When New York Times bestseller Stephen Meyer’s 2021 book Return of the God Hypothesis appeared on the scene, there was hope of an eventual documentary that would distill the work’s three scientific arguments for the creator of life and the universe. Last night’s nationwide theatrical premiere of The Story of Everything, now in theaters through May 6, delivered on that hope.
Indeed, it overdelivered.
I had the privilege of attending the Dallas premiere at the historic Angelika Film Center, where the audience was treated to a beautiful synthesis of majestic spectacle and clear, compelling scientific reasoning. Afterwards Meyer took the stage for the Q&A, with two other scientists interviewed for the documentary, physicist Bijan Nemati and pioneering design theorist William Dembski.
Where It All Started
There is something fitting, even story-like, about Meyer’s presence at the Dallas premiere. It was some forty years ago, while living in Dallas and working as a geophysicist, that he attended a conference which set him on the path that eventually led to The Story of Everything. At the conference the competing cases for theism and materialism were debated, and one of the internationally distinguished scientists participating in the event, Allan Sandage, publicly flipped from unbeliever to theist, on the basis of the increasing evidence in physics and astronomy for a cosmic designer. Biophysicist Dean Kenyon had a key role at that same Dallas conference. The story is recounted in the documentary.
It was also in Dallas that Meyer landed a Rotary Club scholarship to do PhD work at the University of Cambridge, where he began to develop a rigorous case for the design inference as a fully rational and scientific inference to the best explanation. The rest is history, or what Meyer called at the Dallas event last night, “an intelligently designed journey.”