Earlier in his career, Gould made some public statements that have been posted on crevo threads on FR ad nauseum, that clearly showed an atheistic point of few. Later in his life he consistently considered himself an agnostic Jew. I'll let him speak for himself in this article from 1997:
Thank you, you are correct - agnostic Jew with a qualification:"I am not, personally, a believer or a religious man in any sense of institutional commitment or practice. But I have enormous respect for religion," The "institutional commitment" sounds like he turned away from the organized or dogmatic aspects of religion but kept his respect for the spiritual side. I know a few 'agnostics' like that - like the religion but not the church.
Interesting point in this article:
At lunch, the priests called me over to their table to pose a problem that had been troubling them. What, they wanted to know, was going on in America with all this talk about "scientific creationism"? One asked me: "Is evolution really in some kind of trouble. and if so, what could such trouble be? I have always been taught that no doctrinal conflict exists between evolution and Catholic faith, and the evidence for evolution seems both entirely satisfactory and utterly overwhelming."
Question - Are Jesuit priest scientists "true" Christians? Can a "true" Christian hold that evolution is "both true and entirely compatible with Christian belief"?