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Famous Atheists
Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Eric Hitchens (born 13 April 1949) is an English-American
author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career span
more than four decades. He has been a columnist and literary critic at
The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Slate, World Affairs, The Nation, Free
Inquiry, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in
September 2008. He is a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in
2005 he was voted the world's fifth top public intellectual in a
Prospect/Foreign Policy poll.
Hitchens is known for his admiration of George Orwell, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson and for his excoriating critiques of, among others, Mother Teresa,[11] Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger. His confrontational style of debate has made him both a lauded and controversial figure. As a political observer, polemicist and self-defined radical, he rose to prominence as a fixture of the left-wing publications in his native Britain and in the United States. His departure from the established political left began in 1989 after what he called the "tepid reaction" of the Western left following Ayatollah Khomeini's issue of a fatwā calling for the murder of Salman Rushdie. The 11 September 2001 attacks strengthened his internationalist embrace of an interventionist foreign policy, and his vociferous criticism of what he called "fascism with an Islamic face." His numerous editorials in support of the Iraq War caused some to label him a neoconservative, while Hitchens insists he is not "a conservative of any kind." |  |
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin FRS (12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist. He established that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestry, and proposed the scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process that he called natural selection. He published his theory with compelling evidence for evolution in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species, overcoming scientific rejection of earlier concepts of transmutation of species. By the 1870s the scientific community and much of the general public accepted evolution as a fact. However, many favored competing explanations and it was not until the emergence of the modern evolutionary synthesis from the 1930s to the 1950s that a broad consensus developed that natural selection was the basic mechanism of evolution. In modified form, Darwin's scientific discovery is the unifying theory of the life sciences, explaining the diversity of life. |  |
Penn Jillette
 | Penn Fraser Jillette (born March 5, 1955) is an American magician, comedian, illusionist, juggler, bassist and writer known for his work with fellow illusionist Teller in the team Penn & Teller, and advocacy of atheism, libertarian philosophy, free-market economics, and scientific skepticism. |
Carl Sagan
Carl Edward Sagan (1934-1997) was an astronomer and science popularizer. In a March 1996 profile by Jim Dawson in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Sagan talked about his then-new book The Demon Haunted World and was asked about his personal spiritual views: "My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it," he said. "An agnostic is somebody who doesn't believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I'm agnostic." Update from Tom Head, editor of Conversations with Carl Sagan (University Press of Mississippi, 2006): Sagan resisted the atheism label and self-described as an agnostic. |  |
Richard Dawkins
 | Richard Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist; reader in the Department
of Zoology at Oxford University; fellow of New College. He began his
research career in the 1960s as a research student with Nobel
Prize-winning ethologist Nico Tinbergen, and ever since then, his work
has largely been concerned with the evolution of behavior. Since 1976,
when his first book, The Selfish Gene, encapsulated both the substance
and the spirit of what is now called the socio-biological revolution, he
has become widely known, both for the originality of his ideas and for
the clarity and elegance with which he expounds them. A subsequent book,
The Extended Phenotype, and a number of television programs, have
extended the notion of the gene as the unit of selection, and have
applied it to biological examples as various as the relationship between
hosts and parasites and the evolution of cooperation. His following
book, The Blind Watchmaker, is widely read, widely quoted, and one of
the truly influential intellectual works of our time. He is also author
of River Out of Eden, The Greatest Show on Earth, and The God Delusion. |
Jane Asher
English actress, who is well known in the United Kingdom for her numerous appearances in film and television dramas. |
Derren Brown
English psychological illusionist, mentalist, and skeptic of paranormal phenomena. Professed to being an atheist in his book Tricks of the Mind and described Bertrand Russell's collection of essays Why I Am Not a Christian "an absolute joy." |
Louis C.K.
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