PETER WILLIAM ATKINS - A BRILLIANT ATHEIST

Peter William Atkins (born in August 10, 1940 in Amersham, Buckinghamshire) is an English chemist and a fellow and professor of chemistry at Lincoln College - Oxford University. He is a prolific writer of popular chemistry textbooks, including Physical Chemistry, 8th ed. (with Julio de Paula of Haverford College), Inorganic Chemistry, and Molecular Quantum Mechanics, 4th ed. Atkins is also the author of a number of science books for the general public, including Atkins' Molecules and Galileo's Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science.

Atkins is a well-known atheist and supporter of many of the Richard Dawkins' ideas. He has written and spoken on issues of humanism, atheism, and what he sees as a result of the incompatibility between science and religion. According to Atkins, whereas religion scorns the power of human comprehension, science respects it. He is Senior Member for the Oxford Secular Society and an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society. In December 2006, Atkins was featured in a UK television documentary on atheism called The Trouble with Atheism, presented by Rod Liddle. In that documentary Liddle asked Atkins "Give me your views on the existence, or otherwise, of God." Atkins replied, "Well it's fairly straightforward: there isn't one. And there's no evidence for one, no reason to believe that there is one, and so I don't believe that there is one. And I think that it is rather foolish that people do think that there is one”.

In 2007, Atkins's position on religion was described by Colin Tudge in an article of the newspaper The Guardian as being non-scientific. In the same article, Atkins was also described as being hardliner than Richard Dawkins', and of deliberately choosing to ignore Peter Medawar's famous adage that "Science is the art of the soluble”.

He appeared again in the controversial 2008 documentary Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which he told interviewer Ben Stein that religion was "a fantasy", and "completely empty of any explanatory content. It is also evil."

Atkins with his own reason as ratio says about the existence of God: “Well it's fairly straightforward: there isn't one. And there's no evidence for one, no reason to believe that there is one, and so I don't believe that there is one. And I think that it is rather absurd that people do think that there is one”

COMMENT:

... there is no evidence for one (God)...; and the Universe, knowledge, science, where do they come from?; spontaneous generation?; Big Bang?; Where is the evidence? ... The Quantum Physics?; does science come from nothing? ... or knowledge already exists but simply it is becoming evident upsetting all the logics of Classical Physics and ... how could it be explained?

... and so I don't believe that there is one (God)..., if there is no evidence simply one would pass from believing to know that there is no one... then we should affirm and if so (as Atkins seems to do at the beginning of his statement) we should support this point, answering in a sound and compelling way the questions above.

For the brilliant atheist, the immense majority lives in the absurd.

We will follow with the opinion of other scientists.