Prometheus describes the book as follows:
Society rarely acknowledges the many and varied gifts that
"disbelievers" give to the world. Churchmen generally contend that
great figures in history, such as America's founders, were conventional believers.
But author James A. Haught demonstrates that this just isn't true. In 2000 Years
Of Disbelief: Famous People With The Courage To Doubt, he offers a spirited
collection of biographical sketches and choice quotations to set the record
straight -- intelligent, educated people tend to doubt the supernatural. It is hardly
surprising to find a high ratio of religious skeptics among major thinkers,
scientists, writers, reformers,scholars, champions of democracy, and other world
changers -- people called "great" in history. The advance of Western civilization
has been partly a story of gradual victory over oppressive religion, and these
brilliant doubters were men and women who didn't pray, didn't kneel at altars,
didn't make pilgrimages, and didn't recite creeds. Included in this handy
reference are such internationally famous figures as Isaac Asimov, W. E. B.
DuBois, Will Durant, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Edward Gibbon,
Langston Hughes, Thomas Jefferson, Omar Khayyam, Abraham Lincoln, James
Madison, John Stuart Mill, Ayn Rand, Gene Roddenberry, Margaret Sanger,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Voltaire, and many others whose own words reveal
their rejection of the supernatural.