By popular demand, The Story of Everything is enjoying an extended run in theaters, where audiences will get another chance to come get an entertaining gentle introduction to some of the evidence for a Creator. The project is worth seeing on a big screen. Its visual scope is ambitious, unlocking wonders telescopic and microscopic. It could have focused on just one or the other, but it is advertising itself as the story of everything, after all.
Viewers already familiar with Stephen Meyer’s Return of the God Hypothesis and with the general shape of intelligent design work will hear familiar arguments about the origin of the universe, fine-tuning, and the “signature in the cell.” As a longtime fan of Discovery Institute, I didn’t encounter any surprises. Still, I wasn’t expecting the final turn: an argument from beauty.
Gratuitous Beauty
The viewer is asked to consider what we see when we look around us: the “bare-bones, minimalistic, cobbling together of something by accident for the sheer purpose of ruthless survival,” or “something much more extravagant, beautiful in its expression”? The effectiveness of this question is enhanced by its quietness. There’s no soundtrack behind the stunning images on screen — an unborn baby floating in the womb, a school of fish in a deep blue ocean, cutting seamlessly to a flock of birds against a sunset. Steve Meyer describes this beauty as “gratuitous.”
As more remarkable creatures swim and flit across the screen, biologist Richard Sternberg describes the stock explanations that are posited to cast all this in evolutionary terms: There’s some adaptive reason, or it’s all about sexual selection. Against this, Sternberg places the intuitive insight of Aristotle that we are looking at a rational structure, a sign of a mind — or a Mind — reaching out to communicate with other minds.
Humans are the only creatures with a capacity for appreciating beauty beyond a rudimentary attraction to something eye-catching, shiny, or colorful. We use complicated descriptive language to assess it, we recreate it in art and capture it in photography, we convert it into lyrical poetry and prose. It is natural to sense that all of this extravagance is, in a meaningful sense, for us. Yes, it’s an intuition, but as David Berlinski points out, “not to be dismissed” for that reason, as intuitions can point to truth, particularly when added to the mountain of evidence for a creative intelligence.
Aesthetic Arrest
I once heard a story about an atheist philosopher who was on a walking tour through Europe and found himself on the inside of a stunning cathedral. He was so struck that he told his friends to go on without him while he simply sat and contemplated the beauty. Later, he made a quiet conversion to Christianity. No doubt many factors played into that choice, but that day in the cathedral was a significant one. The journalist Rod Dreher has written similarly about a life-changing experience in Chartres Cathedral.
Literary icon James Joyce has a phrase to describe what happened to them: “aesthetic arrest.” It’s an intriguing phrase. It conjures up the image of a person going along his planned route for the day, when God approaches him and says, “You’re going this way instead” — a command, not a suggestion. But then there is something forceful about the way beauty “arrests” our attention. We have the choice to look away and keep walking, but we stop and stare as if we don’t.
The Story of Everything weaves interviews with present-day scholars together with vintage footage from great scientists of the past. One of my favorite pieces of archival footage is an interview where Francis Crick reminisces about the discovery of DNA. He recalls how sometimes he and James Watson would literally do nothing but sit around staring at it, thinking “how beautiful it was.” Here they were, two young scientists who weren’t even originally supposed to be working on this project, staring at the discovery of their lives, unable to look away.
A Baby’s Ear
The great writer and Communist defector Whittaker Chambers wrote very movingly about his daughter in his memoir Witness. She almost wasn’t born at all, but his wife had a breakdown and insisted that they not have an abortion. One day when she was a baby eating in her high chair, Chambers found himself staring at the shape of her ear. He wasn’t yet a religious believer, but all at once, it struck him powerfully that his baby’s ear couldn’t have been an accident. It was too beautiful.
Even Christopher Hitchens, writing in his infamous book God Is Not Great, had to admit that this was a powerful passage. The argument from beauty made the world’s cockiest atheist pause for a moment of respect. Of course, it wasn’t enough to make him stop writing atheist books and trying to talk Christians out of their faith. But he still had to stop and give it its due. Almost like he didn’t have a choice.
The Story of Everything won’t force anyone to stop being an atheist. But it might just make them stop and think, if only for a moment.