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List of deists

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.

Born before 1700

  • Al-MaÊ¿arri (973–1058), was a blind Arab philosopher, poet and writer, and a controversial rationalist.
  • Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. Described as a deist by some sources, most historians have deemed him a Roman Catholic.
  • Edward Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), British soldier, diplomat, historian, poet and religious philosopher
  • 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. He has also been labeled a Christian as well.
  • Matthew Tindal (1657–1733), controversial English author whose works were influential on Enlightenment thinking
  • Voltaire (1694–1778), French Enlightenment writer and philosopher
  • William Hogarth (1697–1764), English painter, visual artist and pioneering cartoonist
  • 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.

Born 1700–1800

Born 1800–1900

  • Victor Hugo (1802–1885), French writer, artist, activist and statesman
  • 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.
  • Lysander Spooner (1808–1887), American anarchist, philosopher and abolitionist
  • Henrik Wergeland (1808–1845), Norwegian poet and theologist (by self-definition).
  • Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865), sixteenth president of the United States. He never joined any church and has been described as a "Christian deist". As a young man, he was religiously skeptical and sometimes ridiculed revivalists. During his early years, Lincoln enjoyed reading the works of deists such as Thomas Paine and Voltaire. He drafted a pamphlet incorporating such ideas but did not publish it. After charges of hostility to Christianity almost cost him a congressional bid, he kept his unorthodox beliefs private. James Adams labelled Lincoln as a deist. In 1834, Lincoln reportedly wrote a manuscript essay challenging Christianity modelled on Paine's book The Age of Reason, which a friend supposedly burned to protect him from ridicule. He seemed to believe in an all-powerful God, who shaped events and, by 1865, was expressing those beliefs in major speeches.
  • Jules Verne (1828–1905), French author who pioneered the science fiction genre in Europe. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, Journey to the Center of the Earth, and Around the World in Eighty Days.
  • 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.
  • Simon Newcomb (1835–1909), Canadian-American astronomer and mathematician.
  • Mark Twain (1835–1910), American author and humorist
  • Alfred M. Mayer (1836–1897), American physicist.
  • 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.
  • Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906), Austrian physicist famous for his founding contributions in the fields of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics.
  • Thomas Alva Edison (1847–1931), American inventor and businessman.
  • Max Planck (1858–1947), German physicist, regarded as the founder of quantum theory.
  • 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.
  • Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937), New Zealand chemist and "father" of nuclear physics, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1908 "for his investigations into the disintegration of the elements, and the chemistry of radioactive substances".
  • 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).
  • Hermann Weyl (1885–1955), German mathematician and theoretical physicist.

Born after 1900

See also

References