“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” journalist Joan Didion wrote in “The White Album,” a poignant essay that I love, recalling about her younger self how she “began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself.”
Our culture is in much the same condition. Some stories we told ourselves about life and the cosmos — that they arose through chance-based material processes alone — have begun to come unraveled. Those are stories we learned in school and through popular science media. Their scientific premises no longer hold. Meanwhile another story, also citing scientific evidence, has arisen in the past century to challenge the old narrative.
Peter Robinson writes today in the Wall Street Journal about the upcoming theatrical documentary The Story of Everything. Based on Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis, it explores three scientific discoveries that, if considered objectively, overturn the familiar materialist narrative. Instead, life and the cosmos — in other words, everything — give evidence of intelligent purpose.
Robinson is a distinguished policy fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford who hosts a wonderful discussion program, Uncommon Knowledge. He begins:
The most striking feature of “The Story of Everything,” the science documentary that will appear in theaters on April 30, is the sheer nerve of the thing. First it claims that modern science has reality all wrong — and then that we know this because of science itself. By the end of the film’s 97 minutes, you’ll likely find yourself concluding those claims aren’t wrong.
For Robinson, the “most arresting argument against materialism arrives with the third scientific finding the documentary presents, the discovery of the astonishing complexity of even the simplest forms of life.”
Not Trying to Convert You
He notes one of the really impressive things about the film: that it is not trying to convert you:
“The Story of Everything” isn’t some snake-handling tent revival. It demonstrates the inadequacies of materialism unapologetically, insisting that the Big Bang, fine-tuning and DNA all indicate that behind reality stands not nothing but something. Something intelligent. But there the documentary stops, making no attempt to convert viewers to any particular belief in the divine.
That is surprising. In our world where everyone is trying to sell you something, this remarkably high IQ documentary is content to present the evidence (far from all of it!) and then let you decide for yourself. You can recommend this film without fearing you’ll have to cringe afterward. Quite to the contrary.
I really appreciated that about it. Yes, I’ve watched it too, and it’s very impressive, and quite gorgeous. As I’ve said already, it’s intelligent design as you’ve never seen it before: with a diverse cast of scientists and scholars, some of whom you will not recognize. Some of the arguments, too, may be unfamiliar, including the “beauty problem.” Why is nature, and life, so beautiful? They did not have to be at all.
By the time Peter Robinson was done watching, his thought was, “All that? The result of blind indifference? Yeah, right.”
On a Knife’s Edge
Our culture is balanced on a knife’s edge. Even the New York Times admitted earlier this month, “After decades of religious decline, people have stopped leaving churches. Secularization is officially on pause.” That’s an interesting phrase: “on pause.” Will the process resume, or reverse itself? Which story of everything will have prevailed, decades from now?
Many of the arguments in Stephen Meyer’s book and in this film have already given pause to devoted materialists. I recently read the outstanding little book by Charles Murray, Taking Religion Seriously, which describes his own journey, including interacting with the ideas in Return of the God Hypothesis, to a very thoughtful and personal understanding of Christianity. I did not expect to find those ideas — their persuasiveness, their validity — recognized in the pages of the Wall Street Journal.
This comes, I should add, on the heels of another article for the same very secular publication last week by our contributor Bethel McGrew. She describes the “contest” between narratives, essentially the two covered by The Story of Everything, as “simply” not a “fair fight.” A colleague noted the publication of the two essays by the Journal, which, like the New York Times, normally tires itself out praising evolution. And this within just two weeks?
My colleague asked, “Has that happened before?” Not that I recall. Is something changing? Perhaps.