Theo Brainz
BBT SH: Những người Âu châu ngay từ rất sớm, ở thế kỷ thứ 4, họ
đã bị khống chế bởi Giáo Hội La Mã và đều bị cưỡng bách theo đạo Ki-tô .
Vừa lọt lòng mẹ là người lớn đã cho rửa tội rồi. Chạy đâu cho thoát?
Vậy không cần kể lể danh sách những tên tuổi này, hay tên tuổi nọ theo
đạo Ki-tô nữa, vì tất cả họ đều là Ki-tô từ lúc nằm nôi.
Nhưng thiên hạ ngày một thông minh hơn, nhờ kinh nghiệm, cọ xát,
trao đổi, tìm hiểu,..hay tò mò, suy tư,…, những người thông minh
(brilliant) bắt đầu muốn thoát khỏi cái tròng tôn giáo ép uổng đó.
Trong đó có một số tác giả như cựu Thẩm Phán Charlie Nguyễn, Bác Sĩ
Nguyễn Văn Thọ, Ông Trần Tiên Long, Ông Cao Hữu Tâm, Ông Phạm Hữu Tạo,
một số trí thức khác mà quí vị cũng thừa biết, và một số đông khác mà
quí vị và chúng tôi chưa biết, nhưng "Chúa biết", vì họ không vào nhà
thờ nữa.
Do đó người ta chỉ kể ra những người đang từ chối niềm tin vô lý xưa cũ. Họ tự nhận là vô thần một cách tự hào. Đó là Danh Sách 50 Nhân Vật Vô Thần Thông Minh Nhất Của Mọi Thời Đại
do trang mạng Brainz liệt kê sau đây. Xin quí vị Ki-tô giáo giúp dịch
ra tiếng Việt để hiểu thêm trước khi đi giảng đạo cho những người lương
của chúng tôi. (SH)
_______________________________
Nhân đọc:
Cái list về "những nhân vật đoạt giải Nobel theo tôn giáo gì" chỉ là trò trẻ nít! http://sachhiem.net/index.php?content=showemail&id=1399
Subject: [DiendanDanToc] DANH SÁCH 50 NGƯỜI VÔ THẦN
From: DiendanDanToc@yahoogroups.com
Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2016 00:04:05 -0700
____________________________________
Danh Sách 50 Nhân Vật Vô Thần Thông Minh Nhất Của Mọi Thời Đại
Atheism is generating quite a lot of attention these days.
Prominent atheists are getting the word out about their views in
increasing numbers and generating lots of public debate on the proper
place of religion in governments and societies in the modern world. And
now more than ever, atheists have been able to network together and
join forces because of the Internet.
Today about 2.3 percent of the world's population identifies
themselves as atheist, and nearly 12 percent more (a number that is
quickly growing) describe themselves as nontheist - non-believers in
any deity. The ranks of scientists boast probably the largest
concentration of atheists, and many of those have been recognized as
among the most brilliant of human beings for their work. But there are
atheists in all walks of life and throughout history as well.
Here's a look at 50 of the most prominent atheists of all time who
also happen to be recognized as some of the most brilliant members of
our species.
As a note of clarification: we've ordered this list
chronologically and we use the term "brilliant" to mean "brilliant at
their craft" - not just pure brainiacs;-)
1. Democritus
Democritus was an ancient Greek philosopher, the most prolific and
influential of the pre-Socratics and whose atomic theory is regarded as
the intellectual culmination of early Greek thought. For this atomic
theory, which echoes eerily the theoretical formulations of modern
physicists, he is sometimes called the "father of modern science." He
was well known to Aristotle, and a thorn in the side to Plato - who
advised that all of Democritus' works be burned.
A cheerful and popular man with the citizenry for his uncanny ability
to predict events, his was known among his fans as the "Laughing
Philosopher," a title that may well have referred more to his scoffing
rejection of assigning to gods the mechanistic operations of nature
itself. His cosmology and atomic theory held that the world was
spheroid, that there were many worlds and many suns, and that all
things manifest in nature were comprised of atoms bound together. There
are varying accounts of his age at death, ranging from a ripe 90 all
the way to 109 years.
2. Diagoras of Melos
The first and most ancient of recognized atheists must include a 5th
century b.c.e. poet and sophist from Melos known as Diagoras the
Atheist. Not content to simply speak against the popular pantheon of
Greek gods, he also criticized the Eleusinian Mysteries. He became a
disciple of Democritus after that notable philosopher paid a hefty
ransom to free Diagoras from captivity following the subjugation of
Melos in 416 b.c.e.
Prosecuted by the Athenian democratic party for impiety in 415
b.c.e., he was forced to flee the city and died in Corinth. None of
Diagoras' own writings survive, but in the 1st century b.c.e. Cicero
wrote that one of Diagoras' friends tried to convince him that the gods
did exist by citing the many people saved from storms by their pleas
to their favorite gods, to which Diagoras was purported to reply,
"there are nowhere any pictures of those who have been shipwrecked and
drowned at sea."
3. Epicurus
Born in 341 b.c.e. in Athens, Epicurus established the school of
philosophy known as Epicureanism, and was a follower of Democritus even
though his own philosophy denied the influence of strong determinism
and often denounced other philosophies as confused. He was an important
figure in the early development of the scientific methodology,
insisting that nothing which cannot be tested through direct
observation and defended through logical deduction should be believed.
For Epicurus the purpose of philosophy was to attain peace of mind
and a happy life, freedom from fear and absence of pain. He considered
pleasure and pain the measures of that which is good or evil. He
insisted that there were no gods to reward or punish humans after
death, that the universe is infinite and eternal, and that all things
are ultimately material in nature. Epicurus himself was never able to
escape a life of pain or a painful death, as he suffered greatly from
kidney stones and died at the age of 72 of complications from that
ailment.
4. Theodorus the Atheist
[no image available]
Theodorus the Atheist from Cyrene lived around 300 b.c.e. He was
banished from Cyrene in his early years, and moved to Athens to become a
follower of the younger Aristippus. He also managed to get himself
banished from Athens which caused him to go into the service of Ptolemy
in Alexandria. It was in this service that he was sent as an
ambassador to Lysimachus, who became offended by Theodorus' free speech
as a lack of respect and decorum.
Theodorus taught that the aim of human life was to obtain joy and
avoid grief, and that joy comes through prudence while grief arises
from folly. Prudence and justice represented good, their opposites
evil. Laertius complained that Theodorus "did away with all opinions
respecting the Gods," but he may have just rejected the notions of
deity popular in his time.
5. Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie [1835-1919] was a noted American industrialist,
businessman and philanthropist. A Scottish-born immigrant, he
established the Carnegie Steel Company in Pittsburgh and later merged
it with the Federal Steel Company to become U.S. Steel. He is regarded
as the second richest man in history, then he gave most of his steel
and railroad fortune away to establish libraries, schools and
universities all over America. He limited himself to an income of
$50,000 per year, everything else went into good works.
He wrote many books on the subjects of wealth and its
responsibilities, on social issues and on political philosophy. He
self-identified as a positivist, and kept away from organized religion
due to his distaste of sectarianism. Carnegie preferred naturalism and
science, saying in his autobiography that, "not only had I got rid of
the theology and the supernatural, but I had found the truth of
evolution."
6. Ivan Pavlov
Ivan Petrovich Pavlov [1849-1936] was a Russian physiologist,
psychologist and physician. He won the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1904
for research on the digestive system. It was his investigation of the
saliva of dogs that first led him to notice that the animals salivated
more when they expected food, a phenomenon he termed "psychic
secretion." He was particularly interested in studying conditioned
behaviors as an experimental model of the induction of neuroses. His
approach became known as "behaviorism," and after his death his work
was extended by William Sargant and others in an attempt to develop a
systematic method for brainwashing and implantation of false memories.
Pavlov died in Leningrad, his laboratory in St. Petersburg was
carefully preserved by the Soviet government as a museum. He had one of
his students attend him on his deathbed to record the circumstances of
his dying, as if it were just another psychological experiment.
7. Sigmund Freud
Born Sigismund Schlomo Freud [1856-1939], Freud was an Austrian
psychiatrist founded the psychoanalytic school of psychology. Using his
theories of the unconscious mind and defense mechanisms of repression,
his psychoanalysis sought to cure sufferers of psychopathology through
a dialogue between the patient and his psychoanalyst. He had an
elaborate system for interpretation of dreams as indicators of
unconscious desires, and did early neurological research on cerebral
palsy.
Despite his ideas falling out of favor or being modified in later
years, his methodology and theoretics continue to exert influence in
the humanities and some social sciences. Freud's family escaped after
Nazi Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and moved to London. He suffered
more than 30 operations for oral cancer in his late life, and convinced
his physician friend Max Schur to assist his suicide in 1939. His
philosophical writings established his strong advocacy for an atheistic
world view, and he was eulogized as "the atheist's touchstone" for the
20th century.
8. Clarence Darrow
Clarence Seward Darrow [1857-1938] was an American lawyer, a leading
member of the ACLU and a notable defense attorney. Starting out as a
corporate lawyer for a railroad company, he soon jumped the ideological
tracks and represented the leader of the American Railway Union in the
Pullman Strike of 1894.
His most famous case was the defense of Tennessee teacher John Scopes
in the "Monkey Trial" against the state law that barred the teaching
of evolution. The prosecution side was argued by William Jennings
Bryan, the the trial served as the story for the play and later film,
Inherit the Wind. During
the trial Darrow self-identified as an agnostic by saying, "I do not
consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic.
I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure - that is
all that agnosticism means." Yet he wrote essays with titles like
"Absurdities of the Bible" and "The Myth of the Soul," suggesting that
his agnosticism was strong enough to be considered atheism.
9. Richard Strauss
Richard Georg Strauss [1864-1949] was a brilliant German composer
who began writing music at the age of six and continued almost until
his death. He was noted for his "tone poems" and operas such as
Salomeand
Elektra,
which made use of dissonance and generated much public outcry. During
the Nazi period he was appointed president of the German State Music
Bureau and composed the theme song for the infamous 1936 Summer
Olympics in Berlin. He produced the opera
Friedenstag in 1938,
a thinly veiled criticism of the Third Reich. He is said to have
stretched his influence very thin in his efforts to protect his son and
Jewish daughter-in-law and their children from the Nazis.
Strauss was dubious of all religion, except perhaps the religion of
reason. "I shall never be converted, and I shall remain true to my old
religion of the classics until my life's end," he declared shortly
before his death.
10. Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell [1872-1970], 3rd Earl of Russell,
was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, pacifist
and social activist. Russell led the revolt against idealism in the
early 20th century and is considered along with Wittgenstein and Frege a
founder of analytic philosophy, which considers formal logic and
science as the principal tools of philosophy. Russell was awarded the
Nobel Prize for literature in 1950.
Russell was not fond of organized religion, but expressed some
difficulty in defining himself as an agnostic or an atheist. In his
1949 speech, "Am I an Atheist or an Agnostic?" Russell admitted that he
could not prove the non-existence of God any more than he could prove
the non-existence of the Homeric gods. But in his autobiography he
stated, "At the age of eighteen, ...I read Mill's
Autobiography, where
I found a sentence to the effect that his father taught him the
question "Who made me?" cannot be answered, since it immediately
suggests the further question "Who made God?" This led me to abandon
the "First Cause" argument, and to become an atheist."
11. Jawaharlal Nehru
Jawaharlal Nehru [1889-1964] was a follower of Mahatma Gandhi, Nehru
rose to leadership of the Indian National Congress at a young age in
part due to his charisma and advocacy of complete Indian independence
from the British Empire. He was the first and longest serving Prime
Minister of an Independent India from 1947 to 1964. His appreciation
for parliamentary democracy and concern for the poor allowed him to
formulate policies derided by some for their socialist leanings.
Nehru enjoyed the honorific title of "Scholar" and despite his
family's Hindi religious background, was an atheist. Forging am
independent, modern India where educational and social opportunities
could been afforded to all citizens regardless of religion or caste,
this rejection of any particular belief system in a region hosting such
wide diversity no doubt helped him toward his considerable
accomplishments.
12. Linus Pauling
Linus Carl Pauling [1901-1994] was one of the most influential
chemists in history as well as one of the most important scientists of
the 20th century - or, according to Gautam Desiraju who wrote the
Millennium Essay in the journal Nature, one of the greatest thinkers
and visionaries of the last thousand years. One of only 4 individuals
ever to have won solo Nobel Prizes in separate and unrelated fields -
for chemistry in 1954, and the Nobel Peace Prize for his tireless
campaign against atmospheric nuclear bomb testing in 1962. His
activities in favor of pacifism and against nuclear weapons earned him
an appearance before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, which
explicitly accused him of being in league with the Communists.
Pauling's wife Ava Hellen, whom he married in 1917, was a pacifist
and peace activist who got him involved in the crusade against nuclear
weapons and atmospheric bomb testing. He had been raised Lutheran and
later joined the Unitarian Universalist Church, but publicly declared
his personal atheism two years before his death of prostate cancer at
the age of 93.
13. Paul Dirac
Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac [1902-1984] was a British theoretical
physicist who contributed to the early development of quantum mechanics
and quantum electrodynamics [QED]. He shared the 1933 Nobel Prize in
physics with Erwin Schrodinger, formulated what became known as the
Dirac equation, and held the Cambridge Lucasian Chair in mathematics
established by Sir Isaac Newton and currently held by Stephen Hawking.
Dirac was noted for his personal humility, refusing to call his
contributions to physics by his own name, and for his somewhat
Edwardian sense of social propriety. He married Margrit, the sister of
fellow Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, in 1937. He adopted her two
children and the couple had two more. While he once said that "God used
beautiful mathematics in creatiing the world," his personal views on
religion were far less expansive. Wolfgang Pauli once described Dirac's
first commandment concerning religion as, "God does not exist and Paul
Dirac is his prophet."
14. Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand [1905-1982] was a Russian-born writer who emigrated to the U.S. in 1925. Her first play,
Night of January 16th, was produced in Hollywood and then on Broadway. Her autobiographical and anti-Soviet novel
We the Living, was published in 1936. Best known for her sweeping intellectual masterpiece
Atlas Shrugged, the fiction mystery allowed her to fully develop her philosophy of objectivism.
For the rest of her life Rand lectured and wrote about objectivism,
which she termed "a philosophy for living on earth." All of the books
Rand published during her lifetime are still in print, and her
philosophy is still taught at many major universities as one of the
most important philosophical movements in the modern world. Objectivism
is particularly prized by dedicated capitalists and economists and
underpins much of the wider freethought movement.
15. Katherine Hepburn
Katherine Houghton Hepburn [1907-2003] was an acclaimed actress in
film, television and stage for 73 years of her long life. She received
12 Academy Award nominations for Best Actress in a film, and still
holds the record with four wins. In 1999 the American Film Institute
ranked Hepburn as cinema history's greatest female star. A child of New
England privilege with a genealogical heritage tracing back to Louis
IX of France, she received her degree in history and philosophy from
Bryn Mawr despite a record of breaking curfew, smoking and skinny
dipping in the fountain. She married socialite businessman Ludlow Ogden
Smith in 1928, but divorced six years later. Despite several romances,
the love of her live was Spencer Tracy, with whom she made nine
movies.
In a 1973 interview on
The Dick Cavett Show Hepburn said
that while she agreed with Christian principles and thought highly of
Jesus Christ, she had no personal religious beliefs nor any belief in
an afterlife.
"I am an atheist and that's it. I believe there's
nothing we can know except that we should be kind to each other and do
what we can for other people."
16. Jacques Monod
Jacques Lucien Monod [1910-1976] was a French biologist who
contributed greatly to the understanding of the Lac operon as a
regulator of gene transcription in cells, suggested the existence of
mRNA molecules in the process of protein synthesis, and further
contributed to the field of enzymology. He was awarded the Nobel Prize
in Physiology or Medicine in 1965. He married archeologist and
orientalist Odette Bruhl in 1938, they had twin sons, Oliver and
Phillippe, one of whom became a geologist, the other a physicist.
Monod wrote the book
Chance and Necessity in 1970, which
became a popular primer on the relationship between the roles of random
chance and adaptation in biological evolution and provided much
ammunition to the atheist community by proposing that the natural
sciences revealed an entirely purposeless world that undermines the
traditional claims of the world's religions. His views also contributed
to the development of the idea of "Memes" that Richard Dawkins made
famous in his writings.
17. Subrahmanyan Chandresekhar
Padma Vibhushan Subrahmanyan Chandresekhar [1910-1995] - better
known by his nickname "Chandra" - has a space-based X-ray observatory
named after him, launched by the space shuttle
Columbiaon
July 23, 1999. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1983 for his
important contributions to knowledge about the evolution of stars, he
is probably better known for his 1995 opus
>Newton's Principia for the Common Reader which explains the detailed arguments of Newton's original
Principia using the language and methods of ordinary calculus.
A naturalized American citizen born in Lahore, India, Chandra's
family long displayed signs of brilliance, even genius. His father was a
government worker and accomplished violinist who wrote several books
on musicology. His mother was an intellectual noted for translating
Ibsen's
A Doll's Houseinto the Tamil language. His paternal uncle was physicist C.V. Raman, who also won a Nobel Prize.
18. Alan Turing
Alan Mathison Turing [1912-1954] was a mathematician, logician,
computer scientist and cryptanalyst from England. He displayed distinct
signs of genius early in his life, solving advanced problems without
having studied elementary calculus. At the age of 16 he encountered
Einstein's work and extrapolated it to question Newton's laws of motion
from a text in which this challenge was not made explicit. Perhaps his
most momentous achievement was his 1936 paper reformulating Kurt
Godel's results on the limits of proof and computation, replacing
Godel's arithmetic-based formal language with what are now known as
Turing machines - formal and simple devices.
It was the death of Turing's first love in their last year at
Sherborne from complications of bovine tuberculosis (contracted from
drinking infected milk as a boy) that shattered Turing's religious
faith. He became an atheist with a firm conviction that all phenomena
must be materialistic in nature.
19. Francis Crick
Francis Harry Compton Crick [1916-2004] is best known as the
co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. He first coined the term
"central dogma" to describe the flow of genetic information in cells as
a one-way street - DNA to RNA to protein. His primary interests
encompassed two fundamental problems in biology. How non-living
molecules become living organisms, and how the human brain creates a
conscious mind.
On the matter of religion, Crick once said, "Christianity may be okay
between consenting adults in private, but should not be taught to
young children." In his book
Of Molecules and Men he
expressed his strong views on the relationship between science and
religion. Those views continued to play a role in his work when he
transitioned from molecular biology into theoretical neuroscience.
20. Claude Shannon
Claude Elwood Shannon [1916-2001] was an electronic engineer and
mathematician known as "the father of information theory." While at the
University of Michigan he was introduced to the works of George Boole,
and once in grad school at MIT working with the 'differential
analyzer', an early analog computer, he saw that Boole's concepts could
be used used to simplify the complicated circuitry of the analyzer and
wrote his master's thesis on what became known as Boolean logic. His
PhD thesis at MIT applied this work to establish mathematical
relationships in Mendelian genetics. He became a National Research
Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and worked
freely across disciplines with other notable scientists to shape the
ideas that became information theory.
Shannon and his wife Betty put their collective mathematical and
analytical abilities together in a game theory for many successful
visits to the gaming tables in Las Vegas and made a fortune. An even
bigger fortune was made later by Shannon and colleague Ed Thorp when
they applied the same theory (later known as the Kelly criterion) to
the stock market.
21. Richard Feynman
Richard Phillips Feynman [1918-1988] contributed much to the
development of quantum mechanics, including what became known as
Feynman diagrams, the path integral formulation, the theory of quantum
electrodynamics [QED], the physics supercooled liquid helium's
superfluidity, and the parton model of particle physics. He won the
Nobel Prize in 1965 for QED and became one of the best known scientists
in the world through his popular books and lectures about physics and
about his own storied life.
Among his colleagues he was perhaps better known as a beatnik and
clown, always thinking up clever pranks or juggling or sitting in with
any impromptu band playing bongos. Some of his other interests were
painting, biology, Mayan hieroglyphics and lock-picking. He was dubbed
the "Great Explainer" for two masterful lecture series on physics at
Cal Tech (which were later turned into the books
Six Easy Pieces and
Six Not So Easy Pieces.
He developed two rare forms of cancer late in his life, complaining
that, "I'd hate to die twice. It's so boring." In the end, he died
after surgery for only one of them.
22. Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky [b. 1928] is one of the most notable American
philosophers of any age. Professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT, and
is considered a father of modern linguistics. Also a prolific writer,
he has also become famous for being an outspoken political dissident,
anarchist, humanist freethinker and libertarian socialist.
Beginning with his 1959 critique of B.F. Skinner's behaviorist theory
of language, Chomsky has iterated and refined his own theory of
linguistics as a branch of cognitive psychology. This view drew much
criticism from behaviorists, particularly his hypothesis that humans
share an innate linguistic capability. On his views of religion,
Chomsky said in a
Common Sense interview in 2002, "...if you
ask me whether or not I'm an atheist, I wouldn't even answer. I would
first want an explanation of what it is that I'm supposed not to believe
in, and I've never seen an explanation."
23. James D. Watson
James Dewey Watson [b. 1928] received the Nobel Prize in physiology
or medicine in 1962 as co-discoverer along with Francis Crick and
Maurice Wilkins of the molecular structure of DNA. Watson began his
Ph.D. research with Salvador Luria, who later earned his own Nobel for
work with Max Delbruck on phages. It was from this association with the
leaders of the "Phage Group" of molecular biologists that he became
involved in the search for the nature of genes. He earned that Ph.D. in
zoology from Indiana University at the age of 22.
Watson was politically active in opposition to the war in Vietnam and
nuclear proliferation, active in environmentalism. When asked by a
student if he believed in God, Watson answered,
"Oh, no.
Absolutely not... The biggest advantage to believing in God is you don't
have to understand anything, no physics, no biology. I wanted to
understand."
24. Peter Higgs
Peter Ware Higgs [b. 1929] is a theoretical physicist and emeritus
professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He is a recipient
of the 1997 Dirac Medal and Prize for outstanding contributions to
theoretical physics, the High Energy and Particle Physics Prize by the
European Physical Society, and the Wolf Prize in physics. If his
predicted Higgs particle - the field boson imparting mass to matter -
is discovered as expected by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN and he
is still alive, Higgs is expected to receive the Nobel Prize in physics
within the year.
Higgs describes himself as an atheist, but expresses discomfort with
one of the designations of his field boson, the "God Particle." That
designation was popularized by Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman in his book
by that title, published in 1993 as part of a PR campaign in favor of
the proposed Superconducting Super Collider [SSC] proposed to be built
in Texas. Higgs lives a reserved life and is not anxious to offend
religious believers.
25. Warren Buffet
Warren Edward Buffett [b. 1930] is an American businessman and CEO
of Berkshire Hathaway rated by Forbes as the richest person in the
world (in the first half of 2008, before the Wall Street meltdown). He
is noted for adherence to the philosophy of "value investing" and for
accepting an annual salary for himself of less than $200,000. Compare
that to what taxpayers are now paying the CEOs of failed Wall Street
investment firms!
Buffett is further noted for his philanthropy, a passion he shares
with fellow billionaire Bill Gates, along with a weekly bridge play
date. In 2006 Buffett announced that 83% of his fortune would be going
to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for further philanthropy. He
describes himself as religiously agnostic. In Roger Lowenstein's 1995
biography
Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist, he is described and non-religious.
"He adopted his father's ethical underpinnings, but not his belief in an unseen divinity."
26. John Searle
John Rogers Searle [b. 1932] is an American philosopher whose
contributions to the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and
social philosophy made him an influential member and spokesperson for
the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley during the late 1960s and early
'70s.
Drawing upon his theory of intentionality, Searle argued in his 1992 book
The Rediscovery of the Mind that
much of modern philosophy has attempted to deny the existence of
consciousness, with little success among conscious people. The primary
issue Searle identifies is a philosophical false dichotomy between
strong materialism and subjective, first-person experience of the
world. What emerged from his resolution is a view he calls "biological
naturalism" - that consciousness is real, caused by the physical
processes of the brain. Searle is regarded as an atheist who believes
in freedom of will and has argued eloquently (and controversially) for
that position.
27. Steven Weinberg
Steven Weinberg [b. 1933] is an American physicist best known for
his work on unification of electromagnetism and the weak force, for
which he shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1979. It was as a
visiting professor at MIT in 1967 that he first proposed his
electroweak unification theory, which predicted the existence of the Z
boson and the existence of a mechanism of mass later known as the Higgs
boson. In 1973 he proposed a modification of the Standard Model of
physics did not predict the Higgs, but there is as yet no consensus.
Weinberg has been prominent in the science vs. religion 'culture
wars'. His popular science books and articles combine explaining
science in the added context of history, philosophy of science, and
atheism. In a 1999 speech in Washington, D.C., he said, "With or
without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do
evil; but for good people to do evil - that takes religion."
28. Carl Sagan
Carl Edward Sagan [1934-1996] was an American astronomer,
astrochemist, and successful popularizer of science.Sagan was connected
to the American space program from the beginning, working as an
advisor to NASA from the 1950s. He contributed to many of the robotic
missions that explored the solar system and arranged experiments to be
conducted during manned moon missions. He designed the gold placque
attached to the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, a message that could be
understood by an extraterrestrial intelligence that encountered it.
Sagan was an outspoken opponent of nuclear weapons and starred in the popular PBS television series
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Noted
as a skeptic who advocated for humanist ideals, the public considered
him an atheist. Sagan called himself an agnostic instead, explaining
that "an atheist has to know a lot more than I know" in order to make a
positive assertion that no deity exists.
29. David Suzuki
David Takayoshi Suzuki [b. 1936] is a Canadian zoologist,
geneticist, science broadcaster and entironmental activist. His work in
television began in 1970 with the weekly children's series,
Suzuki on Science, going on to host CBC's
The Nature of Things and the acclaimed PBS series
A Planet for the Taking.He also worked in radio, hosting CBC Radio One's
Quirks and Quarks, and a weekly program for more mature audiences called
Science Magazine. He
has also written several books about science and environmentalism, is
an outspoken critic of global climate change corporate deniers and
established the David Suzuki Foundation to promote sustainability.
Though he has been often accused by his critics of turning his
environmental causes into a religion of its own, Suzuki describes
himself in his autobiography as an atheist with no illusions about life
and death.
30. George Carlin
George Denis Patrick Carlin [1937-2008] was one of the most popular
and controversial comedians during his lifetime, having won five Grammy
awards for his comedy albums. He was the very first guest host for
Saturday Night Live and
is considered one of the most brilliant satirists of American culture.
He was most noted for his focus on psychology, religion, the English
language and any other subject that might shock and delight his
audiences. He came in second on the Comedy Central network's list of
100 Greatest Comedians of all time.
Just four days before his death the Kennedy Center for the Performing
Arts announced that he would receive the Mark Twain Prize for American
Humor. An outspoken atheist, Carlin joked in his book
Brain Droppings that
he worshipped the sun because he could actually see it. He also
introduced in an HBO special the "Two Commandments," a condensed
version of the ten ending with one additional commandment, "Thou Shalt
keep thy religiion to thyself."
31. Bruce Lee
Bruce Jun Fan Lee [1940- 1973] was an American born Chinese martial
artist, philosopher, instructor and actor, the founder of the Jeet Kune
Do combat form. When he turned to development of his martial arts form
in the 1960s, he also became notable for his views and practices of
promoting peak physical fitness with proper training, diet and vitamin
supplements. Bodybuilder Arnold Schwarzenegger was influenced by Lee,
described his physique as defined, with very little body fat. "I mean,
he probably had one of the lowest body fat counts of any athlete. And I
think that's why he looked so unbelievable."
Lee had majored in philosophy at the University of Washington and
kept an extensive library of philosophy. His first book expressed a
well-developed philosophical outlook and was entitled
Chinese Gung-Fu: The Philosophical Art of Self Defense. As
he developedJeet Kune Do he cited influence from Taoism, Jiddu
Krishnamurti and Buddhism, but was himself an atheist who expressed
disbelief in God.
32. Leonard Susskind
Leonard Susskind [b. 1940] is an American physicist specializing in
string theory and quantum field theory. He is Felix Bloch professor of
theoretical physics at Stanford. He is a notable promoter of public
understanding of science, and his entire course on quantum physics can
be downloaded on the iTunes platform from Stanford. His contrubutions
to theoretical physics are voluminous, including the independent
discovery of string theory, the theory of quark confinement, the
development of Hamiltonian lattice gauge theory, the holography
principle, the string theory of black hole entropy and the principle of
"black hole complementarity."
Susskind is also a popular speaker for both science and against religious creationism. In a review of the book,
The Cosmic Landscape: String Theory and the Illusion of Intelligent Design, Michael Duff wrote that Susskind is "a card-carrying atheist."
33. Stephen Jay Gould
Stephen Jay Gould [1941-2002] was a paleontologist, evolutionary
biologist and historian of science who became one of the most
influential popularizers of evolutionary biology through his books and
essays. Though a critic of the deterministic view of human behavior and
society, he contributed much to expanding upon the mechanisms of
natural evolution. He generated some controversy with
A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism,
taking issue with the gradualism and reductionism of orthodox
neodarwinists. He contributed "Punctuated Equilibrium" to the
evolutionary lexicon to explain the fossil evidence of abrupt changes
in organismic form interspersed with long periods of stability.
Himself an atheist, Gould was an advocate for what he called
"Non-Overlapping Magisteria" [NOMA] as a way to resolve the conflicts
between science and religion.
"Science and religion occupy two separate realms of human experience," he wrote in
Rock of Ages. "Demanding that they be combined detracts from the glory of each."
34. Richard Dawkins
Clinton Richard Dawkins [b. 1941] is the most prominent scientific
atheist in the world today, and was the Simonyi Professor for the
Public Understanding of Science at Oxford until his retirement in 2008.
Dawkins' particular brilliance is not so much reflected in radical
discoveries in his field of biology, but in his popular science
writings like his books
The Selfish Gene and
The Extended Phenotype.
He has been called "Darwin's Rottweiler" in the press for his strong
support of evolution by natural selection. He has also written against
creationism in the book
The Blind Watchmaker and against theism in
A Devil's Chaplain and
The God Delusion, both popular best-sellers.
An engaging and energetic speaker, Dawkins promotes atheism as senior
editor and columnist for the Council for Secular Humanism's
Free Inquiry magazine, and as a member of the editorial board of
Skeptic magazine since it was founded. In2006 Dawkins founded the
Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science,
and in 2007 founded the atheist "Out" campaign, and in 2008 he
supported the Atheist Bus Campaign, Britain's first atheist advertising
blitz.
35. Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett [b. 1942] is an American philosopher
specializing in the philosophies of mind, science and biology.
Dennett's father was a spy for the OSS, disguised as a cultural attache
in Beirut during WW-2. He died in a plane crash in 1947 and the family
moved back to the U.S. Dennett enjoyed study under a number of notable
philosophers at Harvard and Oxford, and is currently a professor of
philosophy and co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts
University.
Dennett's popular work in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the books
Content and Consciousness and
Consciousness Explained reflect
an expansive and detailed development of his philosophical ideas that
have generated some heated debates among his peers. In the book
Breaking the Spell Dennett
examines religious beliefs from an evolutionary point of view as
social adaptations that conveyed selective advantages to the species.
36. Stephen Hawking
Stephen William Hawking [b. 1942] is the Lucasian Professor of
Mathematics at Cambridge, a position once held by Sir Isaac Newton. He
is recognized as one of the most creatively intelligent people of the
modern scientific age, best known his contributions to the fields of
cosmology, quantum gravity and general relativity, as well as for his
best-selling popular science books. He developed ALS (Lou Gehrig's
disease) in graduate school in Cambridge and has survived with the
condition longer than was thought possible. he has almost no
neuromuscular control and must communicate via a speech synthesizer.
Hawking sometimes comes across quite like a deist in his popular writings, particularly in the book,
A Brief History of Time, in
which most of the questions posed of the universe also echo questions
traditionally asked of God. In that book Hawking expounded upon his "no
boundary" model by stating,
"If the no boundary proposal is correct, He [God] had no freedom at all to choose initial conditions.". While he does not publicly profess atheism, Hawking does profess agnosticism.
37. Mick Jagger
Sir Michael Philip "Mick" Jagger [b. 1943] was expected by his
family to become a teacher, like his father and grandfather, but what
he really loved to do was sing. He was a capable student and went to
the London School of Economics on scholarship. In his off time he took
to being a pick-up singer in London's club scene, developing a small
fan following even though he had no formal musical training. He left
school at 19 to follow his musical ambitions. He and friends Keith
Richards and Brian Jones formed a band called the Rolling Stones, and
the rest is history.
Having become one of the wealthiest musicians in the world - and a
Knight of the Realm as of 2003 as well - Jagger founded his own film
company with Victoria Pearman in 1995, Jagged Films. A notorious
womanizer, Jagger has seven children by 4 women (two of whom he
married), and four grandchildren. Not bad for a fabulously wealthy,
world famous economics school dropout.
38. Richard Leakey
Richard Erskine Frere Leakey [b. 1944] was born in Nairobi, Kenya,
one of three sons of noted archaeologists Louis and Mary Leakey. By
1962 he'd earned a private pilot's license and began offering aerial
tours of Olduvai. Noting a potential fossil bed, he went back with an
associate of his father's and was given the funding for a month's dig.
Soon he and his business partner Kimoya Kameu discovered
Australopithecus boisei. His storied career has been set with his
accomplishments as a conservationist, a promoter of civil rights and a
supporter of the Kenyan Safina Party.
In a 2007 interview upon his induction into the Academy of
Achievement for his contributions to paleoanthropology and
environmentalism he said,
"I simply would not accede to being
forced into this, and would frequently be kept out of classes because of
irreverent comments and mocking this religious stuff. Frankly, it
stayed with me to this day. In fact, don't get me going. I'm almost as
bad as Richard Dawkins on this issue."
39. David Gilmour
David Jon Gilmour [b. 1946] of the legendary rock group Pink Floyd
was born in Cambridge, England, son of a senior lecturer in zoology at
Cambridge University. His interest in music, writing and a life on the
road led him into musical and busking adventures during the early
1960s, and finally to Pink Floyd in 1967, which went on to become one
of the top grossing rock bands in history. On his 60th birthday he
released his third solo album,
On An Island, which debuted #1 on the UK charts.
Gilmour has a penchant for philanthropy, support which includes
housing funds for the homeless, Oxfam, Greenpeace, Amnesty
International, the Lung Foundation and others. He was made a Commander
in the Order of the British Empire in 2005, an honor just below full
knighthood. His
On An Island has been called "the most spiritual album ever made by an avowed atheist."
40. Brian Eno
Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno [b. 1948] is
an English musician, composer, record producer, music theorist and
singer best known as the father of ambient music. Starting with the art
rock band Roxy Music in 1971, he became bored with the rock and roll
lifestyle quickly. He then became a prominent member of the performance
art/classical music orchestra the Portsmouth Sinfonia from 1972-74,
and developed his highly eclectic, ambient style in a series of solo
albums.
As a producer he contributed to recordings by Genesis, David Bowie,
Zvuki Mu and Robert Calvert. He composed and performed the "Prophesy
Theme" for David Lynch's
Dune, and produced Laurie Anderson's
Bright Red album,
among many other projects in music, performance and fine art,
literature, theatrical soundscapes and sound bytes for iPhone, Windows
and video games. When not being a prolific and brilliant artist, Eno is
politically active, a humanist with strong anti-war and futurist views.
41. David Sloan Wilson
David Sloan Wilson [b. 1949] is SUNY Distinguished Professor of
Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University in New York, a
prolific popular science writer, and a promoter of evolution by group
and multi-level selection. He has been vice president of the American
Society of Naturalists and serves on the editorial board of the Human
Behavior and Evolution Society. In his Evolutionary Studies program at
Binghamton students study not only the sciences related to evolution,
but also religion and the psychology of religion in terms of evolution.
Wilson, who describes himself as a "nice atheist," views religions as
a sort of mega-trait that evolved because it conferred advantages on
believers. He explored this theme in his book,
Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion and the Nature of Society. Not
a supporter of Richard Dawkins' public efforts to organize atheists,
Wilson described atheism as a "Stealth Religion" on the political blog
Huffington Post in 2007.
42. Steve Wozniak
Stephen Gary "Woz" Wozniak [b. 1950] is a computer engineer who
founded the Apple computer company with Steve Jobs. The two became
friends while working on a mainframe during the summer of 1970. The two
sold some possessions to raise $1,300, assembled the first prototypes
in Job's garage. They formed the company on April 1, 1976 and priced
their Apple I personal computer at $666.66 - Woz later claimed he had
no idea about the correlation with the mark of the beast).
Wozniak is a committed philanthropist, funding various educational
projects, and has even taught fifth graders. Since leaving Apple he
founded other ventures to produce things like the first universal
remote and wireless GPS. He's a member of the Silicon Valley
Aftershocks Segway polo team, which won the 2008 Woz Challenge Cup. Woz
calls himself "atheist or agnostic," in that he says he doesn't know
the difference between the designations.
43. Douglas Adams
Douglas Noel Adams [1952-2001] was an English writer, dramatist and musician, best known for his
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. He also wrote three episodes of the BBC series
Doctor Who for his friend Russell T Davies and served as script editor during the seventh season. He further wrote for and appeared in
Monty Python's Flying Circus, and counted Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour among his closest friends.
A notable environmental activist and self-described "radical
atheist," Adams loved fast cars, cool cameras, Apple computers and any
tech gizmo he could get his hands on. Richard Dawkins dedicated his
book
The God Delusion to Adams. A veteran of many different
day jobs, Adams once worked as a bodyguard for a Qatar oil family and
told hilarious stories about his misadventures. He was locked in a
hotel suite by his editor for three weeks to force him to complete his
book
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, he was a bit notorious for his deadline difficulties.
44. Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker [b. 1954] is an experimental psychologist and
cognitive scientist best known for his advocacy of evolutionary
psychology and the computational theory of mind. He is also known for
his controversial positions on issues like eugenics and euthanasia. He
is a best-selling author of popular science books as well as a popular
speaker. He describes the human mind as a sort of Swiss Army knife that
comes with specialized tools designed to deal with problems our
Pleistocene ancestors encountered.
Pinker's works on how children acquire language echoes Noam Chomsky's
work on language as an innate faculty of mind. Pinker argues that many
other human mental faculties are adaptive in an evolutionary sense and
can be understood best from that angle. Born into the Jewish community
in Montreal, he became an atheist at the age of 13 but remains a
"cultural Jew."
45. PZ Myers
Paul Zachary Myers [b. 1957], better known as "PZ," is an
evolutionary developmental biologist and professor of biology at the
University of Minnesota, Morris. He is an energetic promoter of science
generally and evolution in particular. He got involved in the use of
the internet for this purpose and was a founding member of the
pro-evolution website The Panda's Thumb, and created his own web blog,
Pharyngula, in 2002. PZ Myers has become the leader of the
science-focused online atheist movement and his brilliance as an
atheist might be said to be the remarkable success he has had in this
position.
Pharyngula received the Koufax Award in 2005 for 'Best Expert Blog', and
Nature named it the top ranking blog written by a scientist. It was picked up by
Seed Magazine that
year and anchors their large stable of popular, multidisciplinary
science blogs. His increasing popularity as a proponent of atheism have
made him a popular speaker at freethought, atheist and humanist
events.
46. Jodie Foster
Alicia Christian Foster [b. 1962] is an American film actor,
director and producer who has won three Bafta Awards, two Golden
Globes, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a People's Choice Award, and two
Emmy nominations for her extensive body of work. She began her career
as a child star who later made the transition to adult stardom and
expanded from there to produce some of the most popular and
thought-provoking films of the last decades.
In 1997 she starred in the movie adaptation of
Contact, a novel by Carl Sagan. The following year an asteroid was named in her honor. At the age of 14 she starred in the movie
Taxi Driver,
for which she was nominated for an Academy Award. This earned her the
obsessed attention of would-be Presidential assassin John Hinckley Jr.
who stalked her while she was attending Yale. Foster is an atheist who
celebrates both Christmas and Hannukah with her two sons, and claims
great respect for all religions.
47. Russell T Davies
Stephen Russell Davies [b. 1963] is a Welsh writer and producer of
the modern version of the popular science fiction television series
Doctor Who.A
fan of the good doctor since childhood, his writing and direction of
the new series has won critical acclaim and a new generation of fans.
In 2005, Davies was tapped to write and produce a more adult spinoff
called
Torchwood, which featured darker science fiction drama and more sex and which Davies described as "The X-Files meets This Life."
Davies was named the most influential gay person in Britain in 2006,
spent several years on the top 100 list of influential media figures,
and was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2008.
His 2008 book
Doctor Who: The Writer's Tale is a collection of
autobiographical emails between Davies and journalist Benjamin Cook
that has been described as "...a funny, revealing insight into the
workings of the genius" behind the beloved Doctor Who.
48. David Chalmers
David John Chalmers [b. 1966] Is an Australian philosopher, director
of the Center for Consciousness and past director of the Center for
Consciousness Studies at the University of Arizona in the U.S. His 1996
book
The Conscious Mind is considered a seminal work on
consciousness and its relation to issues in the philosophy of mind,
even by its physicalist detractors. Chalmers argues for an essentially
dualistic view of mind which he terms, "naturalistic dualism."
Chalmers sits on the editorial board of the
Journal of Consciousness Studies and
his paper published there characterizing the mind-body problem in
terms of philosophical zombies generated more than twenty response
papers from such notables as Daniel Dennett, Francisco Varela, Francis
Crick and Roger Penrose, and the exchanges are still among the most
valuable literature debating the philosophy of consciousness ever
generated.
49. Sean Carroll
Sean M. Carroll [b. 1966] is a theoretical cosmologist specializing
in general relativity and dark energy. Currently he is a Senior
Research Associate in Physics at Caltech, writes scientific books and
textbooks in his areas of expertise, contributes to the blog Cosmic
Variance, writes articles for science magazines such as
Nature, Seedm and and is a popular presenter and lecturer at scientific symposia.
Carroll is perhaps better known for his strong advocacy of atheism,
once going so far as to turn down an invitation to speak at a
conference sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation because he didn't
want to be seen as advocating a reconciliation between science and
religion. He argues that scientific thinking must lead to a
materialistic world view and a rejection of all notions of deity or
spiritual nature. Which is why, Carroll wrote in 2003, (Almost All)
Cosmologists are Atheists.
50. Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg [b. 1984] is an American computer programmer
named by Time Magazine as one of the World's Most Influential People in
2008 for his development of the internet application Facebook. While
attending Phillips Exeter Academy he developed an AI program called
Synapse that both Microsoft and AOL attempted to purchase as part of
recruitment efforts, but he determined to attend Harvard instead.
Zuckerberg launched Facebook from his Harvard dorm room in 2004. It
spread to other universities with the help of his roommate Dustin
Moskovitz. Despite some controversy over the platform and a lawsuit
over the ConnectU application which was later dismissed, Zuckerman sold
a 1.6% stake in Facebook to Microsoft, which had a $15 billion market
value at the time according to Forbes. He was born into the Jewish
tradition, yet self-identifies as an atheist.
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