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Originally Posted by photon
I think it's a difficult thing to judge, people are a product of their time, so just because someone was religious during a time when not being so would have been suicide for their career/livelihood makes it difficult to tell.
Newton also was an alchemist, he rejected the trinity and the idea of a devil and literal demons. He had to be careful though because these views were heretical (which was a crime) and would have lost everything.
Einstein was not religious in the sense most people would mean, more of a pantheist than anything else.
"My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment."
"I am a deeply religious nonbeliever.... This is a somewhat new kind of religion."
My only point being that determining the actual religious beliefs of some of these people might be more difficult than one would think given the society they were in. Heck people can't even get Obama's professed religion straight, and who knows what he really believes since to be where he is he pretty much has to appear Christian.
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When I speak of religion, I don't mean specifically Christianity, or Islam, or any other monotheistic, or polytheistic, religion. I mean it in its loosest definition. A set of beliefs concerning the nature, meaning, and/or creation of the universe, often associated with a spiritual being or beings, or spiritual elements such as the soul.
Jainism is a religion, but it isn't remotely Judeo-Christian. It's still religious, however, but not in whatever most people (Westerners?) might believe. There are many ways to be a religious person, and because Newton rejected the existence of demons or the trinity, it doesn't mean he wasn't a deeply religious man. I would certainly believe it more likely, given his life and circumstances, that he
was religious. Luther rejected a lot of stuff too. Calvin even more so.
It is also extremely hard for us to think of people from Newton's time and earlier because of the perceptions of the nowaday world. The world they lived in, dominated by religion and religious men as it was, is a hard thing for us to picture.