There are many remarkable things about the new theatrical documentary The Story of Everything, which is based on Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis. That’s evident from the amount of media coverage it’s received, from the fact that it’s been held over in theaters across the country, and more.
One reason I’m grateful for it is that the film makes a scientific case for theism of a kind that unites. It comes at an important moment for that, when a poisonous element in the culture seems intent on dividing Americans from each other, across religious lines and within religions. I wrote about this yesterday for the Jewish Journal.
A Singular Beginning
From, “For Our Religious Fractures, Science May Be a Healing Salve”:
These are just a few developments that seem calculated to alienate Christians from Jews, Protestants from Catholics, Protestants from Protestants, Catholics from Catholics, and a Christian-majority country, the United States, from Israel. As the prophet Jeremiah asked, is there no balm in Gilead?
There may be, and it might surprise you to hear it could be science. Some of my scientist colleagues at Discovery Institute, here in Seattle, appear in a new theatrical documentary, “The Story of Everything.” They include Christians, Jews, and agnostics. The movie offers what it terms the scientific evidence that “reveals a mind behind the universe.”
The argument of the documentary describes three scientific discoveries. The discoveries are that the universe began to exist at the Big Bang, caused by no force within nature. The cosmos was ultra-finely tuned at that moment to support life, by an intelligence outside nature. And life is ingeniously engineered, again gesturing to an intelligence beyond nature.
That concludes my recommendation of the film and of my colleagues’ work. The reason I bring it up is that science on all three subjects directs us not to a particular religion but to theism, the belief in the existence of a deity.
We could be more specific by saying it directs us to monotheism, the belief in one deity. There was only one Big Bang, sometimes called the Singularity, following the theories of physicist Stephen Hawking. A singular beginning means a singular creator.
All this unites, or it could unite, American religious believers.
I hope you’ll read the rest at the Jewish Journal.
Thank you for making The Story of Everything the No. 8 movie in the country last weekend. Not least for a documentary about science and the history of science, that’s pretty impressive. Please tell your friends about it, use social media to do so as well, and help make this coming weekend a strong one too!