None of this happened by accident.
The documentary The Story of Everything gives a timely look at the evidence for intelligent design
Commander Reid Wiseman peers out the window of the Orion spacecraft on April 6.NASA via The Associated Press
In an interview after the Artemis II mission, Commander Reid Wiseman shared that while he’s not a religious man, he felt a curiously urgent need to speak with a chaplain after what he had seen in space. The power and the grandeur of it all had overwhelmed him so much that as he tried to process it in the immediate aftermath, he found himself reaching for religious language. It was the only kind of language that made sense at the moment. When a chaplain arrived, wearing the signature cross on his uniform, Wiseman said that something about seeing the cross made him burst into tears.
As someone pointed out on X, the symbolism is almost too obvious: an areligious Wiseman traveling through the stars, only to return with a newfound reverence for the divine. There’s no indication that Wiseman made some kind of dramatic full conversion, but what he did share was moving enough. His crewmate, Victor Glover, boldly shared his own Christian faith in messages back to Earth throughout the mission (much to the outrage of some angry atheists), and no doubt his example was an inspiration.
Between the Artemis mission and the smash success of the movie Project Hail Mary, it’s been a space-optimistic year, moving people to “consider the heavens” with renewed wonder in both real-life and fictional contexts. Which makes the Discovery Institute’s new documentary The Story of Everything, in theaters through this Wednesday night, perfectly timed. Based on Stephen Meyer’s book Return of the God Hypothesis, it uses a blend of expert interview footage and CGI to invite a popular audience into reverent contemplation of the universe’s mysteries. The presentation is modest, as the various experts speedrun a recent history of physics, and then as the documentary goes on to plunge from the celestial to the microscopic, of biology. But it all builds to a quietly revolutionary conclusion: None of this happened by accident.
Some of these expert faces and their arguments will be familiar to people who have followed the Discovery Institute’s work and kept up with the intelligent design debate over the years, especially Meyer, Michael Behe, and Bill Dembski. During the heyday of the New Atheists, whose triumphalist soundbites are prominently featured in the film’s introduction, anyone who dared to question the evolutionary narrative of anything came in for much ridicule. Dawkins and friends fanatically attacked “creationist pseudoscience” and painted anyone associated with the Institute as a wild-eyed theocrat propagandist who wanted to ensure schoolchildren never learned any Real Science.
Of course, this was a strawman. Intelligent design researchers have always been deeply engaged with the scientific literature and encouraged Christians to familiarize themselves with its rival “story of everything.” They just dared to point out the holes in the narrative, and to welcome scientists who found themselves abruptly kicked out of the mainstream academic fold for doing the same. One such scientist, Dean Kenyon, made a particular impression on Meyer by being willing to stand up and retract his own work at a conference, because he couldn’t escape the evidence of design. The Story of Everything rolls vintage footage of Kenyon’s courageous public assertion that one does not have to “jump off the end of the rational world to move in the direction of a frankly theistic origin of life.”
Other vintage clips weave themselves in and out throughout, creating the sense of an ongoing conversation between past and present. We watch the agnostic astronomer Robert Jastrow smiling a bit puckishly as he freely admits the “theological” nature of the fact that the universe seems to have sprung into being “at a definite moment,” rather than infinitely existing. He may not be a religious man, but he’s not coming up with another explanation that would “lay these questions to rest.” It was Jastrow who famously wrote in the conclusion of his book God and the Astronomers that scientists had dragged themselves over the last peak of their epic mountain climb only to find a merry band of theologians waiting for them.
Not all the contemporary experts featured are Christians either. The maverick intellectual David Berlinski, witty and laconic as ever, has always slyly hedged his own bets where the “God hypothesis” is concerned. But like Jastrow, he seems unbothered about participating in a project that will prompt people to take that hypothesis seriously. Why shouldn’t people follow the evidence where it seems to be leading them?
There’s a clever transition in the documentary where we begin by observing our “pale blue dot” from space, like the astronauts did, then suddenly descend like they did down, down, down to the water. Only unlike them, we keep going until we have shrunk ourselves all the way down to the level of a single cell. Whether we are looking through a telescope or a microscope, there are marvels everywhere we turn, if like the wise men we have eyes to see.
