UPDATED: Today, Premier Radio UK is airing a debate recorded earlier this week between Signature in the Cell author Stephen Meyer and noted Oxford University chemist and “new atheist” Peter Atkins. The debate is part of the kick off of promotion for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, which arrives in the UK on DVD this month.

Both Atkins and Meyer are accomplished scholars with very different viewpoints. The at times testy back and forth between them is as entertaining as it is enlightening.

Click here to listen to the debate, which is about an hour long.

Dr. Atkins, is a noted critic of intelligent design and author who appeared in Expelled, stating: “Religion, it’s just fantasy … and is evil as well.” According to a 1992 article by Atkins in New Scientist, “Darwin effectively swept purpose aside in the living world,” and “[a]ll reimpositions of purpose are artifices of the religious to feed their faith.” He holds little back on religion, claiming that it only offers only “empty gulping and the verbal flatulence that passes for theistic exposition.” In Atkins’ view, “Humanity should accept that science has eliminated the justification for believing in cosmic purpose.” In his 1993 book Creation Revisited, Atkins contends that the reason for the existence of the universe is because “By chance there was a fluctuation” in the “void.” (p. 149)

Dr. Meyer is the recent author of Signature in the Cell, one of the bestselling science books on Amazon.com for 2009, also named one of the “Books of the Year” by the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) in London.