Stephen Chapman

Columnist

Stephen Chapman is a columnist and editorial writer for the Chicago Tribune. His twice-a-week column on national and international affairs, distributed by Creators Syndicate, appears in some 60 papers across the country. He came to the Tribune in 1981 from the New Republic magazine, where he was an associate editor. He has contributed articles to several national magazines, including the Atlantic, Harper's, Reason and the American Spectator. -- bio from the Chicago Tribune website.

Chapman debated former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan in Slate on the question "Is there a God?".

Chapman writes "What I no longer understand, looking back on my life as a Christian, is the capacity to believe in something so outlandish as the existence of an Almighty God--much less one who created us all one by one, cherishes our immortal souls, intervenes on behalf of those who call upon his name, and holds a place for his faithful in an everlasting paradise. None of us has ever seen this being; none of us has ever heard him, except in the silence of our own heads; none of us can produce a piece of evidence as large as a mustard seed that what we think of as God is anything more than a thought. Our scientists can see stars that have been dead for a billion years; they can document microscopic bacteria that concluded their brief lives on earth eons ago. But of God we have no trace, except for the testimony of scribes writing of events neither they nor those around them ever witnessed--and the faith of millions of people who have managed to convince themselves that he lives and reigns somewhere in the sky."

--MG