One problem with this question is: we only know as much about a fictional character as the author tells us. If I use an example I have here in front of me, Arthur C Clarke’s collected short stories: there are only two stories I can think of where a character’s religion is mentioned, because it is central to the plot. (_The Star_ and The Nine Billion Names of God.) Beyond those he rarely mentions religion, or lack thereof; for all we know, his characters are nearly all atheists.

I’m currently listening to The Amber Spyglass audiobook, the last in the His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman, and the religious status of the characters is not always made explicit. Lord Asriel is fighting the Magisterium, the Theocracy that rules his world, by investigating “Dust”, the mysterious substance that suffuses the universe. Is he an atheist, or a deist? Then you have Mrs. Coulter, head of a Magisterium-backed organisation (The Oblation Board) that is investigating “Dust” too, but with a view to eradicating it – yet she shows no explicit religious leanings, no sign that she actually believes in the Magisterium’s God – whatever that turns out to be. These and other characters inhabit a fictional world where labels such as “atheist” seem out of place.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what labels to put on characters, assuming I’m motivated to label them at all, which is seldom. In my opinion, it would be a bit pointless to label a character as “atheist” if that has no relevance to the plot. If a character is actually described as an atheist, what that implies depends on the author, anyway: a religious author might have the atheist as the bad guy, doing “atheist things”, whatever those are in the mind of the author. Conversely, a character who objects to something done by a religious person,such as a priest molesting a child, might be an atheist, or not; it’s simply not that important.

Posted: July 15th 2008

See all questions answered by brian thomson

• Dr. Gregory House and Dr. Allison Cameron from House, M.D.
• Joan of Arc from Clone High
• Ellie Arroway from Contact
• A.J. Soprano from The Sopranos
• Dr. Mohinder Suresh from Heroes
• Jack Shephard from Lost
• Mal Reynolds from Firefly
• Dr. Cristina Yang from Grey’s Anatomy
• Dr. Temperance Brennan from Bones

In litereature:

• Tyler Durden in Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club
• Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov, Kolya Krasotkin and Pavel Smerdyakov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

There are more, but these are the only ones I can recall or find.

Wikipedia used to have a page listing fictional Atheists but it was removed and Google no longer has a cache of it.

Posted: July 14th 2008

See all questions answered by Reed Braden