Stephen C. Meyer has spent much of his career arguing that some of the deepest discoveries in modern science point beyond material explanations. A philosopher of science who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, Meyer is a former geophysicist and college professor and currently directs the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture in Seattle. He is best known as one of the leading voices associated with intelligent design, a controversial but culturally influential movement that challenges strictly materialist accounts of life, the universe, and human origins.
Across books such as Signature in the Cell, Darwin’s Doubt, and Return of the God Hypothesis, Meyer has built a sustained case that features of biology and cosmology—especially the information encoded in DNA, the apparent fine-tuning of the universe, and evidence for a cosmic beginning—are best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence. His critics see intelligent design as a theological argument dressed in scientific language. Meyer, however, insists that his work belongs within the tradition of inference to the best explanation: weighing competing hypotheses and asking what kind of cause is known to produce the effects under investigation.
His new documentary, The Story of Everything, brings those arguments to the screen. Scheduled for a theatrical run beginning April 30, the film is billed as a 105-minute cinematic exploration of the cosmos, life, and the question of whether nature bears evidence of intentional design. The project features Meyer alongside figures including Lee Strobel, John Lennox, Jay W. Richards, Timothy McGrew, James Tour, and Douglas Axe. According to Fathom Entertainment, the film traces evidence of design “from the precise laws that govern the stars to the intricate patterns found in every living cell.”
In conversation, Meyer frames the film as a cinematic adaptation of Return of the God Hypothesis and, more broadly, as an expression of his life’s work. Rather than relying on a narrator, the documentary lets scientists and philosophers present the discoveries and arguments in their own voices. That choice matters because The Story of Everything is not simply a film about science; it is a film about what science may be allowed to imply. Can discoveries in physics, cosmology, and molecular biology point toward a transcendent intelligence? Can intelligent design be tested like other scientific hypotheses? Where does philosophy of science end and theology begin?
Those questions sit at the center of this interview. What follows is a wide-ranging discussion with Meyer about the making of The Story of Everything, the core claims of intelligent design, the Big Bang, DNA, “junk” DNA, the charge that design arguments rely on gaps in knowledge, and the relationship between scientific evidence, natural theology, and Christian belief. The result is a conversation not only about a film, but about one of the most contested boundaries in modern thought: the line between scientific explanation and metaphysical meaning.
Starting all the way at the beginning: why make The Story of Everything?
Yes. It’s an expression of my life’s work and my last book, which was a culminating book on design in life and the universe. The book was called The Return of the God Hypothesis. The film is a cinematic adaptation of that, and I think it allows more people to understand the scientific discoveries—and the arguments around those discoveries—that I think point to the transcendent intelligence behind the universe.
Staying on the film topic for one second: while you were making the The Story of Everything, were you ever somewhat cautious about the tone and about striking a more emotional argument? Because film and books are very different mediums, and when you make a film, it can be easier to fall into playing on emotions than it is in a book. Did that ever cross your mind?
Sure. We were doing something very unusual in the way we told the story. Rather than have a narrator, which can often lead to a very polemical presentation of ideas, we let the scientists and philosophers of science who were principals—making the arguments and, in some cases, making the discoveries—tell the story themselves. They tell the story of the key discoveries and how we think they should be best interpreted.
You may be familiar with The Big Short, the film about the financial collapse. In that film, there were actors playing the principals who were part of the story of the financial collapse, and the film cut back and forth between the different principals so that the story unfolded in the voices of people who were part of it. Obviously, in that case, the individuals were played by actors. But we used the same kind of device. There is no narrator and no host. Rather, different scientists and philosophers of science who are experts in the different scientific subject matters we cover are telling the story of how the science was discovered and what it means.
Okay. Now briefly, what is intelligent design for people who aren’t familiar with it?
Yeah, sure. Intelligent design is the theory that there are certain features of life and the universe that are best explained by the activity of a designing intelligence rather than by undirected material processes, such as, in the biological realm, the theory of natural selection acting on random mutations, or, in the cosmological realm, theories such as the multiverse, which are inherently materialistic.
Okay. Can you tell me about this designing intelligence, and how do you know that it is there?
The argument for intelligent design uses a standard method of scientific reasoning: inference to the best explanation, sometimes called the method of multiple competing hypotheses. In this standard method, a best explanation is presumed to posit a cause that is known to explain or produce the effects in question. In the best cases, it is a cause that is uniquely known to be able to produce the effects in question.
So when we make the case for intelligent design, we’re looking at features in life and the universe that we know from our repeated experience are always produced by an intelligent agent. One of those key features is the presence of digital information. The huge discovery of the molecular biological revolution was not just the structure of the DNA molecule, but the presence of information stored in the DNA molecule and the presence of a complex information-processing system that expresses that information.
We know from our uniform and repeated experience that information is a mind product. Bill Gates has said that DNA is like a software program, but much more complex than any we’ve ever created. Richard Dawkins has acknowledged that DNA contains machine code. Well, we know that machine code, digital code, or information is always the product of a mind. Software is always the product of a programmer. In fact, whenever we see information and trace it back to its source, to its causal source, we always come to a mind process.
Whether we’re talking about machine code, computer code, a paragraph in a book, a hieroglyphic inscription, or information transmitted over a wire or radio signal, if you go back to the source of information, it is always the product of conscious intelligence. So the presence of information at the foundation of life provides a decisive indicator of the activity of intelligence in generating the information necessary to explain or produce the origin of life.
A simpler analogy might be looking at an iPhone. We don’t see the inventor of the iPhone anymore—Steve Jobs has passed away—but there is an unobservable cause of its origin, and that is the mind of Steve Jobs and the other engineers who worked with him. So when we see features that we know are the product of engineering design, and we see them in life or in the universe, we can infer in the reverse direction of time—what philosophers call making a retrodictive inference—to an intelligent cause.
In The Story of Everything and in intelligent design, in general, when you discuss beginnings like the Big Bang, you say that the designer essentially exists outside of that, right? He precedes the Big Bang, so he is somewhat extra-temporal and extra-spatial. He doesn’t really exist in our material world. So how can you use material examples as a way of proving something that exists outside of it? How does that argument work?
In modern cosmology, we have multiple lines of evidence that point back to a beginning of the universe itself. And by “beginning,” we mean the origin of matter, space, time, and energy.
We have evidence from observational astronomy that the expansion of the universe goes back to a starting point. We have other evidence from observational astronomy, things like the cosmic background radiation, that affirm that same conclusion. And then we have considerations from theoretical physics that point us back to a beginning as well.
The singularity theorems of Hawking and Penrose don’t prove an absolute beginning, but they get about as close as you can get using the tools of physics. Another proof of a beginning, based not on general relativity but on special relativity—the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem—also points strikingly toward a beginning. For a number of reasons, the postulation of an absolute beginning provides a better explanation of that whole ensemble of evidence than does any kind of static universe.
Back extrapolations from observational astronomy all terminate with a stopping point. There is a point past which the back extrapolation implies you cannot go. And in general relativity, matter, space, time, and energy are all linked. So there is a very strong argument for the idea that the universe itself had a beginning.
If, with that beginning, matter and energy come into existence, then you cannot posit matter and energy as the cause of the origin of matter and energy. If matter and energy begin to exist, then there is no matter and energy independent of that, or before that, that can function as the cause. And so you have a great difficulty for any materialistic explanation.
Instead, you have to begin to think: What kind of entity could cause the origin of matter, space, time, and energy? It would have to be an entity that in some way resides independently of our space and time. It is not bound by matter and energy, or it is not itself a material entity.
Moreover, at the beginning, you have a dramatic change in state, from either nothing to something or from some pre-existing state to the expansion of a universe that looks like a decisive volitional act. So I think, if you start to think about what is required to explain what we see when we’re talking about the origin of the universe—or what we have inferred about the origin of the universe—the best explanation is a transcendent intelligence of some kind.
How can intelligent design be testably scientific and the presence of the designer falsifiable?
The intelligent design hypothesis can be tested in the same way that we test any other scientific hypothesis: first, by assessing its explanatory power versus other competing explanations. In the work I’ve done, in my book Signature in the Cell and in my more recent book Return of the God Hypothesis, I show that the postulation of a designing intelligence provides a better explanation for the origin of the information necessary to produce life, or the fine-tuning necessary to allow for life at the cosmological level, than other competing explanations.
That is precisely because we have knowledge of the cause-and-effect structure of the world. Whenever we see functional or specified digital information—information in a digital format that is performing a function—and trace it back to its causal source, we always find that there is a mind at work. So when we posit designing intelligence as the explanation for that information, we’re positing something that provides an adequate explanation, a causally adequate explanation.
Then, when we evaluate other proposed explanations for that information, we find that they are inadequate, whether those explanations are based on chance, natural laws, or some combination of the two. In my work, I evaluate each of those categories and examples or types of explanations for the origin of information and show them, for various reasons, to be inadequate. The design hypothesis emerges as the best explanation among an ensemble of possibilities.
This is how we test many scientific theories. We test them by their comparative explanatory power. The hypothesis that best explains the evidence is the one that passes the critical empirical test.
In addition to that, we often test scientific explanations by making predictions based on the supposition or affirmation of a given hypothesis. Many people think intelligent design makes stale predictions. That is absolutely false. One of the predictions it made, contrary to evolutionary explanations for the origin of information, was that the so-called junk DNA would turn out to be importantly functional.
When it was discovered in the 1970s and 1980s that sections of the genome did not code for the production of proteins, leading neo-Darwinists immediately assumed that those non-coding regions were the product of a long process of accumulated random mutations—essentially junk. We acknowledge that mutation and natural selection are real biological processes, but in our theory, we did not expect that the majority of the genome would be nonfunctional, or that the genetic signal would be dwarfed by the noise.
So in the 1990s and early 2000s, a number of our leading researchers predicted that the non-coding regions of the genome would turn out to be functional. With the publication of the ENCODE projects in 2011 and other publications, it has been established that this prediction of the theory of intelligent design has been confirmed: the majority of those non-coding regions are, in fact, functional. They function like an operating system in a computer that controls the timing and expression of the data files, or the coding files, for proteins.
So that is an example of testing both by explanatory power and by prediction. Intelligent design is tested in exactly the same way you could test any other scientific theory.
I remember being taught about junk DNA in college way back in the 1990s. It didn’t stand to reason that you would have these vast stretches of junk DNA. Nature wouldn’t waste that much real estate on nothing else.
It stands to reason if you believe that nature was designed and that living systems were designed to run efficiently. If you think they were produced bottom-up by undirected mutation and selection, you would expect to see a lot of what the neo-Darwinists themselves put forward: lots of flops accumulating over vast stretches of geological time.
The discovery of the non-coding regions was immediately seized on by neo-Darwinists as confirmation of a prediction or expectation that they had based on their own understanding of how biological information arose and how it was modified by the mutation-selection process.
So this is a discriminating prediction. What the ID people predicted flowed directly out of the theory of intelligent design. It was a logical implication of the theory of intelligent design. What the neo-Darwinists predicted, in the alternative—namely, that there would be a lot of non-coding junk DNA—was a consequence of their understanding of the origin of biological form and information. The empirical result confirmed the intelligent design prediction over and against the prediction derived from neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory.
It’s interesting that you bring up geological time. That immediately brings to mind Lyell and the notion of gaps in knowledge. He refused to go all the way and make the jump to the notion that animals were able to go through transmutations because he said there were gaps. Sometimes intelligent design strikes me as saying that we have gaps in knowledge—let’s say, in what preceded the Big Bang, or in certain things in biological systems. But isn’t the history of science also about filling in those gaps?
Well, the theory of intelligent design is not based on gaps in our knowledge. It’s not an argument from ignorance. It’s an argument based on our knowledge of cause and effect. We know what produces information, and that is minds. Minds produce information. We know of no other cause.
So the argument is not “God of the gaps.” An argument from ignorance has the following logical form: Cause A cannot produce effect X; therefore, cause B must have done it. But we’re not arguing that way. We’re saying cause A—let’s call it mutation and selection, or chance, or whatever—cannot produce functional biological information. But we have independent knowledge that another cause is capable of doing that, and that cause is intelligent agency, or mind. Therefore, we can infer, based on what we know—not what we don’t know—that mind provides the best explanation.
You can say, “Maybe we’ll find some other cause later that is sufficient.” But all scientific arguments are contingent upon what we know now. The inference that we’re making is not logically fallacious, like a gap argument or an argument from ignorance. It is a provisional argument based on what we know about what is inside cells—namely, complex digital information and information-processing systems—and what we know from our uniform and repeated experience, which is the basis of all scientific reasoning, about what it takes to generate such information.
So it is a standard method of scientific reasoning: the method of multiple competing hypotheses, or inference to the best explanation, which is the basis of the intelligent design argument.
In the case of cosmology, the idea that there is a gap that will be filled is a question-begging argument that presupposes philosophical materialism. The best evidence we have, as best we can tell, is that the universe itself had a beginning. This is just the conclusion of scientific investigation.
You can posit, and model all you like, infinite-universe cosmologies, but there is no evidence for those. That is a kind of materialism of the gaps, where the commitment to philosophical materialism continues to provide motivation for endless, extremely fanciful and convoluted modeling of infinite-universe cosmologies.
One of the things we’ve shown recently is that these infinite-universe cosmologies invariably require a huge amount of unexplained fine-tuning in the mathematical models that are generated. So even if you posit some sort of prior-to-the-Big-Bang state, a requirement of doing that is a mathematical or physical model that requires a lot of fine-tuning.
We found this first when Einstein attempted to circumvent the evidence for the beginning, which was an obvious conclusion of his new theory of gravity, general relativity. He was able to do that by coming up with a steady-state model, not only by positing a cosmological constant but by fine-tuning the value of the cosmological constant so he could show that it was in perfect balance with gravitation. The inward pull of gravitation and the outward push of the cosmological constant were in balance, and then he could portray the universe as being in a steady state.
Well, that didn’t work out well for empirical reasons. But also, in order to make that move, he had to arbitrarily choose a very specific value for the cosmological constant. In other words, he introduced unexplained fine-tuning into his steady-state model. Many current attempts to circumvent the evidence for the beginning do the same thing. Every one of the models we have examined introduces unexplained fine-tuning, which just provides evidence of theism on other grounds. You may get around the evidence for the beginning, but only at a high cost to philosophical naturalism.
Can I just go back to one thing? When I asked you about gaps in knowledge and your explanation of that, it brought to mind something that I kept hearing every now and again in the film. It kept sticking out when you would go from “this system is highly complex” to “this must be the product of a mind.” That seems like a big logical jump to me.
That’s not the argument. You’ve not represented the argument accurately.
So what is the argument?
The argument is not “complexity, therefore mind.” The argument is that there is a specific kind of complexity—namely, specified complexity or functional information—which we know from experience is always the product of a mind. The alternative attempts to explain that are inadequate. Therefore, the postulation of a mind provides the best explanation based on our knowledge of cause and effect.
And one question about the way you’re portraying it as an argument: is the argument entirely negative? Is it that it is so complex, and therefore it must be designed?
There is a series of logical steps in the development of the argument. We not only critique the inadequacy of standard evolutionary or materialistic explanations for the origin of the specific type of complexity that we’re looking at—namely, informational complexity—but we also provide positive evidence for the ability of minds or agents to produce that same type of effect. Then we can infer a mind as the best explanation among the available alternatives for the phenomenon in question.
So you said that this is your life’s work, and that your last book was a culmination. During the process over the years, and while you are presenting your case, do you ever worry that you are shifting from science and philosophy of science into theology and pure philosophy? Does that ever cross your mind?
Why would that be a worry?
Well, are we speaking theology now? Because if we are, then there is so much more we could talk about.
There is a long tradition in science, going back to Newton, Boyle, and John Ray, of what is called natural theology: the idea that a close investigation of nature leads to the conclusion that there was a mind behind the phenomena observed. If that is where the evidence leads, why is that a worry? That would just be following the evidence where it leads.
One of the keys of my work has been to show that this attempt to divide knowledge into categories and say that each type of knowledge must stay in its own separate category is misguided. Why can’t scientific discoveries have theological implications? Wouldn’t that be the most exciting thing you could discover?
That’s the argument in the film: that key scientific discoveries have theological or theistic implications. We don’t have to put scientific knowledge, philosophical knowledge, and theological knowledge into separate boxes. It may be that we live in a world where what we see in the physical world around us is pointing to a reality that we can’t see.
In fact, all science has that inferential structure. We inferred the existence of dark matter because of certain gravitational effects that couldn’t be explained apart from the postulation of something we couldn’t see—namely, dark matter. We infer the existence of subatomic particles on the basis of things that we see, but we can’t directly observe those particles. Science often posits the unobservable to explain the observable.
If there are certain aspects of our scientific discovery—the discovery that the universe had a beginning, the discovery that it was finely tuned from the beginning, and the discovery that the inner workings of the cell have features reminiscent of our high-tech digital and nanotechnology—and if those discoveries have implications that point to an intelligent mind behind it all, that would be a very exciting thing to consider. That has been the focus of a lot of my work, and obviously a lot of what we’re doing in the film. So I don’t think it’s a worry that scientific discovery may have a larger philosophical or theological implication. That could be an exciting thing rather than a worry.
Going from there, since we’ve just opened that door: as a Christian, do you believe that the cause, the designer, is the God of Christianity? And if so, what leads you to that conclusion?
Well, I think what is called natural theology—there’s this tradition that I did my teaching in at Cambridge. If you go back to the foundation of modern science, you have these deeply religious men who thought that scientific evidence was pointing to, as Newton put it, an intelligent and powerful being, with a capital B.
They also thought there were limits to what you could learn by studying nature. They called that general revelation. Those limits meant that you could infer the existence of a transcendent mind, but that would not tell you whether that transcendent mind was the God of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or something else.
So natural theology gets you so far. It does not prove a specific theistic religion. I happen to be a Christian, and I have other reasons for believing that, in part because I think there is tremendous evidence for the reliability of the biblical text, and I think there are very strong arguments for the key Christian claims about Christ.
But those are separate from the scientific considerations that lead me to accept that there must be a designing mind behind the universe, and that this designing mind most likely has attributes that are consistent with a theistic conception of God rather than a deistic or pantheistic one.
Yes, but if you’re Christian—I mean, if the natural theological God, for you, as a practicing Christian, is the being designing all these things, don’t you kind of have to go there? To me, it’s one of those things. I’m all for religious tolerance, but if you are going to be strict about your religion and really go by the rules, then people who aren’t believers are essentially not going to the same place you are. So you can’t just separate out what is inconvenient. Again, as a practicing Christian, how do you not bring them together? Because you can’t say you believe God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent, and at the same time separate that being from the natural theological intelligent designer.
The question really has to do with the film or the argument of the books that I’ve done. Obviously, as a Christian, I think the God I see evidence for in nature is the God of Christianity, or the God of the Bible. But in our film, we have conservative Jewish cosmologists. We have an agnostic. There are many people who see evidence for the existence of a transcendent deity who are not religiously practicing Christians.
So there is a common argument here that people of many faith traditions, or none at all, see as valid. If you want me to say that I believe the God I see evidence of in nature is the God of Christianity, I’m happy to say that. But I’m not saying that I believe in the Christian God only because of the evidence I see in nature. You need other types of evidence. I needed other types of evidence to convince me of Christianity.
The evidence described in the film convinced me of theism, but it did not convince me of Christianity as the specific form of theism that I hold. You need other types of evidence, arguments, considerations, and experiences, frankly.
Your response is kind of what I’m getting at. Whenever I was watching the film, and when I run into intelligent design in different places, it seems like intelligent design sometimes stops the extension of how far it is willing to go when it gets to certain theological or moral aspects.
That is a function of what you can infer from the evidence being discussed. Sometimes it’s presented as if people are being disingenuous.
What you would like people to take away from this film?
Yeah. I think there is a powerful argument against scientific materialism that has emerged from new discoveries in cosmology, physics, and biology. That same evidence is pointing toward—but not absolutely proving—the existence of a transcendent intelligence that is also active in creation. In other words, an intelligence that has the attributes that traditional theists have always ascribed to God.
(NOTE: The interview ended at the point where Meyer’s argument became most interesting — and most vulnerable. Throughout our conversation, he had carefully distinguished between intelligent design as a scientific inference and Christianity as a separate theological commitment. But when pressed, he acknowledged that, for him, the intelligence inferred from nature and the God of Christianity are one and the same. That admission does not invalidate the argument, but it changes the terrain. Once the designer is no longer an abstract mind but a personal, omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect God, the questions multiply: Why does nature contain so much suffering and waste? Why is divine authorship so ambiguous? And where, exactly, does science end and theology begin? In that sense, The Story of Everything may not close the case for design so much as open the door to a more difficult conversation.)
The Story of Everything opens in theaters nationwide on April 30.
INTERVIEWER: Marc Landas.