Oxford, W. H. Freeman , 1992

Author of a widely used 1978 text in physical chemistry, P.W.Atkins treats the lay reader with marvelous English in describing the wonder he sees in all that was learned at that time—about time, space, the origin of the universe, dimensionality, and why mathematics works.

His understanding of complex systems and their emergence from chaos drive his thesis that we can understand creation and will, eventually, describe its beginning in terms so accurate that our religious concepts will no longer be necessary.

Unfortunately, this kind of presumption has driven the recent split between science and people of institutional faith, so that the honest, invaluable approach of science—which leaves all conditions open to additional evidence and testing—is lost, as is the awe scientists feel for the complexity they find in nature.

Since this book was published, there has been a growing awareness of the several sources of unpredictability in complex systems. Ilya Prigogine called the choices at chemical bifurcation points “irreducible randomness.” Unpredictable phenomena may arise when many agents interact in nonlinear ways, which is nearly everything, from our bodies to electrical grids.

Atkins, however, neglects the concept of mind as the unpredictable emergent activity of our extremely complex brain with its 86 billion neurons, each with up to 10,000 connections. But his most egregious error is his failure to recognize the difference between science and religion. As Jeffrey Lockridge puts it so eloquently in Grasshopper Dreaming, science explores and suggests how things work, while religion invests in questions that ask why things are as they are, including the universe and our lives. What is our purpose or reason for being, the meaning of life itself? Science doesn’t ask those questions.