Now, for the most vexing and magnificent question of all: Does God exist? Last week in Boulder, two prolific author/pundits wrestled the issue before an audience of 2,350.

For intellectual firepower and celebrity fizz, what a match: Atheist Christopher Hitchens' most recent book is, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. Dinesh d'Souza, a Christian, is author most recently of What's So Great About Christianity.

They've debated elsewhere; their contrasting styles make a sizzle. Hitchens creates his argument with the quick cut and thrust of a rapier; D'Souza, with the deliberate strokes of a sculptor's chisel.

Did they change minds? Afterward, 43 percent of the audience (1,011 people) answered a survey. In that group, Hitchens' position gained one percent and D'Souza's position lost 2 percent. Going into the debate, 28 people were undecided vs. 41 coming out.

Those results don't ruffle Father Kevin Augustyn, head of campus ministry at the St. Thomas Aquinas Center. Its branch, which does student outreach at the University of Colorado, hosted the debate.

"Our goal is to clear up misconceptions about the Catholic intellectual tradition - that it's closed-minded, or not open to discussion," Augustyn said. "We want to open dialogue with the secular world and to grow our visibility and seriousness on campus. We want to be in conversation with people who disagree with us."

For more on the center, and future events, visit the Web site thomascenter.org. Before the debate, I posed these questions to D'Souza and Hitchens:

How do you handle doubt?

Hitchens: Doubt is one of the foundations of our skeptical method to begin with, so only if I ceased to have moments of same would I feel any concern.

D'Souza: To me, doubt is intrinsic to religious belief. "Belief" is not the same thing as "knowledge." If I knew for sure, I wouldn't have belief. Belief means trusting in God even (with) doubts. That doesn't make belief unreasonable or irrational.

What's your opponent's best argument?

Hitchens: The "fine tuning" of the universe, with its bias (at least in our infinitesimal locality) for human life.

D'Souza: That the world is so flawed in its design and with all the suffering in it that it doesn't look like there's an intelligent, all-powerful, compassionate designer behind it all.

If your position "won" and became the world's gold standard of behavior, what would the world look like?

Hitchens: Very much the way it does now, since the way humans behave is in fact determined by the laws of physics and biology and is only to a limited extent affected by theocratic exhortation. Life would and does improve, of course, to the extent that theocratic exhortations are outgrown or ignored. In every country and society, the measure of freedom and education and prosperity can be directly correlated to the growth of secularization.

D'Souza: Imagine a Christian world in which everyone aspired to live by the commandments to love God and love their neighbor, a world in which people took seriously Christ's teachings and sought to apply them. Who can deny that such a world would be infinitely better than the one we have now?