Diderot - early delver into evolution theory; confessed to `debaucheries of the mind`

Francis Hutcheson - distinctions between morality and immorality are discovered by emotional responses to experience

David Hume - rejection of miracles; concerned with ethics through emotions

Immanuel Kant - reduced religiosity to rationality, religion to morality, and Christianity to ethics

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - humans are mostly good and that it is society that corrupts human beings; the concept of a Christian republic was paradoxical since Christianity

Hugo Grotius - moral, political and legal norms are all based on laws derived from or supplied by nature

Voltaire - believed above all in the efficacy of reason.   He believed social progress could be achieved through reason and that no authority—religious or political or otherwise—should be immune to challenge by reason

Jean Le Rond d’Alembert - he opposed religion and stood for tolerance and free discussion

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck - believed that living things evolved in a continuously upward direction, from dead matter, through simple to more complex forms, toward human "perfection."

Karl Marx - religion is the opium of the people

Johann Gottlieb Fichte - The living and efficaciously acting moral order is itself God.   We require no other God, nor can we grasp any other

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel - a belief in the unity of the divine and the human

Ludwig Feuerbach - human beings must have created religion in an attempt to assert themselves against their natural limitations

Jeremy Bentham - held that all knowledge is derived from sensation

John Stuart Mill - that actions that lead to people`s happiness are right

Friedrich Nietzsche - ideas of good and evil and the end of religion in the modern world

Auguste Comte - altruism, sociocracy, and the religion of Humanity

Charles Sanders Peirce - logic, reasoning as the end all

Ralph Waldo Emerson - no virtues are final or eternal

Thomas Carlyle - the intellectual forms in which men`s deepest convictions have been cast are dead and that new ones must be found to fit the time

Herbert Spencer - was frequently condemned by religious thinkers for allegedly advocating atheism and materialism

Francis Galton - improving the human race by eugenics

Antonio Rosmini - presented knowledge as a simple, indivisible whole, based on an innate notion of existence

Bertrand Russell - My own view on religion is that of Lucretius.   I regard it as a disease born of fear and as a source of untold misery to the human race

Martin Heidegger - subjectivism, experiential knowledge

Jean-Paul Sartre - Being and Nothingness" is the exploration of human freedom and its implication

Ayn Rand - the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute