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Matthew Chapman (1) (1950–)

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Matthew Chapman lives in Manhattan. This is his first book. (Bowker Author Biography)
Foto taget av: Matthew Chapman at American Atheists Convention, Des Moines, IA, 4-23-2011

Verk av Matthew Chapman

Runaway Jury [2003 film] (2004) — Screenwriter — 210 exemplar
Consenting Adults [1992 film] (1993) — Writer — 11 exemplar
The Ledge [2011 Movie] (2011) — Director & Screenwriter — 8 exemplar
Hussy [1980 Film] (1980) — Regissör — 4 exemplar
Slow Burn [1986 TV Movie] (1986) — Director & Screenwriter — 2 exemplar

Associerade verk

The Best American Science Writing 2007 (2007) — Bidragsgivare — 237 exemplar
Color of Night [1994 film] (1994) — Writer — 21 exemplar

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Chapman, Charles Darwin's great-great grandson and a successful Hollywood screenwriter, describes the 2005 intelligent design (ID) trial in Dover, Pa. The native-born Brit loves his adopted American home, but is terrified at the rise of a belligerent fundamentalism that seems to him invincibly ignorant and contemptuous of such scientific commonplaces as evolution. The 40 days and nights of the trial convince him that ID should indeed be taught in every science classroom in America: as an exercise in removing the kid gloves with which religion is treated in this country, science teachers should demolish ID before their pupils' eyes. The strength of the book is its function as an old-fashioned courtroom drama, which stays lively even as readers know how the trial will turn out. Chapman rightly describes himself as unable to "maintain animosity toward people with whom I violently disagree once I get to know them." He even checks his own agnosticism to compliment Jesuit theologian John Haught for having "the most beautiful mind in the whole trial." Chapman's exploration of the American soul finds not only cause for fear but also much that is good and decent. The book bogs down in forays into theology, which are marked by egregious misstatements about evangelicals in general (as opposed to just in Dover), and with a side story paralleling Dover with the Scopes monkey trial, which feels like a clunky addendum. (Apr.)… (mer)
 
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MarkBeronte | 9 andra recensioner | Jul 16, 2021 |
Enjoyed learning about the Scopes trial, and the background of Chapman. The book is well-written, easy to follow and interesting. The problem I have with the book is that I just don't like Chapman (at least how he has written about himself) I don't understand people who drink to an excess esp when they have seen what it had done to his mother. And the masturbation, is that what all boys are like? I've raised two and I can't believe that they spend every waking moment thinking about sex. I don't know if Chapman was exaggerating or what, but I don't think it added anything to the story to hear him continually talk about his sexual urges.

So I'm not saying I didn't like the book, I did in many ways. The writing was good, the story was mostly interesting, and the people he met were just incredible. (sadly I doubt they were unusual) I just didn't like Chapman.

There have been many classic books with characters that I don't like, Fahrenheit 451, Catcher in the Rye, Clockwork Orange, all terrific books, but with a man character I do not like. I could not relate to them and felt no sympathy. But still all great stories.
… (mer)
 
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sgerbic | 2 andra recensioner | Nov 5, 2014 |
Matthew Chapman is the great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. He's also a screenwriter and director of some note — at least to his lights. He's also an avowed atheist who decided to investigate the site of the famous "monkey trial," the infamous battle between religion and science in Dayton, Tennessee immortalized in the wonderful film Inherit the Wind. The book becomes a combination historical narrative/ memoir/personal voyage. He explains his interest in the Scopes trial this way: After a bus driver explains he belongs to the Pentecostal Church, where people speak in tongues and "fall over backwards" — 'It's amazin,' I ain't never seen one git hurt' — using that as incontrovertible evidence of the existence of God, Chapman is compelled to observe that "It requires so little proof on the one hand and so much on the other. People will inform you that Jesus was born of an angel-impregnated virgin and walked on water 'because it's in the Bible,' but think nothing of telling you with a sniff of contempt that evolution is 'just a theory, ain't no proof.' The inherent unfairness of this double standard is one of the things that attracts me to the Scopes Trial."

There are books about the Scopes trial that provide much more detail of how George Rappleyea, a Dayton resident, wanted to take advantage of the controversy surrounding passage of the Tennessee law that forbade the teaching of evolution, by hosting a trial in Dayton, a town that had suffered a severe economic downturn after a local mine closed. Inherit the Wind provides a good feel for the climate (pun intended) of the trial and community, but simplifies tremendously. The defense and prosecution each had four to five lawyers and one of the famous speeches for the defense was actually given by Dudley Malone rather than by Charles Darrow, one of my heroes — but those are minor quibbles.

Chapman, an open-minded, good-humored fellow, recounts his delinquent childhood and his musings about life in general as he visits with the Bryan College professor who teaches "proof" of creation and with a local minister, attending his church. He confronts his preconceptions of the South, his "neurotic city-dweller" northernness — fearing the banjo-toting violent, redneck with the gun rack in the truck. What he finds most disturbing, however is the pervasive religiosity. "I feel adrift. It makes me uneasy. What I find disturbing is not so much the belief in God, but the habit of credulity which it engenders. If they can believe in God --who never shows his face — simply because it makes them feel good, what else might they be persuaded to believe in? What's the difference between religious evangelism and political propaganda? Might one prepare you for the other? Was it not credulity as much as 'evil' which made the attempted extermination of the Jews possible?

Chapman goes on a field trip with some of the Bryan College geology students to visit a cave that their professor explains has evidence of the creationist theory of creation. On the way back in the van, he engages in a discussion with the students about hell, and they reveal a certainty that those who do not accept Jesus as their personal savior will be consigned to an everlasting hell. "I'm not saying these kids are Nazis — I like them, in fact — but . . . believing in a literal hell, a burning lake, an inferno of unimaginable suffering, they accept with equanimity that seven-eighths of the world, including me, will end up in it. Forever. . . "Either they don't really believe this or in fact there is something Nazi-like about them: their Final Solution is one of extraordinary scope and brutality; a holocaust of souls which makes the Führer's merely physical extermination of the Jews seem positively amateur. 'Our Father' is far more ambitious: he's going for the eternal destruction of not just Jews, but Hindus, Homos, Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, atheists, agnostics, and presumably Scientologists and others on the lunatic fringe. Seven-eighths of the people He creates, He then destroys. The only place you get worse odds is the abattoir. The girl I'm looking at as I'm thinking this is an accounting major. How on earth can she become an accountant? Then what? A mother? Little League? A nice home? One of those vans with a sliding door down the side? Knowing what she knows, how can she even contemplate this? How could you enjoy the comforts of a suburban life knowing that your God is going to flambé just about everyone you meet? But there she sits, as optimistic and contented as any teenager I ever met."
… (mer)
 
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ecw0647 | 2 andra recensioner | Sep 30, 2013 |
Matthew Chapman, author of [b:Trials of the Monkey An Accidental Memoir|313158|Trials of the Monkey An Accidental Memoir|Matthew Chapman|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1173671566s/313158.jpg|1067957], and great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin, had moved to the United States, tired of the English predilection for class distinctions. Never a diligent student, he fell in love with the story of evolution and visited Dayton, TN, home of the famous Scopes trial. "In my mind the anti-evolution movement remained a quaint Southern aberration resulting from a combination of moonshine and religions of the snake-fondling type. I had drunk of the aforementioned mountain dew and found it a powerful mind-altering substance, oddly delicious, with only the faintest leady aftertaste of the car radiator through which it had been distilled, but concluded it was not the best stimulant of intellectual cognition." Now that's a delightful quote.

When he learned that a small town in Pennsylvania was to be the site for a replay of the Scopes trial, he packed his bags. York County, PA is a land of contradictions. Militant in a state of pacifist origins -- they sent more troops to the Revolution than any area of comparable size and population -- they had evolved into the antithesis of William Penn's "holy experiment" in religious toleration, and the area was known for its religious zealotry.

Dover, sadly, reminds me of the rural town near where I live, except that we have no traffic light. As with Dover, the highpoint of the week is Friday night football/basketball, and the major traffic jam occurs when the old ladies drive to the post office to pick up the mail. A town of about the same size, we have 1700 residents and 4,963 churches. The school used to annually host a local minister who handed out copies of the New Testament to all the kids until they got a call from the ACLU when a local liberal (guess who?) called them. The debate over evolution and teaching of intelligent design (an oxymoron if there ever was one) tore Dover apart.

After the resignation of several school board members, the board appointment process filled it with fundamentalists. Even they realized they couldn't force intelligent design down the throats of the students so they had science teachers be required to read statement indicating that evolution was "just" a theory and students wanting another view should read Of Pandas and People, bordering on a violation of the Pennsylvania standards of education. An editorial in the York Daily Record suggested that," Watching what's going on in the Dover Area School District is like watching a train wreck in slow motion." To give you an idea of the backward climate, the town's mayor had just been acquitted by an all-white jury of having given bullets to local white gangs thirty years before so they could "go out and kill as many black people as they could during some very severe race riots."

One of the arguments of the school board was, "it's just a statement we want read to the students, takes only a couple of minutes, not that important, so what's the big deal?" To which the plaintiffs natural response was, "If it's not so important why are you taking this to court?" Not to mention that the statement provided an unequivocally false impression of what science is and what a theory is. In addition, while making the argument against evolution, the board and the defense team could never marshal arguments for intelligent design. "The logic of picking out intelligent design, which is inherently untestable, and saying that any evidence against evolution is evidence for intelligent design employs a logical fallacy that I think most scientists reject."

The plaintiffs lawyers were a congenial group, staying in the same hotel, eating together, and generally having a good time. The defense team, however, "was a dysfunctional family with a frequently absent father." Richard Thompson, who bore a resemblance to William Jennings Bryan, from the Thomas More Law Center, which he had founded with money from the Domino's pizza chain and who had made his reputation obsessively trying to send Dr., Kevorkian to jail,, would often disappear even while important testimony was being taken. Competition between the Discovery Institute and Thomas More Center would not help their defense.

One of the really nice things about Chapman is that he genuinely likes people, even people he disagrees with completely, once he gets to know them and you feel his sympathy for the participants. Humor abounds. One of the school board members was so fiscally conservative that she was described by another board member as being so tight "she could squeeze the nickel 'till the buffalo farts."

The linkage of belief in evolution and atheism haunted the debate. The plaintiffs at Dover put many people of faith on the stand who fervently believed in the evidence of evolution. Particularly effective was a Catholic priest, Haught, who in his friendly and non-confrontational manner effectively dismantled the defense questions. Often the defense misunderstood the implications of what was said. Chapman asked one of the plaintiff's lawyers about a line of questioning by the defense that seemed to bring out the weaknesses in the defense's own case, the lawyer replied, "We don't get it either, but the good news is that whatever we forget to bring out during direct, we can rely on them to bring out during cross." Haught, argued convincingly that science and religion were related but operated in two separate and distinct realms. His example is instructive:
Suppose a teapot is boiling on your stove and someone comes in the room and says "explain to me why that's boiling." Well one explanation would be it's boiling because the water molecules are moving around excitedly and the liquid state is being transformed into gas.
But at the same time you could just as easily have answered that question by saying, "It's boiling because my wife turned on the gas."
Or you could also answer that same question by saying, "It's boiling because I want tea."
All three answers are right but they don't conflict with each other because they're working at different levels. Science works at one level of investigation, religion at another.
The problems occur when one assumes there's only one answer.


Haught concluded his testimony by saying, "the God of intelligent design seems to be a kind of tinkerer or meddler who makes ad hoc adjustments to creation, whereas I wold want a child of mine to think of God as something much more generous, much more expansive, a God who can make a universe which is, from the start, resourceful enough to unfold from within itself in a natural way all the extravagant beauty and evolutionary diversity that, in fact, has happened. To put it very simply, a God who is able to make a universe that can somehow make itself is much more impressive religiously than a God who had to keep tinkering with the creation."

Apocalyptic thinking played a large role in the belief systems of those defending their desire to teach intelligent design. They truly believe the end was coming, that evolution was a hoax, and that science had evidence proving it to be a hoax but that evidence was being suppressed. The ignorance of the anti-evolution crowd of science and how it worked is truly saddening. They never forgive their antagonists. Scopes, who had never really taught evolution and was picked mostly because of his willingness to participate in the trial, had his life turned upside down. He had wanted to teach geology at the college level but had his much-needed fellowship revoked. "As far as I'm concerned you can take your atheistic marbles and play elsewhere," was the sentiment conveyed in the rejection letter. He realized the stigma of the trial would follow him and he spent his professional life working as a geologist in South America.

Contrary to popular wisdom, I think the hidden debate at Dover was between the God who employed evolution as opposed to the flaky God of instant creation. This formed the crux of the trial that made the outcome almost inevitable. This was not so much a battle between evolutionary atheism and God's intelligent creation, but between two very different views of God and how he/she/it operates. The judge was thus forced, in my view, to rule, quite appropriately, that science was to be taught in the classroom, that the water is boiling because the heat is exciting the water molecules, and not religion, which was suggesting the water was boiling because we want tea.

Excellent book. Very hard to put down.
… (mer)
 
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ecw0647 | 9 andra recensioner | Sep 30, 2013 |

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Statistik

Verk
9
Även av
2
Medlemmar
542
Popularitet
#45,993
Betyg
3.8
Recensioner
16
ISBN
22
Språk
1

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