The Story of Everything

Not rated • Theaters

I simply wasn’t convinced. The computer graphics animating planets spinning and proteins folding, video clips of agnostic astronomers from the 1970s saying the darndest things about their marvelous discoveries, and interviews with modern physicists: The Story of Everything could not have been the product of an intelligent mind. No, no, no. I’m sure the documentary filmed itself, and random chance edited its complex arrangement of scenes, dialogue, and music. Watch it for yourself. I think you’ll agree.

The Story of Everything is based on the book Return of the God Hypothesis by Stephen Meyer, who’s one of the film’s narrators. In four “chapters,” the film presents a staggering amount of scientific evidence pointing to a Creator’s handiwork: the universe’s finite age and finely tuned laws of physics, the existence of life on Earth, the sophisticated “machinery” inside every living cell, and the “gratuitous beauty” in many living things that evolutionary biologists evidently fret over. From the very large to the very small to the abstract—the film’s orderly presentation sure has the appearance of design, like someone had structured a purposeful cinematic composition. But as any reviewer worth his NaCl will tell you, the documentary was that way because it had to be that way.

One of those pieces of evidence: The taillike propeller a bacterium uses to go about its daily business has 30 different interworking parts and in some bacterial species rotates at 100,000 rpm.

All this scientific evidence brought a question to mind—I mean, it spiked an interrogative transmission of chemical signals through my cranial neurons. If the Jewish rabbi Jesus of Nazareth, who history tells us died on a Roman cross 2,000 years ago, was the Creator of spinning planets and folding proteins and everything else visible and invisible, He must really have been holding back during His earthly ministry. Why would He do that? It defies scientific explanation.