List of Deists

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

• Abraham Lincoln (1809 – 1865), American politician who was the 16th President of the United States.

• Alfred M. Mayer (1836 – 1897), American physicist.

• Al-Maʿarri (973 – 1058), was a blind Arab philosopher, poet and writer, and a controversial rationalist.

• Anaxagoras (c. 500 – 428 BC), Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher.

• Andrei Sakharov (1921 – 1989), Soviet nuclear physicist, dissident and human rights activist.

• Antony Flew (1923 – 2010), British philosopher and prominent former atheist

• Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744), English poet during the eighteenth century

• Adam Smith (1723 – 1790), Scottish Philosopher and economist, considered the father of modern economics

• Ahmad Kasravi (1890 – 1946), Iranian linguist, historian, and reformer.

• Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC), Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.

• Averroes (1126 – 1198), Andalusian polymath; a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics. He was born in Córdoba, Al Andalus, modern-day Spain, and died in Marrakesh, Morocco. His school of philosophy is known as Averroism.

• Benjamin Franklin (1706 – 1790), American polymath, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States

• Brett Gurewitz (1962 – ), guitarist and songwriter for the American punk rock band Bad Religion

• Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 – 1855), German mathematician and physical scientist who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, electrostatics, astronomy and optics.

• Charles Lyell (1797 – 1875), British lawyer and the foremost geologist of his day. He is best known as the author of Principles of Geology, which popularised James Hutton's concepts of uniformitarianism.

• Charles Sanders Peirce (1839 – 1914), American philosopher, logician, mathematician, and scientist, sometimes known as "the father of pragmatism". He was educated as a chemist and employed as a scientist for 30 years. Today he is appreciated largely for his contributions to logic, mathematics, philosophy, scientific methodology, and semiotics, and for his founding of pragmatism.

• Cicero (106 BCE – 43 BCE), Roman statesman, lawyer, political theorist, philosopher, and Roman constitutionalist

• Colin Maclaurin (1698 – 1746), Scottish mathematician who made important contributions to geometry and algebra. The Maclaurin series, a special case of the Taylor series, are named after him.

• Dmitri Mendeleev (1834 – 1907), Russian chemist and inventor. He is credited as being the creator of the first version of the periodic table of elements.

• Ethan Allen (1738 – 1789), early American revolutionary and guerrilla leader

• Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury (1583 – 1648), British soldier, diplomat, historian, poet and religious philosopher

• Eduardo Velez Student, agnostic deist.

• Elihu Palmer (1764 – 1806), American author and advocate of deism

• Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937), New Zealand chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics. In early work he discovered the concept of radioactive half-life, proved that radioactivity involved the transmutation of one chemical element to another, and also differentiated and named alpha and beta radiation, proving that the former was essentially helium ions. This work was done at McGill University in Canada. It is the basis for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry he was awarded in 1908 "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".

• Frederick the Great (1712 – 1786), Prussian King from the Hohenzollern dynasty

• Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805), German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright.

• Gottfried Leibniz (1646 – 1716), German mathematician and philosopher. He is best known for developing infinitesimal calculus independently of Isaac Newton, and his mathematical notation has been widely used ever since it was published.

• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781), German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic

• George Washington (1732 – 1799), one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, and the 1st President of the United States

• Harish-Chandra (1923 – 1983), Indian mathematician, who did fundamental work in representation theory, especially Harmonic analysis on semisimple Lie groups.

• Harmony Korine (1973 – ), American film director, producer, screenwriter, and author.

• Henrik Wergeland (1808 – 1845), Norwegian poet and theologist (by self-definition).

• Hermann Weyl (1885 – 1955), German mathematician and theoretical physicist.

• Humphry Davy (1778 – 1929), British chemist and inventor.

• Issac Newton (1642 – 1727), English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived." His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution.

• James Heckman (1944 – ), American economist and Nobel laureate. He is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, Professor of Science and Society at University College Dublin and a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. Heckman shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2000 with Daniel McFadden for his pioneering work in econometrics and microeconomics. He is considered to be among the ten most influential economists in the world.

• James Hutton (1726 – 1797), Scottish physician, geologist, naturalist, chemical manufacturer and experimental agriculturalist. His work helped to establish the basis of modern geology. His theories of geology and geologic time, also called deep time, came to be included in theories which were called plutonism and uniformitarianism.

• James Madison (1751 – 1836), "Father of the United States Constitution", one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, and the 4th President of the United States

• James Watt (1736 – 1819), Scottish inventor and mechanical engineer whose improvements to the Newcomen steam engine were fundamental to the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution in both his native Great Britain and the rest of the world.

• Jean Baptiste Lamarck (1744 – 1829), French naturalist. He was a soldier, biologist, academic, and an early proponent of the idea that evolution occurred and proceeded in accordance with natural laws.

• Jean le Rond D’Alembert (1717 – 1783), French mathematician, mechanician, physicist, philosopher, and music theorist. He was also co-editor with Denis Diderot of the Encyclopédie.

• John Muir (1838 – 1914), Scottish-born American naturalist, author, and early advocate of preservation of wilderness in the United States.

• John Toland (1670 – 1722), Irish philosopher, coined the term "pantheism"

• John Locke (1632 – 1704), influential English philosopher in the field of empiricism

• José Rizal (1861 – 1896), a Filipino patriot, philosopher, medical doctor, poet, journalist, novelist, political scientist, painter and polyglot. Considered to be one of the Philippines' most important heroes and martyrs whose writings and execution contributed to the igniting of the Philippine Revolution. He is also considered as Asia's first modern non-violent proponent of freedom.

• Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519), Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer.

• Ludwig Boltzmann (1844 – 1906), Austrian physicist famous for his founding contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics.

• Luis Walter Alvarez (1911 – 1988), American experimental physicist and inventor, who spent nearly all of his long professional career on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968, and took out over 40 patents, some of which led to commercial products.

• Lysander Spooner (1808 – 1887), American anarchist, philosopher and abolitionist

• Mark Twain (1835 – 1910), American author and humorist

• Martin Gardner (1914 – 2010), American popular mathematics and science writer specializing in recreational mathematics, but with interests encompassing micromagic, stage magic, literature (especially the writings of Lewis Carroll and G.K. Chesterton), philosophy, scientific skepticism, and religion.

• Matthew Tindal (1657 – 1733), controversial English author whose works were influential on Enlightenment thinking

• Max Born (1882 – 1970), German-British physicist and mathematician who was instrumental in the development of quantum mechanics. He also made contributions to solid-state physics and optics and supervised the work of a number of notable physicists in the 1920s and 30s. Born won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Walther Bothe).

• Max Planck (1858 – 1947), German physicist, regarded as the founder of quantum theory.

• Maximilien Robespierre (1758 – 1794), French revolutionary and lawyer

• Mikhail Lomonosov (1711 – 1765), Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries was the atmosphere of Venus. His spheres of science were natural science, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, history, art, philology, optical devices and others. Lomonosov was also a poet and influenced the formation of the modern Russian literary language.

• Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786), German philosopher influential in the Jewish Haskalah

• Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi or Rhazes (865 – 925), Persian polymath, physician, alchemist and chemist, philosopher, and scholar.

• Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 – 1821), French military and political leader

• Neil Armstrong (1930 – 2012), American NASA astronaut, test pilot, aerospace engineer, university professor, United States Naval Aviator, and the first person to set foot upon the Moon.

• Nick Cave (1957 – ), Australian musician, songwriter, poet, author and actor.

• Paul Davies (1946 – ), British physicist and science writer and broadcaster

• Robert Hooke (1635 – 1703), English natural philosopher, architect and polymath.

• Simon Newcomb (1835 – 1909), Canadian-American astronomer and mathematician.

• Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931), American inventor and businessman.

• Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826), author of the United States Declaration of Independence, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, and the 3rd President of the United States

• Thomas Paine (1737 – 1809), English pamphleteer, revolutionary, radical, inventor, and intellectual, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States

• Victor Hugo (1802 – 1885), French writer, artist, activist and statesman

• Voltaire (1694 – 1778), French Enlightenment writer and philosopher

• Werner Heisenberg (1901 – 1976), German theoretical physicist who discovered (1925) a way to formulate quantum mechanics in terms of matrices. For that discovery, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1932. In 1927 he published his uncertainty principle. He also made important contributions to the theories of the hydrodynamics of turbulent flows, the atomic nucleus, ferromagnetism, cosmic rays, and subatomic particles, and he was instrumental in planning the first West German nuclear reactor at Karlsruhe, together with a research reactor in Munich, in 1957. Heisenberg, along with Max Born and Pascual Jordan, set forth the matrix formulation of quantum mechanics in 1925. Heisenberg was awarded the 1932 Nobel Prize in Physics for the creation of quantum mechanics, and its application especially to the discovery of the allotropic forms of hydrogen.

• Wernher von Braun (1912 – 1977), German-American rocket scientist, aerospace engineer, space architect, and one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in Nazi Germany during World War II and, subsequently, in the United States.

• William Lloyd Garrison (1805 – 1879), American abolitionist, journalist, and social reformer. He is best known as the editor of the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator, and was one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, he promoted "immediate emancipation" of slaves in the United States.

• William Hogarth (1697 – 1764), English painter, visual artist and pioneering cartoonist

• Wolfgang Pauli (1900 – 1958), Austrian theoretical physicist. In 1945, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics. He is best known for his work on Pauli principle and spin theory.