Okay, enough debating boys, here are the facts:
Book:
by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
published 1955 by Random House Publications
ISBN: 0553269151
Film:
Directed by Stanley Kramer
Released 1960
Not Rated
ASIN: 6302120624
Film:
Directed by Daniel Petrie
Released 1999
Rated PG
ASIN: 6305600988
...now that the facts are conveniently out of the way, I can get into my impressions of this work.
I was 'forced' to read this book in my 11th year English class. I thought I would abhor it, but instead, well.. this was the only book I've ever stolen -- that's right, I never turned it in at the end of the year, but instead I kept it. That's how good I thought it was.
I won't make any commentary on the 'bias' of the work, suffice it to say that it's not as bias as everyone is keen to think, and I highly recommend it.
Additional: Lometa asked me to tell why I kept the book as opposed to returning it. Well, it wasn't because stealing is 'cool', and I honestly didn't intend on doing it, it just sort of happened (like sex).
Besides the whole thing being very well written, and the dialogue being well composed and all that other literature crap(!), it inspired me to one important end: it showed me that science and faith do not exist in mutually exclusive space. It was this book that really gave me personal license to examine my faith with a scientific eye -- and in doing so, I realized that they can co-exists and, in fact, compliment each other. It mostly stems from the section of courtroom dialogue where Drummond is examining the good Reverend Brady as an Expert Witness on the subject of the Bible. The debate is on the age of a rock, to which Brady states that it cannot be more than 7000-some-odd years old, due to calculation based on the ages of the ancients mentioned in the Bible. Drummond responds to this answer by asking what day the Earth was created on, and how long a 'Day' was at the time. The obvious answer here is '24 hours', which is the answer Matthew Brady returns. Though, in a feat of insight I could never hope to achieve in my lifetime, Drummond asks that, if the Sun was not created until much later, after the Earth was, how can a day's length be gauged?
That left me dumbstruck for several days afterward. Being a child of science, I had always assumed that God and Science were irreconcilable, and always would be. But after having my mind opened like that, I began to think in new ways about the world and about eternity. After a bit of research on my own after that, I also came to understand that, in the original Hebrew, the Bible doesn't say anything about a day. It simply says 'a period of time', which could be 24-hours, or even billions of years.
The important point that this work made to me was that You do not have to choose.