When I got a screener link to Story of Everything (Sypher Studios 2026) and sat down to watch it, I felt the fear that Jonathan Witt admits to: “ … the film would bog down in scientific and philosophical minutiae.”
Ah yes, The Revenge of the Talking Heads — and just when one can’t quietly change the channel… There is a lot of that out there.
But afterward, I wrote to friends, “It’s excellent. See it.”
SoE is essentially the story of how science discoveries in the last century — especially the beginning of the universe in a Big Bang and the awesome complexity of the living cell — have exploded materialism.
It is told using film and TV footage of scientists, today and yesterday, on all sides of the struggle. The archival footage, in a sense, makes the film. At last, the end of materialism escapes the lecture room; it becomes a story about real people in real time in the midst of a civilizational struggle.
Philosopher Stephen Meyer narrates the film but never gets in the story’s way. A number of other scientists and philosophers throw in brief thoughts, creating the feel of a lively discussion that we don’t need to be experts to understand.
For example, I was struck by something philosopher Timothy McGrew offered, about the elegance of the organization of the cosmos: “Sometimes the path toward the truth leads through beauty and that is an important window. We need to be willing to open that.”
Speaking from the arts side, the doomed British poet John Keats (1795–1821) said something very like that in 1820 in “Ode to a Grecian Urn”:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
In short, beauty, symmetry, elegant theory, and mathematical poise do not arise from meaningless existential chaos — which means that the view that has shaped modern materialism for a century and a half cannot be correct. As philosopher David Berlinski says, it “belongs in the movies.” Yes, it does. It makes for critically acclaimed noir films and angsty novels. But in the real world, it could not design a shoebox, let alone a cosmos.
Incidentally, Meyer offers the best argument I have heard against the idea that our universe is not remarkable; it just happens to work where countless others have flopped. That’s multiverse theory, a familiar materialist dodge that plays well in TV talk shows and grad student seminars. The trouble is, a mechanism that generates universes must then exist — and we must explain that. In other words, the fundamental problem — Why is there something rather than nothing? — is left standing. But anyway we have no evidence for any universe other than our own.
Will this film, to be released tomorrow, make a difference to public debates on life, the universe, and everything?
Well, it moves discussion among thoughtful people a considerable way toward a designed universe. We see atheist mathematician and astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001), an estimable thinker, who fought hard for an atheist cosmos and lost. In sharp contrast, materialists Carl Sagan (1934–1996) and Larry Krauss, left to themselves, don’t come off as people who should even be taken seriously.
That’s a skilful approach to arguing the case for design. If the materialists were portrayed as villains, corrupting the youth, many people’s natural instinct would be to sympathize with them, not with their detractors. But many fewer people sympathize with people who look like they just don’t get where the bulk of the evidence is pointing.
Witt tells us,
“In a Q&A with the filmmakers, I learned that in post-production they kept reminding themselves to “fight for the audience” — that is, for that guy and gal showing up at the cinema for a date, popcorn and fountain drinks in hand, hoping to be informed and edified, sure, but also entertained.
They certainly have the right approach there.