"Trials of the Monkey" by Matthew Chapman

But what's all this have to do with Dayton and the Scopes Trial?

For Chapman, Dayton becomes a turning point. To his surprise, he discovers a soft spot for the Jesus freaks. Between reading historical accounts of the Scopes trial -- which he paraphrases for the reader with a special focus on William Jennings Bryan and the worldwide attention showered on Dayton -- Chapman meets and greets a series of interesting characters who win him over.

There's Gloria, the divorced, bankrupt eternal optimist who runs the bed and breakfast Chapman stays at while in Dayton. There's Rocky, the muscular local cop who lets Chapman join him on a patrol of Dayton's seedier side. There's even a handful of drunks who manage to get Chapman some moonshine.

Then there are the folks at Bryan College, a Christian university named after the "Great Commoner." Chapman spends a good deal of time with the school's teachers and students, spelunking in caves and hiking the local mountains. Some of the students provoke him. Their asexuality, their insistence that more atheists commit suicide than Christians, their blind faith in creationism, their belief that God will send most people to hell -- all drive him to the verge of insanity. "It's almost as if I'm the center of a joke and don't know it," he writes. But overall, the Christians Chapman gets to know make him realize that the need for spirituality is nearly universal even if religion itself makes no sense.

Kurt Wise, one of the world's leading "creation scientists," single-handedly alters Chapman's view of faith. With a Ph.D. in biology from Harvard, Wise should be one of Darwin's local proponents. Instead, he's convinced that the world is 6,000 years old and that God created it in seven days. Though he studied under Stephen Jay Gould, one of the world's most revered experts on evolution, Wise even remains convinced that the world's fossils were created by the Great Flood.

To Chapman, this is pure craziness. But while he's always despised religion ("in particular its resistance to scientific progress"), Chapman likes Wise, finds him generous and sincere. Wise's heartfelt struggle to fuse God and science somehow cracks through Chapman's jaded shell. "My intellectual views remain the same, but in some significant way, my feelings have changed," he writes. "Faith in God or any of the fairy tales that surround Him may be absurd, but the need for faith is anything but. When you encounter someone like Kurt, you realize that faith is sometimes an absolute necessity."

To his credit, Chapman's transformation never becomes complete. He flirts with the idea of creating a religion that starts with self-love and extends to care for the less fortunate, but he hasn't written "Out on a Limb" or the "Celestine Prophecy." He ultimately experiences no call to the altar. He hasn't given up drinking by the book's end and still plans to write for movies. The same critical gaze he fixed on himself still gets pointed toward the locals -- "the preachers, whose faith seemed fanatical in its conviction, cruel in its form, and useless in its effect."

And yet, there's been a development. By the end of the book, Chapman has learned to empathize with his superstitious wife and he's learned to seek more than just another drink or orgasm. He still feels confident enough in his disdain for religion to declare that science and Christianity today are more at odds than they were 75 years ago, but he's not above entertaining godly thoughts. He's essentially moved from atheism to agnosticism.

At times, even this subtle conversion feels forced. Will Chapman really go to Africa to help the poor? Doesn't he see that a moral philosophy founded on his own personal desires sounds a lot like an excuse for selfishness?

There are other flaws too. Most of them are literary. Some of the metaphors, for example, should have been extinguished. The line about Chapman needing his wife "to apply the plunger of her conviction to the turbulence of my uncertainty" might strike some as poetic, but it sounded like unintended Monty Python to me. And actually, since Chapman never attended the Scopes trial reenactment, it's tough to shake the feeling that his book is in part an effort to appease an editor in order to avoid giving back his advance.

Still, Chapman's honesty and his ability to create a scene carry "Trials of the Monkey" past these obstacles. The book may be accidental, but it's hardly a failure.

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