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 literal 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 with those near to you. There is no point letting atheism take over the minds of the people closest to you, especially when they don’t have the facts.