosophical arguments, while others consider themselves to have a religious faith that need not be, or could not be, supported by rational argument.

Deism, the religious attitude typical of the Enlightenment, especially in France and England, holds that the only way the existence of God can be proven is to combine the application of reason with observation of the world. A Deist is defined as "One who believes in the existence of a God or Supreme Being but denies revealed religion, basing his belief on the light of nature and reason." Deism was often synonymous with so-called natural religion because its principles are drawn from nature and human reasoning. In contrast to Deism there are many cultural religions or revealed religions, such as Judaism, Trinitarian Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and others, which believe in supernatural intervention of God in the world; while Deism denies any supernatural intervention and emphasizes that the world is operated by natural laws of the Supreme Being.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pandeism</span> Belief that God created the universe by becoming it

Pandeism, or pan-deism, is a theological doctrine that combines aspects of pantheism with aspects of deism. Unlike classical deism, which holds that the creator deity does not interfere with the universe after its creation, pandeism holds that such an entity became the universe and ceased to exist as a separate entity. Pandeism purports to explain why God would create a universe and then appear to abandon it, and pandeism seeks to explain the origin and purpose of the universe.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Irreligion in Turkey</span>

Irreligion in Turkey refers to the extent of the lack, rejection of, or indifference towards religion in the Republic of Turkey. Based on surveys, Islam is the predominant religion and irreligious people form a minority in Turkey. Precise estimates of the share of Deists, atheists, agnostics, and other unaffiliated people in the population vary, though in the survey averages they make up more percentages than Christians and Jews in the country.

A number of Christian writers have examined the concept of pandeism, and these have generally found it to be inconsistent with core principles of Christianity. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, condemned the Periphyseon of John Scotus Eriugena, later identified by physicist and philosopher Max Bernhard Weinstein as presenting a pandeistic theology, as appearing to obscure the separation of God and creation. The Church similarly condemned elements of the thought of Giordano Bruno which Weinstein and others determined to be pandeistic.

Catholicism and Deism are two theologies that have opposed each other in matters of the role of God in the world. Deism is the philosophical belief which posits that although God exists as the uncaused First Cause, responsible for the creation of the universe, God does not interact directly with that subsequently created world. As deism is not organized, its adherents differ widely in important matters of belief, but all are in agreement in denying the significance of revelation in Christian Scripture and Tradition. Deists argue against Catholicism by either, only considering Scripture to be a helpful moral tool, or denying: its divine character, the infallibility of the Church and Traditions, and the validity of its evidence as a complete manifestation of the will of God. Deism is first considered to have manifested itself in England towards the latter end of the seventeenth century.

References

  1. John Ferguson (ed.). Plato: Republic Book X. Taylor & Francis. p. 15. Anaxagoras was a typical Deist.
  2. Freethought Traditions in the Islamic World Archived 14 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine by Fred Whitehead; also quoted in Cyril Glasse, (2001), The New Encyclopedia of Islam, p. 278. Rowman Altamira.
  3. Hodapp, Christopher; Alice Von Kannon (2007). The Templar Code For Dummies. John Wiley & Sons. p. 256. ISBN   9780470127650. Da Vinci was definitely an esoteric character and a man of contrasts; a bastard son who rose to prominence; an early Deist who worshipped the perfect machine of nature to such a degree that he wouldn't eat meat, but who made his first big splash designing weapons of war; a renowned painter who didn't much like painting, and often didn't finish them, infuriating his clients; and a born engineer who loved nothing more than hours spent imagining new contraptions of every variety.
  4. Müntz, Eugène (2011). Leonardo Da Vinci. Parkstone International. p. 80. ISBN   9781780422954. To begin with, even if it could be shown – and this is precisely one of the points most in dispute – that Leonardo had broken with the teachings of the Catholic Church, it would still be nonetheless certain that he was a deist and not an atheist or materialist.
  5. Zhu, Zhenwu; Zhang, Aiping (2016). The Dan Brown Craze: An Analysis of His Formula for Thriller Fiction. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. p. 227. ISBN   9781443894159. but the overwhelming majority of historians have deemed him a Catholic
  6. "Herbert of Cherbury, Edward [The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]". Iep.utm.edu. 16 April 2001. Retrieved 4 July 2010.
  7. "In a commentary on Shaftesbury published in 1720, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a Rationalist philosopher and mathematician, accepted the Deist conception of God as an intelligent Creator but refused the contention that a god who metes out punishments is evil." Andreas Sofroniou, Moral Philosophy, from Hippocrates to the 21st Aeon, page 197.
  8. "Consistent with the liberal views of the Enlightenment, Leibniz was an optimist with respect to human reasoning and scientific progress (Popper 1963, p.69). Although he was a great reader and admirer of Spinoza, Leibniz, being a confirmed deist, rejected emphatically Spinoza's pantheism: God and nature, for Leibniz, were not simply two different "labels" for the same "thing". Shelby D. Hunt, Controversy in marketing theory: for reason, realism, truth, and objectivity (2003), page 33.
  9. "The Human Jesus and Christian Deism". Onr.com. 31 May 2009. Archived from the original on 16 March 2006. Retrieved 4 July 2010.
  10. "World Union of Deists". Archived from the original on 8 June 2009. Retrieved 2 May 2014.
  11. "Alfred Adler Biography from Basic Famous People – Biographies of Celebrities and other Famous People". Basic Famous People. 28 May 1937. Retrieved 4 July 2010.
  12. Repcheck, Jack (2010). The Man Who Found Time: James Hutton and the Discovery of the Earth's Intiquity. ReadHowYouWant.com. p. 58. ISBN   9781458766625. But Maclaurin had one other major effect on Hutton. Maclaurin was a deist, one who believes in a creator God, a God who designed and built the universe and then set His creation into motion (but does not interfere with the day-to-day workings of the system or the actions of people).
  13. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin from earlyamerica.com
  14. "Emilie du Châtelet 1706–1749". Literary Criticism (1400–1800). Gale Cengage. 2004. Retrieved 27 May 2013. While her translation of Mandeville was not read during her lifetime, except among her peers, this work was quite familiar to Voltaire, who was strongly influenced by it in writing his own Traité de métaphysique. In keeping with philosophical trends of the day, she began a work on grammar, the unfinished Grammaire raisonné, and she applied her thoughts on deism and metaphysics to a study of the Bible, resulting in the unpublished Examen de la Genèse (which may be translated as "The Examination of Genesis"). Both studies reflect du Châtelet's Enlightenment commitment to applying science and reason to all aspects of human life, including language and religion.
  15. Galina Evgenʹevna Pavlova; Aleksandr Sergeevich Fedorov (1980). Mikhail Vasilievich Lomonosov: his life and work. Mir. p. 161. The atheistic direction of Lomonosov's scientific and artistic creativity was not always consistent. His world outlook, just as that of many other representatives of the age of enlightenment, possessed elements of deism according to which God, having created the universe, assumed no control over its development which was governed by the laws of nature. Lomonosov's deism was no chance factor. As Karl Marx aptly put it, deism was the most convenient and easiest way for many materialists of the 17th–18th centuries to abandon religion.
  16. Andrew Kahn (2008). Pushkin's Lyric Intelligence . Oxford University Press. p.  130. ISBN   9780191552939. No atheistic conclusions spring from 'The Orb of Day has Set' to reverse Lomonosov's deism, but the poem still intrudes a painful gap between man and nature.
  17. "The dividing line between Deism and atheism among the Philosophes was often rather blurred, as is evidenced by Le Rêve de d'Alembert (written 1769; "The Dream of d'Alembert"), which describes a discussion between the two "fathers" of the Encyclopédie: the Deist Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and the atheist Diderot." Andreas Sofroniou, Moral Philosophy, from Hippocrates to the 21st Aeon, page 197.
  18. The Times obituary of Adam Smith
  19. McCormmach, Russell (2004). Speculative Truth: Henry Cavendish, Natural Philosophy, and the Rise of Modern Theoretical Science . Oxford University Press. p.  29. ISBN   9780195160048. James Hutton, a deist, believed that nature was self-sustaining, without need of ongoing help from God, and that the laws of nature were immanent in the world.
  20. John L. Heilbron, ed. (2003). "Hutton, James". The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science. Oxford University Press. p. 387. ISBN   9780199743766. A deist in religion, he believed that a powerful and benevolent deity governed the universe, and dismissed the Biblical miracles as fables.
  21. "Bartleby.com: Great Books Online – Quotes, Poems, Novels, Classics and hundreds more". Archived from the original on 13 February 2009. Retrieved 23 December 2005.
  22. "Reform Judaism and the relationship to Deism". Sullivan-county.com. Retrieved 4 July 2010.
  23. Chernow, Ron (2010). Washington: A Life. Penguin Press. ISBN   9781594202667 . Retrieved 24 June 2024.
  24. McCabe, Joseph (1945). A Biographical Dictionary of Ancient, Medieval, and Modern Freethinkers. Haldeman-Julius Publications. Retrieved 30 June 2012.
  25. Dickinson, Henry Winram; Jenkins, Rhys; Commemoration, Committee of the Watt Centenary (1927). James Watt and the steam engine: the memorial volume prepared for the Committee of the Watt centenary commemoration at Birmingham 1919. Clarendon press. p. 78. It is difficult to say anything as to Watt's religious belief, further than that he was a Deist.
  26. "Modern History Sourcebook: Thomas Paine: Of the Religion of Deism Compared with the Christian Religion". Fordham.edu. Retrieved 4 July 2010.
  27. Allen, Ethan (1784). "Reason: The Only Oracle of Man". Archived from the original on 10 December 2004. Retrieved 7 February 2013.
  28. "Jefferson's Religious Beliefs". monticello.org. Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Inc. Retrieved 7 February 2013.
  29. Michael Corbett and Julia Mitchell Corbett, Politics and religion in the United States (1999) p. 68
  30. Dulles, Avery (January 2005). "The Deist Minimum". First Things (149): 25ff. Archived from the original on 30 December 2010. Retrieved 7 February 2013.
  31. Delumeau, Jean; O'Connell, Matthew (2000). History of Paradise: The Garden of Eden in Myth and Tradition. University of Illinois Press. p. 223. ISBN   9780252068805. Like Erasmus Darwin and unlike Cabanis, Lamarck was a deist.
  32. "Adam Weishaupt Quote".
  33. "VQR " The Religion of James Monroe". Vqronline.org. Retrieved 4 July 2010.
  34. Holmes, David (12 December 2003). "The Religion of James Monroe". vqronline.org. The Virginia Quarterly Review. Retrieved 9 October 2022.
  35. Frede, Victoria (2011). Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia. University of Wisconsin Pres. p. 57. ISBN   9780299284442. Schiller was no atheist: he preached faith in God and respect for the Bible, but he condemned Christianity (both Catholic and Protestant forms) as a religion of hypocrisy.
  36. "Modern History Sourcebook: Robespierre: the Supreme Being". Fordham.edu. Retrieved 4 July 2010.
  37. Elihu Palmer – First Presbyterian Church of Newtown Archived 13 December 2006 at the Wayback Machine
  38. Bühler, Walter Kaufmann (1981). "14". Gauss: a biographical study . Springer-Verlag. p.  152. ISBN   9780387106625. Despite his strong roots in the Enlightenment, Gauss was not an atheist, rather a deist with very unorthodox convictions,...
  39. Bühler, Walter Kaufmann (1981). Gauss: A Biographical Study . Springer-Verlag. p.  153. ISBN   9780387106625. Judging from the correspondence, Gauss did not believe in a personal god. An essential part of his credo was his confidence in the harmony and integrity of the grand design of the creation. Mathematics was the key to man's efforts to obtain at least a faint idea of God's plan. Obviously, Gauss's beliefs had a strong resemblance to Leibniz's system, though they were much less systematic and explicit.
  40. Falk, Gerhard (1995). "The Influence of Scientific Thinking on the Secularization Process". American Judaism in Transition: The Secularization of a Religious Community . University Press of America. p.  121. ISBN   9780761800163. Gauss told his friend Rudolf Wagner, a professor of biology at Gottingen University, that he did not believe in the Bible but that he had meditated a great deal on the future of the human soul and speculated on the possibility of the soul being reincarnated on another planet. Evidently, Gauss was a Deist with a good deal of skepticism concerning religion but incorporating a great deal of philosophical interests in the Big Questions, that is. the immortality of the soul, the afterlife and the meaning of man's existence.
  41. "Gauss, Carl Friedrich". Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 2008. Retrieved 29 July 2012. In seeming contradiction, his religious and philosophical views leaned toward those of his political opponents. He was an uncompromising believer in the priority of empiricism in science. He did not adhere to the views of Kant, Hegel and other idealist philosophers of the day. He was not a churchman and kept his religious views to himself. Moral rectitude and the advancement of scientific knowledge were his avowed principles.
  42. Kline, Morris (1982). Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty . Oxford University Press. p.  73. ISBN   9780195030853.
  43. Fullmer, June Z. (2000). Young Humphry Davy: The Making of an Experimental Chemist, Volume 237. American Philosophical Society. p.  158. ISBN   9780871692375. In prominent alliance with his concept, Davy celebrated a natural-philosophic deism, for which his critics did not attack him, nor, indeed, did they bother to mention it. Davy never appeared perturbed by critical attacks on his "materialism" because he was well aware that his deism and his materialism went hand in hand; moreover, deism appeared to be the abiding faith of all around him.
  44. Thomson, Keith Stewart (2009). The Young Charles Darwin . Yale University Press. p.  109. ISBN   9780300136081. In his religious views, Lyell was essentially a deist, holding the position that God had originally created the world and life on it, and then had allowed nature to operate according to its own (God-given) natural laws, rather than constantly intervening to direct and shape the course of all history.
  45. 1 2 "Famous Deists". Adherents.com. Archived from the original on 22 December 2005. Retrieved 4 July 2010.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  46. Chopra, Ramesh (2005). Academic Dictionary of Philosophy. Gyan Books. p. 143. ISBN   9788182052246. What Garrison did in the anti-slavery campaign is well known. The clergy to it that Americans do not know equally well that he rejected Christianity and was at the most a deist.
  47. "Deistsreplymain". Lysanderspooner.org. Archived from the original on 15 August 2009. Retrieved 4 July 2010.
  48. Costello, Peter (1978). Jules Verne, Inventor of Science Fiction . Scribner. p.  34. ISBN   9780684158242. Verne was to spend his life trying to escape from both, moving as he grew older towards anarchy and a more generalised deism.
  49. Verne, Jules; Edgar Allan Poe; Frederick Paul Walter; Paul Walter Frederick (2012). "Jules Verne, Ghostbuster". In Frederick Paul Walter (ed.). The Sphinx of the Ice Realm: The First Complete English Translation; with the Full Text of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym by Edgar Allan Poe. SUNY Press. p. 406. ISBN   9781438442112. And despite what some have said, Verne isn't much different. His early biographers laid stress on his Roman Catholicism—his grandson (Jules-Verne, 63) called him "deistic to the core, thanks to his upbringing"—yet his novels rarely have any spiritual content other than a few token appeals to the almighty.
  50. Arthur B. Evans, ed. (2007). The Kip Brothers. Wesleyan University Press. p. 412. ISBN   9780819567048. But Verne's oeuvre cannot be characterized as Christian – there is never a mention of Christ, and most of his Voyages extraordinaires seem to be built around a rather deist philosophy of "Aide-toi et le Ciel t'aidera" (God helps those who help themselves). As Jean Chesneaux once remarked: "Despite fairly frequent references to Providence, to the Supreme Being, he [Verne] is fundamentally a rationalist... (The Political and Social Ideas of Jules Verne [London: Thames and Hudson, 1972],82).
  51. Oliver, Kendrick (2012). To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane, and the American Space Program, 1957–1975. JHU Press. ISBN   9781421408347. Verne himself is best characterized as a kind of Catholic deist, deeply intrigued by the idea of God but unconvinced that he was at work in the world; and Verne was largely uninterested in the figure of Christ.
  52. Gordin, Michael D. (2004). A Well-ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table. Basic Books. p.  230. ISBN   9780465027750. Mendeleev's son Ivan later vehemently denied claims that his father was devoutly Orthodox: "I have also heard the view of my father's 'church religiosity' — and I must reject this categorically. From his earliest years Father practically split from the church – and if he tolerated certain simple everyday rites, then only as an innocent national tradition, similar to Easter cakes, which he didn't consider worth fighting against." ...Mendeleev's opposition to traditional Orthodoxy was not due to either atheism or a scientific materialism. Rather, he held to a form of romanticized deism.
  53. Wible, James R. (April 2009). "Economics, Christianity, and Creative Evolution: Peirce, Newcomb, and Ely and the Issues Surrounding the Creation of the American Economic Association in the 1880s" (PDF). p. 43. Retrieved 5 June 2012. While rejecting all of the organized religions of human history, Newcomb does recognize that religious ideas are basic to the human mind. He articulates his point: "But there is a second truth admitted with nearly equal unanimity .... It is that man has religious instincts – is, in short, a religious animal, and must have some kind of worship." 51 What Newcomb wants is a new religion compatible with the best science and philosophy of his time. He begins to outline this new religion with doctrines that it must not have: 1. It cannot have a God living and personal.... 2. It cannot insist on a personal immortality of the soul.... 3. There must be no terrors drawn from a day of judgment.... 4. There can be no ghostly sanctions or motives derived from a supernatural power, or a world to come.... 5. Everything beyond what can be seen must be represented as unknown and unknowable.... (Newcomb 1878, p. 51).
  54. Moyer, Albert E. (1983). American Physics in Transition: A History of Conceptual Change in the Late Nineteenth Century. Springer. p.  40. ISBN   9780938228066. This deistic leaning persisted in Mayer's thought.
  55. Brent, Joseph (1998). Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (2 ed.). Indiana University Press. p. 18. ISBN   9780253211613. Peirce had strong, though unorthodox, religious convictions. Although he was a communicant in the Episcopal church for most of his life, he expressed contempt for the theologies, metaphysics, and practices of established religions.
  56. Boltzmann, Ludwig; Blackmore, John T. (1995). Ludwig Boltzmann: His Later Life and Philosophy, 1900–1906. The philosopher . Springer. p.  3. ISBN   9780792334644. Boltzmann's tendency to think that the methods of theoretical physics could be applied to all fields with profit both within and outside of science apparently made it difficult for him to sympathize with most religion. His own religious position as given above seems to emphasize hope rather than belief, as if he hoped that good luck would come to him without specifying whether this would be caused by Divine Intervention, Divine Providence, or by natural or historical forces not yet understood by science or whose occurrence or timing one could not yet predict. But in the same letter to Brentano he maintains: "I pray to my God just as ardently as a priest does to his."
  57. Boltzmann, Ludwig; Blackmore, John T. (1995). Ludwig Boltzmann: His Later Life and Philosophy, 1900–1906. The philosopher . Springer. p.  4. ISBN   9780792334644. Boltzmann in optimistic moods liked to think of himself as an idealist in the sense of having high ideals and a materialist in all three major senses enjoying the material world, opposing spiritualist philosophy, and reducing reality to matter... Boltzmann may not have been an ontological materialist, at least not in a classical sense and not in his methodology of science but rather closer to the phenomenalistic positions normally associated with David Hume and Ernst Mach.
  58. In a correspondence on the matter Edison said: "You have misunderstood the whole article, because you jumped to the conclusion that it denies the existence of God. There is no such denial, what you call God I call Nature, the Supreme intelligence that rules matter. All the article states is that it is doubtful in my opinion if our intelligence or soul or whatever one may call it lives hereafter as an entity or disperses back again from whence it came, scattered amongst the cells of which we are made." New York Times. 2 October 1910, Sunday.
  59. Heilbron, J. L. (1986). The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck and the Fortunes of German Science. Harvard University Press. p. 198. ISBN   9780674004399. On the other side, Church spokesmen could scarcely become enthusiastic about Planck's deism, which omitted all reference to established religions and had no more doctrinal content than Einstein's Judaism. It seemed useful therefore to paint the lily, to improve the lesson of Planck's life for the use of proselytizers and to associate the deanthropomorphizer of science with a belief in a traditional Godhead.
  60. "Dr. Jose Rizal: The Foremost Filipino Deist". relijournal.com. 23 September 2006. Retrieved 9 November 2012.
  61. Leahy, Michael Patrick (2007). Letter to an Atheist. Harpeth River Press. p. 55. ISBN   9780979497407.
  62. Heilbron, J. L. (2003). "1: Cambridge and Ray Physics". Ernest Rutherford . Oxford University Press. p.  13. ISBN   9780195123784. He emerged a clever teenager, cheerful and strong, with a good earthy sense of humor, no airs, a wide set of manual skills, no obvious genius, an indifference to religion, and, despite having many sisters, a remarkable shyness with girls.
  63. Bowler, Peter J. (2012). Reconciling Science and Religion: The Debate in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain. University of Chicago Press. p. 61. ISBN   9780226068596. Ernest Rutherford seems to have abandoned his Presbyterian up-bringing completely, apart from its moral code. A colleague wrote of him: "I knew Rutherford rather well and under varied conditions from 1903 onwards, but never heard religion discussed; nor have I found in his papers one line of writing connected with it." ...Given the reports quoted above, it is difficult to believe that either Rutherford or Ford was deeply religious in private.
  64. Greenspan, Nancy Thorndike (2005). The End of the Certain World: The Life and Science of Max Born : the Nobel Physicist who Ignited the Quantum Revolution . Basic Books. pp. 58–62. ISBN   9780738206936. Max later traced his reluctance to his father, who had taught him not to believe in a God who punished, rewarded, or performed miracles. Like his father, he based his morality on his "own conscience and on an understanding of human life within a framework of natural law." Born, in fact, was no longer Jewish. His mother-in-law had worn him down. In March 1914, after a few religion lessons in Berlin, he was baptized a Lutheran by the pastor who had married him to Hedi. As he later explained, "there were...forces pulling in the opposite direction [to my own feelings]. The strongest of these was the necessity of defending my position again and again, and the feeling of futility produced by these discussions [with Hedi and her mother]. In the end I made up my mind that a rational being as I wished to be, ought to regard religious professions and churches as a matter of no importance.... It has not changed me, yet I never regretted it. I did not want to live in a Jewish world, and one cannot live in a Christian world as an outsider. However, I made up my mind never to conceal my Jewish origin."
  65. Nosotro, Rit (2003). "Max Born". HyperHistory.net. Archived from the original on 26 April 2013. Retrieved 19 June 2012. In 1912 Max married a descendent of Martin Luther named Hedi. They were married by a Lutheran pastor who two years later would baptize Max into the Christian faith. Far from being a messianic Jew who fell in love with Rabbi Yeshua (Jesus), Max was merely one of the millions of Jews who no considered assimilation of more importance than their Jewish faith. As Max explained, "there were...forces pulling in the opposite direction [to my own feelings]. The strongest of these was the necessity of defending my position again and again, and the feeling of futility produced by these discussions [with Hedi and her mother]. In the end I made up my mind that a rational being as I wished to be, ought to regard religious professions and churches as a matter of no importance.... It has not changed me, yet I never regretted it. I did not want to live in a Jewish world, and one cannot live in a Christian world as an outsider. However, I made up my mind never to conceal my Jewish origin."
  66. Weyl, Hermann; Pesic, Peter (20 April 2009). Peter Pesic (ed.). Mind and Nature: Selected Writings on Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics . Princeton University Press. p.  12. ISBN   9780691135458. To use the apt phrase of his son Michael, 'The Open World' (1932) contains "Hermann's dialogues with God" because here the mathematician confronts his ultimate concerns. These do not fall into the traditional religious traditions but are much closer in spirit to Spinoza's rational analysis of what he called "God or nature," so important for Einstein as well. ...In the end, Weyl concludes that this God "cannot and will not be comprehended" by the human mind, even though "mind is freedom within the limitations of existence; it is open toward the infinite." Nevertheless, "neither can God penetrate into man by revelation, nor man penetrate to him by mystical perception."
  67. Enz, Charles Paul (2002). No Time to Be Brief: A Scientific Biography of Wolfgang Pauli. Oxford University Press. ISBN   9780198564799. At the same time Pauli writes on 11 October 1957 to the science historian Shmuel Sambursky whom he had met on his trip to Israel (see Ref. [7],[ not specific enough to verify ] p. 964): 'In opposition to the monotheist religions – but in unison with the mysticism of all peoples, including the Jewish mysticism – I believe that the ultimate reality is not personal.'
  68. Heisenberg, Werner (2007). Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science . HarperCollins. pp.  214–215. ISBN   9780061209192. Wolfgang shared my concern. ..."Einstein's conception is closer to mine. His God is somehow involved in the immutable laws of nature. Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him."
  69. Alvarez, Luis W.; Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (1987). Alvarez: adventures of a physicist. Basic Books. p.  279. ISBN   9780465001156. Physicists feel that the subject of religion is taboo. Almost all consider themselves agnostics. We talk about the big bang that started the present universe and wonder what caused it and what came before. To me the idea of a Supreme Being is attractive, but I'm sure that such a Being isn't the one described in any holy book. Since we learn about people by examining what they have done, I conclude that any Supreme Being must have been a great mathematician. The universe operates with precision according to mathematical laws of enormous complexity. I'm unable to identify its creator with the Jesus to whom my maternal grandparents, missionaries in China, devoted their lives.
  70. Carpenter, Alexander (2008), "Martin Gardner on Philosophical Theism, Adventists and Price" Interview, 17 October 2008, Spectrum.
  71. 1 2 Grimes, William (16 April 2010). "Antony Flew, Philosopher and Ex-Atheist, Dies at 87". The New York Times . Retrieved 27 October 2018. In "There Is a God" he explained that he now believed in a supreme intelligence, removed from human affairs but responsible for the intricate workings of the universe. In other words, the Divine Watchmaker imagined by deists like Isaac Newton, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.
    In a letter to The Sunday Telegraph of London in 2004, he described "the God in whose existence I have belatedly come to believe" as "most emphatically not the eternally rewarding and eternally torturing God of either Christianity or Islam but the God of Aristotle that he would have defined – had Aristotle actually produced a definition of his (and my) God – as the first initiating and sustaining cause of the universe."
  72. "Top Scientists on God: Who Believes, Who Doesn't". HuffPost. Retrieved 13 May 2013. I am very much a scientist, and so I naturally have thought about religion also through the eyes of a scientist. When I do that, I see religion not denominationally, but in a more, let us say, deistic sense. I have been influenced in my thinking by the writing of Einstein who has made remarks to the effect that when he contemplated the world he sensed an underlying Force much greater than any human force. I feel very much the same. There is a sense of awe, a sense of reverence, and a sense of great mystery.
  73. Borel, Armand (2000). The Mathematical Legacy of Harish-Chandra: A Celebration of Representation Theory and Harmonic Analysis : An AMS Special Session Honoring the Memory of Harish-Chandra, January 9–10, 1998, Baltimore, Maryland. American Mathematical Soc. pp. 40–41. ISBN   9780821811979. The sense of purpose Harish gave to his life had some spiritual, even religious underpinning. His religion was not a traditional one with the usual paraphernalia of stories, rituals, prayers and direct intervention of a personal god. Rather it was on an abstract, philosophical level, a yearning for some universal principle, transcending our lives, which would give a sense to the universe. Mathematics was maybe for him a way to approach it this life.
  74. Hansen, James R. (2005). First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong. Simon and Schuster. p. 33. ISBN   9780743281713. It is clear that by the time Armstrong returned from Korea in 1952 he had become a type of deist, a person whose belief in God was founded on reason rather than on revelation, and on an understanding of God's natural laws rather than on the authority of any particular creed or church doctrine. While working as a test pilot in Southern California in the late 1950s, Armstrong applied at a local Methodist church to lead a Boy Scout troop. Where the form asked for his religious affiliation, Neil wrote the word "Deist."
  75. Heckman, James J. (2009). "James J. Heckman". In William Breit; Barry T. Hirsch (eds.). Lives of the Laureates, Fifth Edition: Twenty-three Nobel Economists (5 ed.). MIT Press. pp.  303–304. ISBN   9780262012768. If I had any religion at that time, it was Deism. I was impressed by God the watchmaker.
  76. Sidocon, Gino (20 May 2016). "Netizens react to Duterte's statement on God, religion". Featured Story. Manila Bulletin . Intramuros, Manila. Retrieved 21 May 2016.
  77. Romero, Alexis (20 May 2016). "Duterte says he believes in God but not in religion". Headlines. The Philippine Star . Port Area, Manila. Retrieved 21 May 2016.
  78. "Duterte: I believe in God, but not in religion". News. GMA Network Inc. Quezon City. 19 May 2016. Retrieved 21 May 2016.
  79. Ho, Alex (23 January 2016). "Duterte leaves religion for mayoral duties; sees Roxas as 'useless'". News. CNN Philippines . Mandaluyong. Archived from the original on 31 May 2016. Retrieved 21 May 2016.
  80. Horgan, J. (12 September 2005). "Clash in Cambridge: Scientific American". Scientific American. 293 (3). Sciam.com: 24B, 26–8. doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0905-24B. PMID   16121847 . Retrieved 4 July 2010.
  81. Soghomonian, Talia (3 August 2008). "Nick Cave". musicOMH. Archived from the original on 2 February 2012. Retrieved 26 February 2012. Asked if he's a believer, he replies evasively, 'I believe in all sorts of things.' I attempt to lift his aura of mysticism and insist. 'Well, I believe in all sorts of things. But do I believe in God, you mean? Yeah. Do you?' he turns the question on me, before continuing, 'If you're involved with imagination and the creative process, it's not such a difficult thing to believe in a god. But I'm not involved in any religions.'
  82. "Nick Cave on The Death of Bunny Munro". The Guardian. 11 September 2009. Do I personally believe in a personal God? No.
  83. "Greg Graffin: Punk-Rock PhD". Paste Magazine. 1 August 2007. Archived from the original on 16 October 2007. I'd call myself a provisional deist...I don't believe in a God who does much. But I do believe in God, for some reason that I can't explain.
  84. Waldman, Steven (5 August 2020). "Will Tammy Duckworth be the first deist veep since Thomas Jefferson?". religionnews.com. Religion News Service. Retrieved 9 October 2022.
  85. Monetti, Domenico. "HARMONY ENFANT TERRIBLE All Korine's Transgressions" . Retrieved 24 June 2012. "Even though I was born into a Jewish family, I don't belong to any religion. I'm not an atheist, I believe in a higher power. You have to believe in something, otherwise it would be hard getting out of bed in the morning." Harmony Korine and scandals.