I watched a recent interview with physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and actor William Shatner, who of course played the iconic role of James T. Kirk in the original Star Trek series. Their conversation echoes the shifting philosophical landscape among scientists, as showcased in the new theatrical documentary The Story of Everything.
In the interview, Tyson represented the old-guard scientific establishment, proclaiming “settled truths” that those outside the scientific priesthood should treat as sacrosanct. Shatner represented the intrepid explorer who senses that the universe is far deeper and more profound than the reigning scientific paradigm can fully contain. His comments captured the spirit of Star Trek’s famous invitation “to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
The Atheist Gatekeepers
Tyson is featured at the beginning of The Story of Everything as part of the chorus of atheist scientists assuring the public that the universe displays no evidence of design, despite what seems obvious to the casual observer. Carl Sagan, a prominent astronomer from a previous generation, eloquently summarized this perspective in his response to the question of whether the order in the universe points to a creator:
It’s very tempting. I find the watch, it requires a watchmaker. Watches do not spontaneously self-assemble. And now I find a bacterium. It is much more intricately and exquisitely put together than a watch. Here too, there must have been a creator. It’s very natural. But we must not believe because we want it to be true. There is a perfectly reasonable process, which is inevitable. Order means creator is wrong.
He further stated,
We are like mites on a plum. And the plum is this little planet, and it goes around an insignificant local star. And that star is on the obscure outskirts of an ordinary galaxy, which contains 400 billion other stars. And this galaxy is just one of something like a hundred billion other galaxies. So the idea that we are central, that we are the reason there is a universe, is pathetic.
Richard Dawkins similarly commented,
It seems so obvious that if you’ve got a garden, there must be a gardener. But what science has now achieved is an emancipation from that impulse to attribute these things to a creator.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss, author of A Universe from Nothing, continued this common refrain, “500 Years of science have demonstrated that God, that vague notion, is not likely.” The common theme is that the universe, our planet, and life were not preordained; instead, we are a cosmic accident.
The New Frontier
The rest of the movie features interviews with leading figures in the intelligent design research community and several other high-ranking scientists and scholars who challenge the cosmic accident hypothesis. Much of the content resides in the books Return of the God Hypothesis, by Stephen Meyer, and The Privileged Planet, by Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards. The film also presents the argument, championed by biologist Ann Gauger, that nature displays awe-inspiring beauty, pointing beyond nature to a loving Creator (here, here).
The implications of such paradigm-altering evidence were well articulated by Shatner in his interview. He described how discoveries that challenge deeply held assumptions can have a domino effect, disrupting multiple previously sacrosanct beliefs. As a case in point, the weight of the evidence presented in the film is forcing leading academics to rethink their entire philosophical framework and, as a result, their understanding of the cosmos and life (here, here). Such shifts suggest that the next great scientific frontier is not nanotechnology or artificial intelligence but recognizing the mind behind the universe.