John McCarthy

AI Researcher

John McCarthy invented Lisp and spear-headed a lot of the seminal work in AI. He is a renowned computer scientist, and currently is a Professor Emeritus at Stanford.

He also is an outspoken atheist, and author of one of my favorite quotes on the subject:

  "An atheist doesn't have to be someone who thinks he has a
  proof that there can't be a god.  He only has to be someone
  who believes that the evidence on the God question is at a
  similar level to the evidence on the werewolf question."

-- written 14-Apr-98 in a Usenet article archived here.

submitted by Russell Turpin on 2-Feb-02