The scientific evidence for God’s existence is overwhelming.

So argues The Story of Everything, a landmark documentary that hit the big screen this spring. Drawing from interviews with a range of scientists — including two Biola professors — the film lays out a scientific case that the universe is best explained by an intelligent designer, rather than materialism and chance.

The film’s writer, Dr. Stephen Meyer, a leading intelligent design proponent and author of Return of the God Hypothesis, appeared at Biola on April 22 for a free screening, about a week before the film’s theatrical debut. In a panel discussion with three Biola professors — including two featured prominently in the film, Dr. Douglas Axe and Dr. Richard Gunasekera — Meyer said he hopes the film will expose broad audiences to questions about God and science.

“There’s a way in which film, with music, with visuals, with storytelling, can do something that a mere scientific paper can’t do,” Meyer said. “We all wanted to see the case for design — the case for the reality of God, the case for the mind behind the universe — to be brought to life in a way that the words on the printed page alone couldn’t do.”

Set against striking visual animations and a sweeping score, the film features scholars from a range of fields — biochemistry, biology, geology, mathematics, philosophy, physics. Together, they advance three lines of argument for God’s existence: the origins of the universe from nothing, the fine-tuning required for life, and the complexity of the cell.

Axe, the Rosa Endowed Chair of Molecular Biology at Biola’s School of Science, Technology and Health and author of Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed, features prominently in a section explaining the intricate design of protein molecules within the cell. He also shares an argument from beauty, reasoning that the world doesn’t match what ought to be expected if individuals are merely throwaway survival machines for propagating DNA.

“What would life look like if the Darwinian mechanism were the cause of it?” Axe said during the panel discussion. “I think it would look very ugly. Open your eyes and look around, and you see this just amazing display of extravagant beauty — 6,000 ladybug species, with different colors and different numbers of dots. You wouldn’t have that in a brutalist, survival-only world.”

Learn more about ‘The Story of Everything’ at thestoryofeverything.film.