I’ve put up a few posts about this new “The Story of Everything” movie that is available to see from April 30th to May 6th. My tickets are for tomorrow (Monday). Some of my friends went to see it on the weekend. One told me it sparked discussion about the big questions of life among her four children. But some people in my office were skeptical that such a movie could have appeal to non-Christians. So, today’s post will be very helpful.

Today’s post is a review of the movie from a website called TechSpective. The reviewer is Tony Bradley.

What caught my eye was this introduction about how the writer abandoned his faith:

I should tell you upfront: I’m an atheist. I was born-again Christian as a kid, read the Bible end to end more than once, and eventually landed somewhere else entirely. I mention this not to pick a fight, but because it’s relevant to what I’m about to say about a documentary that opens in theaters today — one I might have dismissed without a second thought if I hadn’t spent an hour talking to the man behind it.

I do have a number of friends who are fairly high up in establishment Christianity. And I know how they explain their lack of interest in apologetics. It’s something along the lines of “Apologetics? That’s not very useful. People become Christians when it enhances their lives. It works for them when they are children, then it doesn’t work for them when they are in college and starting their careers, and then it does work for them again when they have kids. So don’t worry about apologetics, people who are raised in the church will come back to the church as soon as they have kids”. This is literally how most pastors and Christian leaders think. They are really happy with the status quo of people being involved in Christianity for emotional reasons, and then leaving it when it’s convenient.

And this also applies to their own kids, who they raised in married Christian homes and with regular church attendance. I’ve had Christian professionals in my office reject books by Dr. Stephen C. Meyer for their kids who were going off to study BIOLOGY and ENGINEERING at big universities. “Kids these days are more leftist than we were, and they just see religion differently. The main thing is that my two kids got accepted to Vanderbilt and Duke! Isn’t that great? They’re going to make a lot of money, and have a lot more kids, so I’ll have lots of grandkids.” So, even the Christians who are very smart and very good at their IT jobs – experts in technology – don’t know why the Christianity they believe in is true. It’s just what they were raised in, what makes them feel good. It’s their favorite brand of clothes, type of food or local sports team. We cheer for Christianity because we were born in the South. Rah, rah, Jesus.

Anyway, let’s see what this guy who left Christianity thought about a movie that makes truth the issue, for a change.

First, what he thinks that the movie is about:

The Story of Everything is a new film anchored by Stephen Meyer, a philosopher of science with a Ph.D. from Cambridge. It makes an explicit, unapologetic case for intelligent design — the idea that discoveries in cosmology, physics, and molecular biology point not just to some vague designer, but to a system that has been conceived and engineered with intent.

[…]Meyer’s central argument — laid out in his 2020 book Return of the God Hypothesis, on which the film is based — isn’t “the Bible says so.” It’s that three major scientific discoveries of the past century create a serious problem for strict materialism: the universe had a definite beginning, the physical constants that make life possible are calibrated to a degree of precision that strains every probabilistic resource available, and the information encoded in DNA cannot be explained by the chemistry that carries it.

That last point is where a technology background becomes relevant, and it’s what Meyer said fascinates him most. Inside living cells, the chemical subunits along the DNA molecule function like alphabetic characters in a written text — or like digital characters in machine code. The sequence is what matters, just like the sequence of characters in software. And here’s the part that doesn’t get enough attention: natural selection has nothing to select until a self-replicating system with a working genetic code already exists. The origin of that code is not a question Darwinian evolution actually addresses. It starts after the code is already there.

Then, what he thinks about the movie as an atheist:

Meyer is not a preacher. He’s a deeply credentialed philosopher and scientist with a recall of specific facts, sources, and counterarguments that’s difficult to match. During our conversation, he cited papers, named researchers across multiple disciplines, engaged Hawking’s quantum cosmology in technical detail, and pushed back on my objections with precision rather than deflection. He’d be a formidable person to debate. But our conversation wasn’t adversarial — not remotely. He was curious, thoughtful, and didn’t try to convert me or judge me for disagreeing. He was interested in the exchange, not just in winning it. That’s rarer than it should be.

Nothing about the film or our conversation fundamentally changed where I stand. But I came away with a much clearer picture of the actual argument — not a strawman version of it — and a better understanding of why serious, intelligent people find it compelling. That’s enough of a reason to watch.

It would be wonderful if Stephen C. Meyer was the baseline of what it means to be a Christian. Wouldn’t it be great if what you learned in church, Sunday school, VBS, etc. was literally the scientific evidence for a Creator and Designer. Sadly, that’s not at all what Christians who are raised in the church typically learn. And that’s because the people who are supposed to be teaching them don’t know about these things either.

If you have not yet made plans to see the movie, you should by all means do so. Take your spouse. Take your kids. And when it’s over, take them to a nice quiet restaurant with no distractions, and talk about the evidence, so other people can overhear your discussion. There is no point letting atheism take over the minds of the people closest to you, especially when atheists don’t have the facts.

Two of my friends alerted me to a bunch of recent shows posted on Sean McDowell’s popular YouTube channel. I always like shows where there are discussions of evidennce – topics like economics and science are best for me. Well, Sean has had a bunch of good guests on good topics. The key thing about his recent shows is that he is doing 2-part shows. The first makes a positive case, and the second is about how to answer objections to that case.

The first guest is Dr. Stephen C. Meyer, and he talks about the origin of the universe:

And then there is a second show, where Sean talks with a Biola University philosopher about objections to the origin of the universe:

The second guest is Dr. Doug Axe. I met Dr. Axe way back at the Baylor Conference on intelligent design in April, 2000. He talks about the evidence for design in the origin of life, which is what his research is on.

Here is his “positive case” show:

And then here is the second show, where they discuss objections to the positive case:

So, if you watch both of these, you will really learn something about how to talk about this topic.

The third guest is Dr. Jay Richards. You might remember him, because we had him on the Knight and Rose Show. His topic was the fine-tuning argument. I am running into Christians at work who are just trying to learn this argument, so I hope this video helps them.

Here is the first show – the positive case:

And here is the second show, where they answer objections to the positive case:

By the way, if you like David Wood, he has a recent episode with David Wood about the biggest problem in Islam right now. Which is the biggest problem? I would say either the Islamic Dilemma or the research coming out on Quran variations. It looks like they go over a whole bunch of problems!

Finally, if you like listening to Sean McDowell, we had him on an episode of the Knight and Rose Show, where he talked about the fate of the Apostles. So if you missed that, then you can go back and listen.

I saw an interesting post on Katy Faust’s Substack and I wrote a long comment to it. I sent the comment to three of my manliest male friends (police officer, and two software engineers who run their own very profitable companies). They said “publish as is”. And I also sent it to a female co-worker, a female podcast co-host (Rose) and a very famous female Christian author. They all said “publish as is”. So, I published as is.

Below is my published comment to Katy’s article. Keep in mind, this was straight shoot from the hip, didn’t link to any studies, didn’t even proof-read it, with just fixing up the few typos that my female friends found. I am so happy with everyone who checked it over for me.

If you comment on Katy’s blog, please be kind. Don’t attack her personally. I hope I didn’t attack her personally in my comment. I was just trying to address what I see as a failing strategy. Katy herself is excellent. I regularly give her books away to friends (and I just warn them about her anti-male bias).

One of helpful editors sent me a couple of images, so take a look at those first:

And:

Here is the full text of my comment:

Speaking as someone who is a visible minority, has had to navigate legal immigration by merit, and worked 27 years in the competitive private sector in the field of technology (FT100 companies), I have a different view of how we should approach the twin problems of declining marriage rate and declining birth rate.

First, we don’t want to reduce male headship to “taking the initiative”. Leadership, as seen in great leaders like Dwight Eisenhower, involves making plans and making decisions to achieve real results. Someone who is a good leader is not someone who merely takes the initiative. It is someone who knows how to get from point A to point B, who has a record of doing it, and who knows how to make other people want to participate in the plan by following the leader’s decisions. Going up to a woman and starting a conversation is not leadership. It’s convenient for the woman to be passive and avoid rejection and decide if they like the man based on first impressions and feelings. But it is not actual leadership. And it is not demonstrating the kind of leadership that women will want from a husband and father in the long run.

Again, taking Eisenhower as the model, leadership would be if a man is able to motivate a woman into a long-term effort in which she takes independent action to help him to achieve the plan that he thinks is important. For a Christian man, that higher goal would not be the woman’s happiness, but serving God. A man’s purpose for a relationship with a woman is leading her to serve God. Masculinity is NOT “when a man uses his strength to benefit women”. (A social conservative once told me that was her definition of masculinity) Speaking as a non-white person, that view sounds exactly like slavery to me, and it implies that slaves who don’t like being slaves are lacking in character – i.e. – less masculine. A man whose first priority is serving God is going to be very skeptical about signing up for a relationship where the strength that God has entrusted him with is taken away from God, and transferred to the woman for her happiness. It’s not appealing to Christian men to disregard their goals for relationships and become a woman’s slave instead.

Now onto why men are declining to approach and pursue. The root cause of men’s disinterest in pursuing women is twofold. First, Christian parents and church pastors have not prepared women to resist secularism and leftism in the culture. The second concern is the changes to laws, workplaces, courts, etc. brought on by feminism.

What are the consequences of the widespread turn towards secularism and leftism in young women (according to surveys). Well, they tend to be attracted to left-wing and immoral men. Men who don’t judge, men who are permissive, men who don’t hold women accountable. More and more young women don’t value or choose chastity, pro-life advocacy, evidential apologetics, sobriety, frugality, etc. They aren’t being taught to by Christian parents and pastors, because women are already seen as perfect for marriage. Nothing to fix. You won’t find anything like Thomas Sowell economics, evidential apologetics, etc. in most Christian homes and churches. So, when good Christian men meet these women, they have to start from ground zero – and often after the women has lived out the secular feminist lifestyle through her late teens, her 20s, and sometimes even 30s and 40s. So no defenses to secularism and feminism get laid down in the years before college, and then these Christian women lose their faith and conservatism after a semester or two of college. Studies show that promiscuity is a risk for lower relationship quality and higher relationship instability. Relationship instability is already a big risk for women, who initiate 70% of divorces. The highest instability rate is for lesbians. This is because women naturally condition commitment on their feelings. Whatever we are doing right now, it’s not preparing women to get over this tendency.

And it’s not just avoiding moral and spiritual leadership. Studies on attraction show that many young women are looking for dark triad traits. Again, a few rounds with men who have these traits will make them very unattractive for good men who have kept themselves chaste and sober. The damage is more like student loan debt – it doesn’t just disappear by spiritual conversion in the mid-30s. It stays on the books and requires work to eliminate. And the attempt by good men to choose the right woman for the job or lead the wrong woman into becoming the right woman is often dismissed as “controlling” or “judging” or “emotional abuse” or worse. This is not a good situation for a good man to get involved with. Young women are not trained to be led on moral and spiritual issues, and male leadership is seen as suspicious and even evil.

The second problem is underestimating the effects of feminism in laws and courts on men’s incentives to marry. Most social conservatives can’t admit or list the problems that are causing well-educated, high-earning, commitment-ready Christian men to decline to date and marry. That would be things like no-fault divorce, bias in domestic violence, handling of false accusations, bias in custody assignment, more severe sentencing of men, paternity fraud permissiveness, and so on. If these problems are even admitted, they are usually blamed on men failing to make women sufficiently happy. Men can name dozens of clear examples of society treating men unfairly. If a good man is weighing what to do with the fruits of his labor, then he is going to be looking at these problems. Even if these threats are not likely to get the good man, they are signs of widespread approval of bias against men – even among parents, pastors and social conservatives. Many good men will choose to just use their hard-earned millions for other things – like Christian ministry and mentoring. Jesus never married nor did he have children. Was he doing a good job of obeying God the Father when he decided to focus on other things instead?

The naive approach of hoping that men will somehow just disregard the influence of 6 decades of feminism on 1) women’s character and choices and 2) the laws and courts has not worked, is not working now, and will never work. And just doubling down on making demands or shaming men is not going to make it work any better than it has been. Maybe we can start with a new definition of masculinity that is 100% opposed to the “masculinity is when men are women’s slaves” definition. Let’s make the new definition of masculinity this: “masculinity is when a man is able to disregard the attractiveness and sexual offers of women such that he is able to focus himself and the women around him on his higher responsibility to serve God”.

After that, we can ask good men what they want out of marriage, and how they see the effects of feminism on 1) women’s character and 2) the laws and courts, as deterrents to men marrying.

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That’s it for the comment. Let me know what you thought of it in the comments to this post.

We have a long way to go to reverse feminism and misandry inside the church… and also in the minds of some Christian social conservatives. Unfortunately, I can’t think of a single prominent Christian leader who takes the concerns of men about dating and marriage seriously.