Carl Edward Sagan (November 9, 1934 - December 20, 1996)
According to Wikipedia, Sagan "was an American astronomer and astrochemist and a highly successful popularizer of astronomy, astrophysics, and other natural sciences. He pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI). He is world-famous for writing popular science books and for co-writing and presenting the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, which has been seen by more than 600 million people in over 60 countries, making it the most widely watched PBS program in history. A book to accompany the program was also published. He also wrote the novel Contact, the basis for the 1997 Robert Zemeckis film of the same name starring Jodie Foster. During his lifetime, Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and popular articles and was author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books. In his works, he frequently advocated skeptical inquiry, humanism, and the scientific method....
"Sagan wrote frequently about religion and the relationship between religion and science, expressing his skepticism about many conventional conceptualizations of God. Sagan once stated, for instance, that 'The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by "God," one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.' Sagan is also widely regarded as a freethinker or skeptic; one of his most famous quotations as seen in Cosmos, was 'Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.'"
