Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
The Future, a podcast about evolution and intelligent design.
[00:00:14] Speaker B: By now you might have heard about the Story of Everything, the new movie based on Dr. Stephen Meyer's book Return of the God Hypothesis. It's a cinematic exploration of the cosmos that reveals the hidden hand behind our universe. We're pretty excited about it and we want you to be able to share in the excitement as well. Welcome to Iview the Future. I'm your host, Andrew McDermott. Well, today we're going to hear from physicist Dr. Brian Miller as he discusses his experience of being interviewed as an expert in the film. Before we get to that though, I want to take a few minutes just to share the trailer with you to the Story of Everything so you can get an idea of the look and feel of the movie and the sheer scope of the story.
Let's watch that together. Now.
[00:01:04] Speaker C: Today I'm going to tell you a story which may seem very strange.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Galileo, Kepler, Newton.
[00:01:15] Speaker C: Each tried to explain events in the
[00:01:17] Speaker D: history of the universe.
[00:01:18] Speaker C: Has the universe always been here or is it finite?
[00:01:22] Speaker A: Is there something else that would blatantly
[00:01:24] Speaker C: these questions to rest? It reopens that question of ultimate meaning.
[00:01:29] Speaker A: How in the world did this start?
[00:01:31] Speaker C: The simulation theory, the multiverse. You can't trust what's in front of your eyes. Come on, that's. That's ridiculous. That belongs in the movies.
We want to take our metaphysical hypotheses and see what they point to. And I can remember him saying, here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event.
Himself made a discovery that shook his personal philosophy.
The fact the universe sprang into being at a definite moment seems to me theological. It is science that has revealed this.
We are dealing with a system of manifold complex design.
[00:02:15] Speaker A: 110 to the 10,110 to the power
[00:02:19] Speaker C: turned out to be the tip of the iceberg.
[00:02:22] Speaker A: We associate information with a rational intelligence.
[00:02:27] Speaker C: Behind it had an uncanny resemblance to a digital bit string. Very much like an information carrier. You can read the same segment forward to get one protein and backwards to get another.
[00:02:39] Speaker B: It struck us with a tremendous impact.
[00:02:42] Speaker C: Without guidance, we would get a life unfriendly universe.
Many organisms have beauty beyond anything that's relevant for their survival value.
The concept of life as a cosmic phenomenon should have many consequences.
The question then was what does one do about it?
[00:03:16] Speaker B: That's the trailer for the Story of Everything, which opens in theaters April 30, 2026. Make plans to bring your family, friends and colleagues to the movie. It's going to generate some awesome conversations.
Even young People will benefit from seeing this. So high school, college age, and here's the point I'd like to make before we move forward and hear from Dr. Miller. The film presents three scientific discoveries of just the last century that reaffirm the God hypothesis. And you know what? A hundred years might sound like a long time, but what we're finding is that not enough people are even aware of. Of this evidence. Scientific arguments can take a long time to percolate through the culture, especially when much of the scientific establishment and traditional media push a narrative that's aligned with scientific materialism.
We just can't assume that our friends, family, associates, neighbors, teachers, pastors, and leaders have even heard about the evidence for intelligent design.
That's a sobering thought, but it also means we have an awesome opportunity to. To share the evidence with them. Sure, you can give them a copy of Stephen Meyer's book Return of the God Hypothesis, but let's face it, not everyone is going to sit down to a book these days. The Story of Everything movie, then, is a great way to share and introduce some of the key evidence for intelligent design with other people. Let's not miss that opportunity.
All right, let's pivot now to Daniel Reeves, who serves as Director of Education and outreach at Discovery Institute's center for Science and Culture. He sat down recently with Dr. Brian Miller in a webinar for our Roots program to discuss the story of everything. Here's that exchange.
[00:05:01] Speaker D: Now, the perfect person to talk to today about this film because of the fact that he was both instrumental in the release of Steve Meyer's book the Return of the God hypothesis, in 2021, and was also one of the many interviewees featured in this new film.
So I'm excited to ask Brian a few questions about this to give you guys a sense for the content of the film and the experience of being on set.
So, Brian, if I can, I want to start out just by asking just a fun general question, and that is, how did you get involved in this film in the first place? And what was it like to be on set of a big feature film like this?
[00:05:42] Speaker A: Well, I was the main technical advisor for Stephen Meyer when he wrote the book Return of the God Hypothesis. And that's really the impetus behind this movie, because a lot of the content of the book is in the movie. So naturally, when the movie producers were trying to identify who would be appropriate scientists to speak in the movie, my name came up. So I was very happy to be part of it. And it was really a great experience. I'd never been on. I had only been on a movie set once before and this was very well, very well run, very well set up and it was just really exciting to meet so many high level scientists, physicists, biologists, computer scientists, and just the movie team. That was just really fun to work with.
[00:06:24] Speaker D: That's cool. That was going to be one of my questions was, did you bump into some of the other interviewees at that same set, that same location?
[00:06:33] Speaker A: Yeah, in fact, some of us went out to dinner together, we had meals together, had some nice conversation time when they were setting the setup. So it was people like Rob Sheldon, who I had not been around as much, who was a fascinating plasma physicist that worked for NASA.
And then Brian Keating was just a larger than life person who's this very well known physicist, has his own podcast and he actually came and brought us meteorite fragments, which was just really cool.
[00:07:02] Speaker D: Very cool.
[00:07:02] Speaker A: So he's one of the most exciting people to be around when you hear all the stories.
[00:07:06] Speaker D: Yeah, I put together a list of everyone that appears in the film. It takes quite a bit of time to just list them all, so I won't go through that list. But it's amazing just looking at the types of scientists that are featured in the film. We have, like you mentioned plasma physicist, and we've got organic chemists and mathematical physicists, mathematicians, biochemists, geologists, evolutionary biologists, historians of science. So there's a lot of firepower, a lot of expertise behind this film. And as you've already highlighted, while a lot of these people are familiar to the intelligent design movement, there's also some new names.
Is there anyone in the film that you're.
That's a bit of a surprise. Might be a surprise to people in the sense that they maybe a decade or two ago, might not have been in a film about intelligent design.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Well, there was some very notable people. Like Brian Keating would probably be a person that will be very exciting to see in the film because he's very mainstream, he's very respected. He almost won the Nobel Prize. In fact, he actually wrote a book called How I Lost the Nobel Prize.
And he has a podcast where he interviews just leading physicists of every imaginable background. So I think people will be very excited to see him in the film. And I really appreciate his courage of supporting us since he doesn't necessarily embrace everything that we embrace, but he really is a believer in free thought, free speech, and he respects the quality of our work and the quality of our argument. So he was really exciting. Another notable Figure was Frank Tipler. And Frank Tipler wrote a book many, many years ago that was one of the foundational books behind this whole idea of fine tuning the anthropic principle is what he called it back then. And of course, there's many other figures that are just very prominent in their fields.
[00:09:00] Speaker D: That's great. Tell me a little bit about the organization of the film. We just got a very quick snapshot, but it is appropriately called the Story of Everything. And as you know, the film is organized like a story with chapters. It's kind of a them and the graphic design. So can you tell me a little bit about the organization?
[00:09:21] Speaker A: Well, the organization of the film actually follows the organization of the book. Return of the God Hypothesis pretty well.
It starts off laying out the importance of the question, talking about how there's these two stories that have dominated Western civilization and also many other civilizations which come down to the question, are we just simply an acts in nature? Is everything just chance in time?
[00:09:45] Speaker C: Or.
[00:09:46] Speaker A: Or is there a mind behind the universe? So the movie starts out laying out this epic conflict between these stories and then talks about the history of science in the west, of how people became very enamored by the materialistic story that everything is just chance and time. But then how over the last century, that story has shifted. How there's been these discoveries in science, cosmology with Einstein's generativity, that have caused the pendulum to go more towards this design perspective.
And then what happens is the next chapter in the movie talks about the origin of the universe, the cosmological beginning that Steve Meyer talks about so often. It then goes into the fine tuning and then talks about just the design behind life.
Excuse me, the design behind our planet.
Very much the work of people like Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards. And Jay Richards appears in the film.
And then it goes on to the evidence behind design in life. Very much like signature in the cell. And then it concludes by talking about how we really see how this idea of a mind being the center of reality is what is the center of the story of everything. And that's how it concludes.
[00:10:59] Speaker D: Wow.
Yeah. I know that when I saw an early cut of the film, I still haven't seen the final, final cut because I know they've still been working on it up to the last minute. But when I saw that early cut, it really was incredible how it all came together at the end. That you often think of these as different disciplines with different implications. And yet when you see the way it all comes together and the connection to intelligence and to the mind, it really has quite a. Quite an impact.
So have you yourself presented on some of the topics that are covered in the film publicly in recent years, since the publication of Steve's book? And if so, what has the reception been like for different audiences?
[00:11:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I have presented this material at several universities. I spoke at Berkeley, I spoke at mit, which is where I did my undergraduate.
Just last week, I spoke at Duke University, which is where I did my PhD work. I spoke at University of Washington last night, and I spoke at many other universities and colleges and different venues. And what's been absolutely amazing is I feel like. And I've been doing these sorts of talks for 20 years, and I feel like just in the last few years, the conversation has become much more significant to more people that people really want to talk about these big pictures of life, these pictures of purpose, these pictures of whether we're an accident or we were created by a divine mind, God. And I found that there is really no hostility. Like, if you really look at the Intelligent Design movement, when things got going, there was a lot of pushback. People are very uncomfortable talking about design in our universe, design and life.
But I feel like now, even among leading scientists, there's the sense that the evidence is moving in that direction so strongly that people want to have the conversation and they're being swayed by the evidence. People of every academic background and every field of discipline, which has been very exciting.
[00:12:53] Speaker D: Wow.
I've got a couple more questions, but I want to mention before sharing those that anyone that would like to share a question for Brian or for me about this film and its release and what's covered in the film is welcome to drop those questions in the Q A here, and we'll get to those in just a couple of minutes.
You know, you. You kind of mentioned this. You hinted at the fact that the. The conversation has changed over the last several years. And it makes me think about the. The difference between the film Expelled that came out in 2008, and the tone of that film, and then this new film. Of course, it's. In some ways it's comparing apples to oranges, but I think it's worth noting the difference in tone. Do you want to comment on that? And how it reflects the change in conversation around intelligent design.
[00:13:41] Speaker A: Yeah. And John west does a very nice talk where he talks about just what happens when there's major shifts of thinking in society and there's different phases that ideas go through. And the initial phase often is opposition. It's like we want to stomp this Out. We want to just end this conversation. We want to prevent people who have these ideas from getting a platform. But then what happens is as the idea continues to grow as a gains traction, the next phase often is that people just ignore it. They just pretend it's not there. They just hope it'll go away. And that kind of looks shapes the tone of the conversation. Because what you find is when Expelled came out, the challenge was that when people were presenting these ideas of design, there was a lot of persecution, that people would lose their positions. People who were people that were news reporters that would write favorably or even objectively about the topic were penalized. People like Rick Sternberg, who published. He was the editor that published Steve Meyer's famous article at the Smithsonian. He really was shut out of his office. Even. So what happened is those early years of persecution is what inspired the movie Expelled because it talked about what are the challenges that people face.
Well, now that we're in a different phase of the conversation where the ideas have gotten out there. Steve Meyer has been on Joe Rogan, Piers Morgan.
We have several books out there. There's several really high level people that have either fully endorsed what we do or at least have said we really want to have the conversation. I think about Eric Weinstein, who is on Joe Rogan, saying that, you know, Steve Meyer has some very important ideas. So that's an incredible change. So what you're finding even is that if you look at the high profile critics of our work, there were some people that were very articulate 15 years ago, people like Ken Miller. But now what you find is there's just no one out there who even wants to have a debate. They don't even want to talk about us because they really can't respond to the arguments. They've become so strong. And the movie reflects that. So what the movie is not doing is debating people. It's not talking about persecution or opposition. It's simply laying out the facts. It's just really talking about how there's all this evidence out there that's absolutely incredible. And it really causes us to think deeply and ask questions. So I think the tone of the movie reflects how the conversation has changed.
[00:16:08] Speaker D: Yeah, that makes sense. I also think that that change in tone makes this movie accessible and interesting, palatable maybe to a broader audience than Expel did.
I'm just thinking about personal friends of mine that wouldn't be open to or excited about watching a film like Expelled, but would really enjoy this film because it is so thoughtful and nuanced and Non combative, I suppose you can say, even though it is really setting up this. This conflict, that there are two stories and one of them is.
Is measuring up to the evidence and the other is not. Even though it's setting up that. That conflict at the beginning and making a case for the story of everything. It's. It's really done in a really thoughtful, thought provoking way.
I'm curious what you think about how the film will be received by different types of audiences. For example, putting yourself in the shoes of a.
Someone who's been following the Intelligent Design movement for years or putting yourselves in the shoes of a thoughtful skeptic. I'm just curious what you anticipate as reactions to the film.
[00:17:18] Speaker A: Well, I think for a person who's very familiar with the arguments, what'll be very beneficial is they'll know a lot of the material, but they'll see the material placed that's framed in such a way that's very accessible and it'll help people see the big picture. And I think it's going to help a lot of people to know how to present the material to others and know the significance of it. So I think that's going to be very beneficial for others. There'll be a sense of nostalgia, like, oh yeah, yeah, I remember these people. I remember these challenges. In fact, at one point in the movie or several points in the movie, it actually shows like this old TV set with these interviews of people in black and white that creates a sense of nostalgia and what's happened in the past.
But then when you start to see the new faces, it'll be a sense of excitement that it really shows that this is starting to become mainstream ideas. In fact, the fine tuning of the universe is something that's well recognized even by secular scholars.
So I think for people it'll be who are familiar with Winterly, very exciting, very encouraging. But I think for people who. And this will be most people, like when I do these talks at universities, I speak to people of all different backgrounds and most people have not heard the arguments, even the most basic level of the arguments. So a lot of people are going to be absolutely dumbfounded by the material that's out there that points to design.
So that'll be, I think, the majority of people. And of course the skeptic will be the skeptic. It's like, well, you know, I don't really like what they're saying. I don't agree with this. So they'll just simply ignore what's being said or rationalize it away. And again, this isn't a super high level movie for PhDs. This is for the average public.
So it's not going to go into enormous depth about counter arguments and arguments. It's just going to present the basic ideas out there in a way that's accessible and very compelling. So I think the people that'll be most impacted are people that have just never heard about the arguments before and those that may know them, but would like to know how to present them in a more effective way.
[00:19:16] Speaker D: That's great and that's very exciting because we have hours and hours worth of recorded talks and content on the technical details. But to have something that's really accessible and beautiful and easy to share with friends and skeptics alike is really a great, great thing. Is there anything else that we haven't covered that you really want to just mention from either your experience on set or just from the content of the film? Anything else that stands out?
[00:19:43] Speaker A: Well, I think one thing that's very encouraging about the film is the graphics.
Because when you look at the animations, they spend a lot of money doing animations, right?
And what the animations do is they really help to illustrate the ideas in a visual way that helps them to be understood and internalized in a much deeper way. Like the portrayal of the multiverse was very powerful, showing these universes kind of being constructed. The animations of molecular machines really illustrate just how extraordinary these machines are. And I think just the graphics, the production value, the use of history, it all flows together very beautifully. It's just a well done film.
[00:20:21] Speaker D: Yeah, I agree.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: That was Dr. Brian Miller speaking with Daniel Reeves about the Story of Everything, which opens in theaters April 30, 2026.
Learn more about the film and get single and group tickets at TheStoryOfEverything film. That's the website address. TheStoryOfEverything film. That'll take you to the trailers. You'll get to learn about the filmmakers and you'll see the whole cast of experts that are featured in the film, the StoryOfEverything film.
Also, look out for more coverage of the movie on this podcast. We've got interviews with the director, Eric Esau, as well as some of the experts featured in the film. Dr. Michael Behe, Dr. Doug Axe, Dr. Tim McGrew, and Dr. Sarah Salviander. Well, lots more to come. Thanks for joining us for Idea the Future. I'm Andrew McDermott.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: Visit us at idthefuture.com and intelligentdesign.org this
[00:21:19] Speaker D: program is copyright discovery Institute and recorded by its center for Science and Culture.
