This list of nonreligious Nobel laureates comprises laureates of the Nobel Prize who have self-identified as atheist, agnostic, freethinker, or otherwise nonreligious at some point in their lives.
Many of these laureates earlier identified with a religion. In an estimate by Baruch Shalev, between 1901 and 2000, about 10.5% of all laureates, and 35% of those in literature, fall in this category. According to the same estimate, between 1901 and 2000, atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers won 8.9% of the prizes in medicine, 7.1% in chemistry, 5.2% in economics, 4.7% in physics, and 3.6% in peace. Alfred Nobel himself was an atheist later in life.
Shalev's book lists many Jewish atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers as religiously Jewish. For example, Milton Friedman, Roald Hoffmann, Richard Feynman, Niels Bohr, Élie Metchnikoff, and Rita Levi-Montalcini are listed as religiously Jewish; however, while they were ethnically and perhaps culturally Jewish, they did not believe in a God and self-identified as atheists.
Physics
YearLaureateReference 2000 Zhores AlferovObituaries, T. (2019, March 12). Zhores Alferov, Nobel prize-winning scientist whose work helped pave the way for the Communications Revolution – Obituary. The Telegraph. Retrieved March 15, 2023 2024Geoffrey Everest Hinton 1977 Philip Warren Anderson 1956, 1972 John Bardeen 1967 Hans Bethe 1948 Patrick Blackett 1981 Nicolaas Bloembergen "When asked about being religious, Bloembergen said No." 1922 Niels Bohr 1946 Percy Williams Bridgman 1929 Louis de Broglie 1935 James Chadwick 1903 Marie Curie 1903 Pierre Curie 1933 Paul Dirac 1921 Albert Einstein 1938 Enrico Fermi 1965 Richard Feynman 1980 Val Logsdon Fitch 1925 James Franck 1969 Murray Gell-Mann 2002 Riccardo Giacconi: When asked about being religious, Giacconi said "No". Giacconi also said that he doesn't believe in an afterlife, apart from just a rearrangement of molecules and atoms of your body. He also expressed his idea that irrational thinking is very dangerous and wished that scientists should inject more rationality in the world. 1973 Ivar Giaver: Interviewer: "Are you religious?" Giaver: "Absolutely not. [...] I'm not religious and I don't like religion. I think religion is to blame for a lot of the ills in this world." 2003 Vitaly Ginzburg 1979 Sheldon Glashow 2005 Roy J. Glauber: Glauber says that he has no feelings towards the intelligent designer approach to science [...] He says that what has been discovered (physical world) is enormously interesting but it tells us nothing about intelligent design and certainly nothing at all about life. 2004 David J. Gross: "He also said that he is atheist and humanist..." 1945 Wolfgang Pauli Metanexus: Wolfgang Pauli’s Journey InwardLaurikainen, K., “Quantum Physics, Philosophy, and the Image of God: Insights from Wolfgang Pauli,” *Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science* 25(4) (1990): 391–404. 2012 Serge Haroche 2013 Peter Higgs 2002 Masatoshi Koshiba: Interviewer: Are you religious?" Koshiba: "/(You Mean) God?... I don't know... You know... science deals only (with?) those things which you can confirm by observation or by experiment...God doesn't come into that (category). So God...the problem of God, is not a problem in science." 2016 J. Michael Kosterlitz 2000 Herbert Kroemer: Interviewer: "You have no belief in a afterlife?" Kroemer: "That's correct." Interviewer: "...You don't see the evidence of a designer?" Kroemer: "No, I don't." Interviewer: "Could you say more about it?" Kroemer: "I think it's just wishful thinking." 1962 Lev Landau 1988 Leon M. Lederman 2019 Michel Mayor 1907 Albert A. Michelson 2010 Konstantin Novoselov 2019 Jim Peebles 1926 Jean Baptiste Perrin 2019 Didier Queloz 1944 Isidor Isaac Rabi 2011 Brian Schmidt: "I have been described by one of my colleagues as a "militant agnostic" with my tagline, "I don't know, and neither do you!". I take this hard-line, fence-sitting position because it is the only position consistent with both my scientific ethos and my conscience." 1933 Erwin Schrödinger 1956 William Shockley 1988 Jack Steinberger 1958 Igor Tamm 2017 Kip Thorne 1910 Johannes Diderik van der Waals 1999 Martinus J. G. Veltman: Interviewer: "What is your view about God and religion?" Veltman: "We are living in a totally ridiculous world. We have all kinds of things from horoscopes to Zen Buddhism to faith healers to religions to what have you. [...] "So for science it's very essential that we take a position that through the scientific method that keeps us away of all the irrationalities that seem to dominate human activities. And I think we should stay there. And the fact that I'm busy in science has little or nothing to do with religion. In fact I protect myself, I don't want to have to do with religion. Because once I start with that I don't know where it will end. But probably I will be burned or shot or something in the end. I don't want anything to do with it. I talk about things I can observe and other things I can predict and for the rest you can have it." 1979 Steven Weinberg 1963 Eugene Wigner2020Roger Penrose
Chemistry
YearLaureateReference 1903 Svante Arrhenius 1997 Paul D. Boyer 1975 John Cornforth 1911 Marie Curie 1935 Frédéric Joliot-Curie 1935 Irène Joliot-Curie 1985 Herbert A. Hauptman 1981 Roald Hoffmann 1996 Harold W. Kroto 1987 Jean-Marie Lehn 1978 Peter D. Mitchell 1994 George Andrew Olah"Today, I consider myself, in Thomas Huxley's terms, an agnostic. I don't know whether there is a God or creator, or whatever we may call a higher intelligence or being. I don't know whether there is an ultimate reason for our being or whether there is anything beyond material phenomena. I may doubt these things as a scientist, as we cannot prove them scientifically, but at the same time we also cannot falsify (disprove) them. For the same reasons, I cannot deny God with certainty, which would make me an atheist. This is a conclusion reached by many scientists." George Olah, A Life of Magic Chemistry 1909 Wilhelm Ostwald 1954 Linus Pauling 1962 Max Perutz 1958 Frederick Sanger 2011 Dan Shechtman 2020 Emmanuelle Charpentier 2018 George Smith 1993 Michael Smith 1934 Harold Urey
Physiology or Medicine
YearLaureateReference 1970 Julius Axelrod: "Although he became an atheist early in life and resented the strict upbringing of his parents' religion, he identified with Jewish culture and joined several international fights against anti-Semitism." 1914 Robert Bárány 1958 George BeadleGeorge Beadle, An Uncommon Farmer: The Emergence of Genetics in the 20th Century. CSHL Press. 2003. p. 273. . Beadle's views on this occasion were somewhat more tempered than David's characterization of him as a "vehement atheist," and from his earliest days "intolerant of religion and other forms of superstition. 1989 J. Michael Bishop 2002 Sydney Brenner 1962 Francis Crick 1974 Christian de Duve 1945 Howard Florey 1906 Camillo Golgi 1929 Frederick Gowland Hopkins 1963 Andrew Huxley 1965 François JacobJacob, The Statue Within, pp 20–57. Quotes from pp 42 and 53. 2003 Paul LauterburDawson, M. Joan. Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2013. Print. "Paul became an atheist, revering intellectual honesty and the quest for truth." 1907 Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran 1986 Rita Levi-Montalcini 1960 Sir Peter Medawar 1908 Élie Metchnikoff 1965 Jacques Monod 1946 Hermann Joseph Muller 2001 Paul Nurse 1904 Ivan Pavlov 1993 Richard J. Roberts 2017 Michael Rosbash: "I should avoid any confusion at this point and state unequivocally that I am a devout atheist and quite anti-religion." 2002 John SulstonThe nobel prize in physiology or medicine 2002. NobelPrize.org. Retrieved March 15, 2023 1937 Albert Szent-GyörgyiNational Institutes of Health. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi discusses religion - Albert Szent-Gyorgyi - profiles in Science. U.S. National Library of Medicine. Retrieved March 15, 2023 1973 Nikolaas Tinbergen 1967 George Wald 1962 James Watson
Economics
YearLaureateReference1976Milton Friedman1994John Harsanyi1974Friedrich Hayek1994John Forbes Nash, Jr.1994Reinhard SeltenFrom Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1994, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 19951998Amartya Sen1978Herbert A. Simon
Peace
YearLaureateReference1933Norman Angell1908Klas Pontus Arnoldson1990Mikhail Gorbachev1962Linus Pauling1995Joseph Rotblat1975Andrei Sakharov1986Elie Wiesel1973Lê Đức Thọ
Literature
YearLaureateReference1969Samuel Beckett1903Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson1957Albert Camus1997Dario Fo1932John Galsworthy1991Nadine Gordimer1971Pablo Neruda1936Eugene O'Neill2005Harold Pinter1950Bertrand Russell: "I never know whether I should say 'Agnostic' or whether I should say 'Atheist'... As a philosopher, if I were speaking to a purely philosophic audience I should say that I ought to describe myself as an Agnostic, because I do not think that there is a conclusive argument by which one prove (sic) that there is not a God. On the other hand, if I am to convey the right impression to the ordinary man in the street I think I ought to say that I am an Atheist."1998José Saramago1964Jean-Paul Sartre1925George Bernard Shaw1986Wole Soyinka1962John Steinbeck1996Wisława Szymborska2018Olga Tokarczuk2000Gao Xingjian
See also List of Christian Nobel laureates List of Jewish Nobel laureates List of Nobel laureates
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