THE documentary The Story of Everything was released by Fathom Entertainment at the end of April. It is the latest contribution from a group of scientists who have raised several serious challenges to the prevailing culture and ideology of scientific materialism, which has dominated the public discourse for 175 years.
The release of the film follows the publication of two books that press the challenges to scientific materialism to their logical breaking point. The first is The Return of the God Hypothesis (HarperOne, 2021) by Stephen C. Meyer; the second is God, the Science, the Evidence by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies (Palomar) (Books, 14 November 2025). Both are global bestsellers.
The film includes contributions from many of the world’s leading scientists who do not accept the pre-eminence of scientific materialism — or, at least, who have grave doubts about it. Among them are Professor John Lennox, Dr Stephen Meyer, Dr David Berlinski, Professor Douglas Axe, and Professor James Tour. This is no band of lightweight chancers: they are serious scientists, experts in the natural sciences, mathematics, and the history of science and philosophy.
Over the past few years, they have patiently and politely argued their case with increasing confidence as the compelling nature of their argument has begun to cut through. Dr Meyer has been interviewed by Joe Rogan on his podcast at length, and has appeared on Piers Morgan Uncensored, in which Mr Morgan declared himself a theist on the same basis as Dr Meyer.
Scientific materialism is embedded in modern society. At its core, it asserts that everything in the universe, including human thought and behaviour, is governed by physical processes, and can be described using concepts of natural sciences, such as physics, chemistry, and biology. It is a fantastically intolerant ideology, and those who challenge it are often met with mockery, disbelief, or, as the argument develops further into difficult areas, a kind of secular fury at the affrontery of challenging the world-view that it maintains.
In modern times, supporters of scientific materialism have tended to describe their ideology in terms of “evidence-based rationalism”. But, as The Story of Everything and the two books above make clear, the evidence base is moving away from scientific materialists: people are waking up to it, and the claims made by scientific materialism are increasingly and demonstrably irrational.
SOME of the objections to scientific materialism are very long-standing. Science, for instance, is possible at all only because of reason, which is very difficult to analyse at all in terms of materialism. Human consciousness brings free will, emotions, and submission to the universal moral law (as C. S. Lewis identified it). None of this is easily analysed in terms of physical machinery. As Professor Lennox argues: “If our beliefs are merely the product of electrical impulses in the synapses in our brains, there is no reason to believe them.”
But the problem for the materialists is much more serious than this, because reason allows us to describe and observe, through science, “order” in both the physical and metaphysical worlds, and this raises more difficult questions.
Contemporary evidence-based challenges to materialism are now so numerous that it would be possible to write many books about them; but let us consider one that impressed Mr Morgan, and which is dealt with in The Story of Everything and the two books described above.
Science tells us that the universe began (one might say, was created) at the point of the Big Bang — and that this is the inevitable consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. Scientific materialists resisted that conclusion for as long as they could because they well understood the implications of it. As Dr Meyer discussed with Mr Morgan on Uncensored, this presents a serious problem for a materialist, because, before the Big Bang, there is no “material” to do any causing; so, “rationally”, one would need a non-material cause to explain how this could have happened.
THE difficulties only increase when one looks at the standard model of the Big Bang, because what that reveals is that the scientific order in the universe, which apparently emerged out of nothing, happened very quickly, and is subject to regularities of balance and order that science can observe, but which it cannot explain.
Drs Bolloré and Bonnassies set this out in their book, phase by phase; it is a breathtaking explanation of how a universe of great intricacy and complexity came into being in tiny fragments of a second. But why should the universe have order and regularity at all? Why not disorder? What, then, is the source of this order and these rules and regularities? These are questions that scientific materialists cannot answer.
Professor Lennox once explained that his faith was based on three things: science, the history of the Gospels, and his personal experience of the Lord Jesus Christ. For too long, scientific materialists have been allowed to obscure what has been obvious to many of us, and which can best be summarised in words from the opening sequences of The Story of Everything, attributed to Cicero in De Natura Deorum: “The celestial order and beauty of the universe compel me to admit that there is some excellent and eternal Being who deserves the respect and homage of men.”
Simon Miller is a friend and supporter of the Community of the Resurrection, Mirfield.