The film that will make you believe in God.
Can science explain everything? Prime Video’s ambitious documentary The Story of Everything suggests the answer may be a complicated one
The Story of Everything asks whether science has become too quick to dismiss faith
Peter Stanford
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Published 20 June 2026 5:00pm BST
There is increasing evidence – a mix of anecdote and data – that what once seemed like the inevitable decline of religion in secularised Western society has recently been, if not quite reversed, then at least paused. Something in these anxious, divided times in which we live seems to be stirring. There are reports of rising numbers of young people going to church. Prominent scientists, for so long the prophets of a godless future, are coming out as Christians (including the widely admired psychiatrist Dr Iain McGilchrist). Pope Leo’s anti-AI stance has struck a chord with a generation not usually prone to listening attentively to papal pronouncements.
Set against such a backdrop, the timing of the visually stunning 100-minute documentary The Story of Everything makes perfect sense. Aspiring to capture the zeitgeist, it is awash with exquisite footage from space, the deep oceans, and the world’s forests and fields, and even the odd cartoon animation. It’s all interspersed with appearances from a cast of two dozen leading scientists (and others) from across the disciplines, exploring with differing degrees of approval the theory that some sort of hidden hand or intelligent design lies behind the universe.
Released in US cinemas on April 30 for a limited run until May 6, The Story of Everything did reasonable, if not sell-out, business. It received largely positive, if patchy, coverage in mainstream outlets including the Wall Street Journal. Disappointingly, it failed to secure a UK cinema release but has now appeared on Amazon Prime Video.
No one in the film quite nails the name of God to this animating spirit behind the universe because The Story of Everything is at pains to avoid sounding preachy, or like a documentary variation on Mel Gibson’s ultra-sincere but much-lampooned 2004 film The Passion of the Christ. But he, she or it hovers there in the ether and there are moments when director Eric Esau, whose past credits span fact and fiction, might have trusted audiences more and allowed mention of the Almighty
Instead, he films the contributors talking softly and ever so reasonably. (Bizarrely, these include PayPal and Palantir founder Peter Thiel, here busy bemoaning the corroding influence of materialism.) Esau places them in a highly stylised, fashionable set that feels like an upmarket late-1960s or early-1970s hotel, all à la mode retro Scandinavian sofas and muted colours. The concept seems to be to send a reassuring message to fashion-conscious chattering classes that they need not be afraid this film is something stitched together by a parish hall committee keen to refill the pews or fix the roof.
The return of the God question
And what of the core argument it wants to make? The Story of Everything takes its cue from a 2021 book, Return of the God Hypothesis, by philosopher of science Stephen Meyer, based at the conservative but secular Discovery Institute in Seattle. Yet, for the sake of fairness, it also includes arguments that contradict those of the main contributors. So we get montages of scientists of yesteryear such as Fred Hoyle, who rejected the Big Bang theory and instead argued for a steady-state universe – in contrast to the now widely accepted theory that the universe began in an extremely hot, dense state before expanding to form matter, stars and eventually planets such as Earth.
Once you lean into its unusual subject matter, The Story of Everything is quietly seductive, but you have to keep your wits about you to separate the wheat from the chaff. The case for a rethink is built slowly, via four chapters with multiple sub-sections, and some are more compelling than others. Everyday language – “all gardens require a gardener” – carries you along when the arguments get too dense.
Where the film makes its strongest case
There are three core ideas explored. And one big omission. Let’s get that out of the way first. Because the producers are targeting a broad audience, they ignore the passionate belief in the creationist wing of Christianity that the Genesis account of God spending six days creating the world, complete with Adam and Eve, is literal truth rather than metaphor. Its absence from the film has already caused a backlash in the United States, with fundamentalist preachers and social-media users warning followers to avoid cinemas showing this work of the Devil.
For the rest of us, the story begins by exploring whether, rather than being static as was once believed, there is evidence that the universe is expanding – an idea that gained traction in the early 20th century after astronomer Edwin Hubble used increasingly powerful telescopes to study distant galaxies. The film then argues that this expansion points to an originating event or “First Cause” and turns to intelligent design advocates, who suggest that a supernatural – rather than natural – explanation may lie behind it. In other words, though it is left unsaid, God may have set in motion the Big Bang around 13.8 billion years ago.
The second pillar of wisdom in the film concerns the “fine-tuning” that has created our solar system – how the sun, the planets that circle it and the comets are not in some random order, as might be expected from a chaotic Big Bang, but rather are carefully balanced, with Earth in just the right place to enable human life. Mars, one contributor suggests, was a prototype for human habitation but was simply too hot and dry to sustain life. If there is fine-tuning, surely that means there is a fine-tuner?
Having grown up on the Adam and Eve version of creation at my Irish Christian Brothers school in Catholic Liverpool, I have always steered clear of any argument suggesting that religion or the Church has anything to say about how the world came into being. Stick to the social teaching of Jesus in the Gospels, try to follow it, keep an open mind on the afterlife, but don’t, whatever you do, get involved in whether it really took God six days to make the Earth. It was a guaranteed losing wicket.
Perhaps that is why The Story of Everything really started to get its claws into me. And that was before we move on to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA’s double-helix structure – such an astonishingly complex structure, it is convincingly argued, that it could not simply have evolved out of chaos. This takes us into what is referred to as the “beauty problem”. Essentially, the Earth and its systems are so perfectly designed, the balance so finely calibrated (until human beings start interfering with it), and the sheer beauty of the planet so gratuitous, when simpler, plainer systems might have done just as well to ensure survival, that it becomes difficult to accept they were the result of the cosmic equivalent of a random multiple-car crash. Hard to disagree with that, I felt.
Between documentary and persuasion
At a time when the evidence for climate change is hard to ignore, however much we might like to, this final part of the film takes on the emotional power of a David Attenborough wildlife documentary.
It is also in this final section that the subtle persuasion which runs throughout this clever film begins to edge towards the manipulative. It can justifiably claim to sit on the right side of the documentary/sales pitch divide. But only just. One or two dissenting voices in that Scandi-heaven studio (rather than confined to archive footage) would have helped, while still allowing food for thought.
For those with the stamina to digest 100 minutes of often dense science, there is still much in The Story of Everything that provokes fresh thinking, and that can only be a good thing. Its bias, after all, is no more pronounced than that of those scientists who stingingly dismiss talk of a “mind behind the universe” as “pseudoscience” (by which I assume they mean selective in the evidence produced).
By the end, I could think of no reason why British distributors were not picking it up and showing it in cinemas, where the brilliance of its cinematography can best be appreciated. If they doubt there is an audience, then I would suggest there has never been a better time in recent decades to test whether that assumed secular mindset in society is becoming less fixed.
The failure to give it a go makes me question whether there might just be a hint of no-platforming going on here. You can hear the reasoning. “Don’t give space to arguments that differ from the accepted norm.” It is rather like the BBC’s decimation in recent years of its once-busy religious affairs department. It was decided on high, seemingly on a whim and without much consultation, that there is no longer an audience for religion on TV. A better question might have been whether the corporation was commissioning the right programmes to attract the 33 million people in the 2021 and 2022 censuses who described themselves as religious.
The Story of Everything may just offer a winning format to solve that conundrum. It will not, I confidently predict, turn an atheist into a believer in intelligent design. But it could well loosen a few bricks in the wall of certainty. There is enough plausible challenge and enough good science in there to make you think again. Next time the origin of the Earth comes up in conversation, I for one will not be ducking out.
The Story of Everything is available to buy on Amazon Prime Video. DT.
