Professor Peter Atkins - "Science is King"

Chemistry author Professor Peter Atkins will be exploring the conflict of science and religion, and will argue that science provides the only reliable route to knowledge in all fields of human endeavour. To do so, it is necessary to distinguish real questions from invented questions, and to have confidence to dismiss the latter as not worthy of further consideration. Atkins shall ask whether there are any questions that the scientific method cannot elucidate, and will argue that there are not.

Professor Atkins is a fellow and professor emeritus of Chemistry at Lincoln College, and is best known for his authorship of many hugely popular Chemisty textbooks, including Physical Chemistry, Molecular Quantum Mechanics and Inorganic Chemistry. He has also written a number of other science books, most recently Four Laws That Drive the Universe, as an introduction to thermodynamics. Atkins is also an outspoken atheist, being an active promoter of secularism and scientific causes, and having served as the first senior member of the Oxford Secular Society until his retirement from lecturing and research in 2007 (he is now one of Sec Soc's patrons).

Event Photos

Photos courtesy of Andrew West.