Devin Squeri grew up in a nominally Catholic home and accepted the basic tenets of the faith until around age 14. As one whose mind inclined toward math and science, he started to wonder in his teens if there were any factual bases to its truth claims about reality. Pushing the questions aside, though, he went on to earn degrees in physics and math and to found and run a software company. He attended church regularly as an adult and for several years served as an usher, all the while keeping his creeping doubts at bay.
But as his 50th birthday approached, the long-suppressed questions surfaced with a vengeance, hijacking and demanding his full attention. Is all of reality really reducible to molecules in motion? Is philosophical materialism true, as the assumptions of the secular world seemed to imply, rendering life ultimately meaningless? Or is there evidence to support the biblical worldview’s presupposition of a self-existing creative mind?
Church Failure
Devin voiced his questions first in his home church, but to no avail. Next, he took them to four more local churches. But none of them were equipped to give him a substantial, evidence-based answer. No one. Bereft of help and desperate to find the truth, he spent a full two years doing his own research.
You can read about that in his 2025 book, The Doubt Project (or for a summary of it, look here). The point I want to make here is that the churches he consulted utterly failed to provide the smallest modicum of help in addressing his questions. Worse, no one seemed to know that the questions could be engaged with by reference to empirical evidence derived from the natural world. Every response effectively distilled to some form of a “just have faith” appeal to authority, either the authority of a church body, a sacred writing, or some combination thereof.
Don’t Fail the Questioners
There are a lot of people like Devin out there, and if you are a professing Christian, it’s likely there is someone attending your church while quietly wondering about the same things. The Story of Everything: The Science that Reveals a Mind Behind the Universe, in theaters beginning April 30, will prepare you to give them an evidence-based response to the larger questions about reality. Please note: it is not necessary that you provide detailed, scientific explanations of the evidence that “Reveals a Mind Behind the Universe.” But if you are a professing Christian — and this is especially true if you’re in a position of leadership — it is necessary that you know something about these 20th-century discoveries and become at least minimally conversant with them. The Story of Everything is an ideal way to start.
Don’t fail the next person who approaches you wondering if there are reasons to believe. Prepare yourself. And while you’re at it, you just may discover a new kind of joy in the wonder. Go here to find your local theaters and showtimes.