Peter William Atkins FRSC (born 10 August 1940) is an English chemist and a Fellow of Lincoln College at the University of Oxford.

He was the founding chairman of IUPAC Committee on Chemistry Education, and is a trustee of a variety of charities.

In 2016 Atkins received the James T. Grady-James H. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public from the American Chemical Society.

[6] He is also a member of the advisory board of The Reason Project, a US-based charitable foundation devoted to spreading scientific knowledge and secular values in society.

Atkins has regularly participated in debates with theists, including John Lennox,[7] Alister McGrath, Stephen C. Meyer, Hugh Ross,[8] William Lane Craig,[9][10] Rabbi Shmuley Boteach,[11] and Richard Swinburne.

"[12] In July 2016, Atkins was quoted as stating, “We are a hiccup on the way from one oblivion to another oblivion.”[13] Atkins is known for his use of strident language in criticising religion: He appeared in the 2008 documentary-style film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, in which he told interviewer Ben Stein that religion was "a fantasy" and "completely empty of any explanatory content.

In the same article, Atkins was also described as being "more hardline than Richard Dawkins", and of deliberately choosing to ignore Peter Medawar's famous adage that "Science is the art of the soluble".