Intelligence Squared US

A journalist, screenwriter, and director, Matthew Chapman is the Co-founder and President of Science Debate, an organization seeking to get political candidates, particularly presidential candidates, to debate important science policy issues. The great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, Chapman is the author of two books, Trials Of The Monkey - An Accidental Memoir and 40 Days and 40 Nights - Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, OxyContin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania. His most recent film, The Ledge, was accepted into competition at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival and deals with the ultimately fatal feud between an atheist and an evangelical Christian.

A.C. Grayling, a British philosopher and professor, has written over 20 books on philosophy, religion and reason including Against all Gods and The Good Book: A Secular Bible. Previously a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, Grayling is now Master of the New College of the Humanities, an independent university college in London. For nearly 10 years, he was the Honorary Secretary of the principal British philosophical association, the Aristotelian Society, and a Trustee of the London Library. A former fellow of the World Economic Forum, Grayling was a Booker Prize judge in 2003.

A New York Times bestselling author, Dinesh D’Souza, the President of The King’s College in NYC, has had a distinguished 25 year career as a writer, scholar and intellectual. A former policy analyst in the Reagan White House, D’Souza also served as an Olin Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute as well as a Rishwain Scholar at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Called one of the “top young public-policy makers in the country” by Investor’s Business Daily, he quickly became a major influence on public policy through his writings. In 2008 D’Souza released the book, What’s So Great About Christianity, the comprehensive answer to a spate of atheist books denouncing theism in general and Christianity in particular. Consequently he has gone on to debate atheists such as Christopher Hitchens, Peter Singer, Daniel Dennett, and Michael Shermer.

Named the #1 Pulpit Rabbi in America and the second most influential Rabbi in America by Newsweek magazine, David Wolpe is the Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles, California. He previously taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York, the American Jewish University in Los Angeles, Hunter College, and he currently teaches at UCLA. In 2003 Rabbi Wolpe was named one of the hundred most influential Jews in America by Forward. He is the author of seven books, including the national bestseller Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times. His new book, Why Faith Matters, is largely a response to atheist theories.