You can’t help but get a chill from many moments in the new documentary The Story of Everything, directed by Eric Esau. The film from Fathom Entertainment will be in theaters from April 30 to May 6. Tickets are available for purchase now, with options for group tickets and theater buyouts.
When James Watson and Francis Crick uncovered the double helix structure of the DNA molecule in 1953, Crick is said to have remarked in wonder, “It’s so beautiful, it’s got to be true.” We can imagine his saying so with his own chill.
From this riveting and informative film, audiences will learn that science elicits wonder because it points to a source of great beauty outside itself, outside our universe.
“Codes Within Codes Within Codes”
That the cosmos had a beginning, that it is finely tuned for our existence, and that digital information, “codes within codes within codes,” directs the processes of cellular life, are all objective indications — three scientific discoveries — that a Creator has preceded us on the scene.
What exactly is so special about a living cell? Charles Darwin understood it as a blob of jelly.
But science itself has revealed “high technology” in even the humblest bacterial life. With gorgeous, haunting graphics, The Story of Everything invites us inside the cell — the “immense miracle” of it, as even agnostic mathematician David Berlinski affirms in the film. The cell stuns us with its molecular machines, constructed from proteins obeying the instructions of what biologist Richard Sternberg says bears “an uncanny resemblance to a digital bit string.”
Mid-Century Modern
In The Story of Everything, we encounter a diverse range of scientists who — starting with Watson and Crick, themselves atheists — have overturned the story that claims existence is without purpose. That materialist “story of everything” was dealt a fatal blow in the middle of the 20th century by the discovery of DNA’s structure. Which is why, in a witty touch, the filmmakers chose to locate many of their interviews with scientists on sets evoking the classic mid-century modern style.
The cell is a mystery. It is “one that seems to be reaching out to us,” as Dr. Sternberg says.
But James Tour, the great Rice University chemist, makes a still more fundamental observation. We know something about the technology in the cell. Yet how could the very first cell have arisen on the early Earth, without intelligent human interference, or advanced laboratory equipment, to help it do so?
The new documentary, based on New York Times bestseller Stephen Meyer’s book Return of the God Hypothesis, identifies an “information enigma”: the mystery of life and life’s origin demands that we tell another story of everything, a scientifically truthful one.
The film also poses what Dr. Meyer calls the scientific “problem of gratuitous beauty.” Life and the universe speak to us through the bounty of their beauty. And as philosopher Timothy McGrew puts it, echoing Francis Crick, “sometimes the path to the truth leads through beauty.”
It’s intelligent design as you’ve never seen it before. Find inspiration, and share it with friends and family, in The Story of Everything.