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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Story of Everything

Stephen Meyer and the Great Metaphysical Bailout

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

When “we don't know” becomes “therefore God”

Stephen Meyer has made a remarkably successful career out of a very simple intellectual maneuver: take a genuine scientific mystery, enlarge it into a philosophical crisis, and then present God as the missing explanatory ingredient.

His new film, The Story of Everything, is the latest and most ambitious version of this strategy. It promises nothing less than an account of where everything came from and why the universe is the way it is. The film draws together the familiar Meyer themes: the beginning of the cosmos, fine-tuning, biological information, the origin of life, and the intelligibility of nature.

There is nothing wrong with asking any of these questions. They are wonderful questions.

The trouble starts when Meyer quietly changes the rules of the game.

Science says: we don't yet know.

Meyer says: perhaps science doesn't know because there is a Mind behind it all.

And then, before long, “perhaps” becomes “the evidence points to,” which becomes “the best explanation is,” which finally becomes Christian theism.

This is not a scientific revolution. It is a metaphysical bailout.

The old creationism gets a scientific makeover

Meyer is not a young-earth creationist. That distinction matters. He accepts the Big Bang, an ancient universe, and much of contemporary cosmology. He has learned the lessons of the scientific revolution well enough to understand that simply quoting Genesis is not going to persuade educated modern audiences.

So intelligent design performs a clever rebranding operation.

Creationism becomes “design.”

The Creator becomes “intelligence.”

Biblical revelation becomes “inference to the best explanation.”

Miracles become “causal agency.”

And the whole enterprise is wrapped in the language of contemporary science.

This is what makes Meyer more interesting than the average creationist—and also more philosophically slippery.

The fundamentalist says: God did it because the Bible says God did it.

Meyer says: Look at the evidence and infer the best explanation.

But when we examine the inference, the old creationist conclusion has not disappeared. It has merely been given a laboratory coat.

The magic word is “information”

Meyer has always been particularly fond of information.

DNA contains information. Therefore, he argues, its origin calls for an explanation in terms of intelligence.

This sounds persuasive until one asks what kind of information DNA actually contains.

DNA isn't a message lying around in a bottle waiting for somebody to read it. It is part of an enormously complicated biochemical system in which replication, variation, selection, development and environmental interaction are inseparably entangled.

The evolutionary process does not require a complete biological program to be written in one miraculous act.

It requires cumulative retention of differences.

That distinction is absolutely central.

Meyer repeatedly takes the astonishing complexity of contemporary biological systems and projects it backwards onto the origin of life. But the origin of life and the subsequent evolution of life are different scientific questions. We may not yet know exactly how the first self-replicating systems arose. That is an open research problem.

But an open research problem is not evidence for a supernatural programmer.

This is the sleight of hand at the heart of intelligent design.

The harder the natural problem becomes, the more impressive the designer appears.

What could be more convenient?

Fine-tuning and the cosmic lottery

The same trick appears in Meyer's treatment of fine-tuning.

The physical universe is indeed astonishing. The parameters of physics fall within ranges that permit complex structures and, eventually, life as we know it.

But Meyer wants us to experience this as an enormous cosmic lottery in which the odds of winning were infinitesimal.

There is a small problem.

Where is the lottery?

What is the set of possible universes?

What is the probability distribution?

Which constants are genuinely independent?

What physical theory determines the range of possible values?

How do we know that the constants could have been different?

These are not pedantic objections. They are the missing premises of the argument.

We know one universe.

We know that its properties permit our existence.

We do not thereby know the probability of obtaining those properties from some hypothetical ensemble of universes.

Meyer frequently presents an intuition of improbability as though it were a measured probability.

That is not physics.

It is metaphysics wearing a numerical costume.

The Big Bang: a beginning is not yet a Creator

The beginning of the universe provides Meyer with another magnificent opportunity.

If the universe had a beginning, then what caused it?

It is a perfectly legitimate question.

But notice how quickly the argument proceeds:

The universe had a beginning.

Therefore, it requires a cause.

The cause must be outside the universe.

That cause must be timeless, spaceless and immaterial.

And that sounds suspiciously like God.

But every step after the first is philosophical, not observational.

Perhaps our current physical theories break down at the beginning of cosmic history. Perhaps “before” is not even a meaningful temporal category in the ordinary sense. Perhaps there is a deeper physical description. Perhaps there are cosmological possibilities we have not yet discovered.

Or perhaps Meyer is right and there is a transcendent intelligence.

Science does not currently settle the matter.

That is precisely why the intellectually honest answer remains:

We don't know.

Meyer dislikes that answer because his entire apologetic project depends upon making ignorance look like evidence.

The God-shaped gap

There is a familiar pattern here.

Whenever science has an explanatory gap, Meyer places God inside it.

The origin of the universe? God.

Fine-tuning? God.

The origin of biological information? God.

The origin of life? God.

Consciousness? God.

The intelligibility of mathematics? God.

The astonishing thing is not that Meyer finds God everywhere.

The astonishing thing is that God always seems to appear precisely where the explanation is incomplete.

This is the God of the explanatory gaps.

And the history of science is not especially kind to this strategy.

Gaps tend to shrink.

Not always, and not necessarily forever. But historically, phenomena once attributed to supernatural agency have repeatedly acquired natural explanations.

That does not prove that every mystery will eventually be solved scientifically. It does establish a very sensible epistemic rule:

An unexplained phenomenon is not evidence for whatever explanation happens to be available.

Meyer's real opponent is not science

There is another important trick in Meyer's presentation: the invention of “materialism” as the villain.

Materialism is portrayed as the worldview that says everything is accidental, meaningless and purposeless.

But that is a caricature.

Science does not tell us that human love is meaningless because brains evolved.

Evolution does not tell us that Mozart is worthless because musical abilities have biological antecedents.

Cosmology does not tell us that our lives are insignificant because the universe is vast.

Neuroscience does not tell us that friendship is an illusion because friendship involves neural activity.

Those are philosophical conclusions that some people may draw from naturalism. They are not scientific findings.

The false choice is therefore:

God or meaninglessness.

But there is an enormous middle ground.

A naturalistic universe can contain emergent complexity, consciousness, language, culture, morality, art, science and genuine human meaning.

One can reject supernatural creation without rejecting meaning.

Indeed, one can regard the fact that meaning emerges within a natural universe as one of the most interesting things that has ever happened.

Meyer doesn't spend much time exploring that possibility.

He needs the existential crisis.

Without the crisis, there is much less demand for the cure.

Enter the meaning crisis

And here the Meyer project begins to intersect with the contemporary Integral world.

For years, Integral thinkers have been warning about fragmentation, nihilism, disenchantment, secularization and the supposed “meaning crisis” of modernity.

There is a legitimate issue here. Modern societies really do contain conflicting value systems, religious disaffiliation, political polarization, ecological anxiety and widespread uncertainty about ultimate meaning.

But there is a remarkable temptation in certain Integral and metamodern circles to treat secular modernity itself as the disease.

Meyer offers a convenient solution.

Science gives us the facts.

Materialism supposedly drains them of meaning.

Metaphysics restores meaning.

God returns.

The cosmos becomes purposeful again.

What could be more satisfying?

And what could be less scientifically necessary?

The Integral temptation

This is where Meyer becomes especially relevant to Integral World.

Integral theory has long tried to distinguish itself from fundamentalist religion by insisting that premodern religious worldviews cannot simply be restored. We need a worldview adequate to modern science and postmodern critique.

Fine.

But what happens when “integral” becomes a sophisticated mechanism for smuggling metaphysics back into science?

The vocabulary changes.

Instead of “God created the universe,” we get “the universe is intrinsically purposive.”

Instead of “God guides evolution,” we get “evolution has an inherent direction.”

Instead of “Spirit created matter,” we get “consciousness is fundamental.”

Instead of “divine providence,” we get “Eros.”

The theological furniture has been rearranged.

The house looks modern.

The basement is still metaphysical.

This is precisely why Meyer's film deserves criticism from an Integral perspective. The issue is not whether transcendence is permitted. It is whether transcendental interpretations are being presented as though empirical science had already established them.

That is where the trouble begins.

Wilber's Eros and Meyer's Designer

There is a striking family resemblance between Meyer's intelligent designer and Ken Wilber's Eros.

They are obviously not identical concepts. Meyer invokes an intelligent agent; Wilber generally speaks of an intrinsic evolutionary drive toward greater complexity, consciousness and depth.

But epistemically they perform a similar function.

Something remarkable happens in evolution.

Why?

Because there is a deeper purposive principle behind it.

Meyer calls it design.

Wilber calls it Eros.

One person invokes intelligence.

The other invokes Spirit.

But neither explanation becomes scientific merely because the unknown cause receives a name.

This is the fundamental criticism I have repeatedly made of Wilber's Eros: it does not explain anything.

Calling evolution “Eros” does not tell us which mechanisms operate, how they operate, under what conditions they operate, or what observations would distinguish Eros from ordinary evolutionary processes.

Likewise, calling the origin of biological information “intelligent design” does not explain how the alleged intelligence generated the first information-bearing system.

A label is not a mechanism.

A metaphysical interpretation is not automatically an explanation.

The amazing universe needs no supernatural narrator

There is also something strangely unnecessary about Meyer's project.

The actual scientific story is already extraordinary.

The early universe cooled.

Particles formed.

Stars ignited.

Heavy elements were forged inside stars and stellar explosions.

Planets emerged.

Chemistry became increasingly complex.

On at least one planet, self-replicating chemistry eventually gave rise to evolving life.

Over billions of years, life diversified.

Nervous systems evolved.

Brains became more complex.

Eventually one species acquired language, mathematics, symbolic culture and cumulative technological knowledge.

That species built telescopes capable of looking billions of years into the cosmic past.

It decoded the molecular basis of heredity.

It reconstructed its own evolutionary history.

It discovered that the atoms in its body were manufactured in ancient stars.

And then it asked:

Why?

That is already an extraordinary story.

Why does Meyer need to interrupt it with an invisible supernatural intelligence?

Because the scientific story is not a theological story.

And that, ultimately, is what bothers him.

Science does not owe us metaphysical closure

Perhaps the deepest problem with The Story of Everything is its demand for closure.

Science is enormously successful precisely because it is willing to leave questions open.

It does not need to provide an ultimate meaning of existence.

It does not need to tell us what the universe is “for.”

It does not need to reassure us that consciousness was intended.

It does not need to guarantee that human beings occupy a privileged place in cosmic history.

Science describes, explains and predicts phenomena.

Philosophy can ask what these findings mean.

Religion can offer its own interpretations.

Art can explore their existential dimensions.

But once Meyer turns a philosophical interpretation into a purported scientific inference, categories begin to collapse.

The question is no longer simply whether God exists.

It is whether God is doing explanatory work that science has actually established.

And here Meyer's case is much weaker than his cinematic presentation suggests.

The ultimate irony

The title The Story of Everything is therefore unintentionally revealing.

Meyer does not actually possess the story of everything.

Nobody does.

He possesses a particular interpretation of the things we currently know about the universe.

That interpretation begins with science, passes through philosophical inference, and ends with Christian theism.

The danger lies in allowing viewers to forget where the scientific evidence ends and the theological interpretation begins.

This is the same epistemic problem that appears in much contemporary Integral discourse.

Science discovers complexity.

Integral theory discovers Eros.

Science discovers consciousness.

Integral theory discovers Spirit.

Science discovers emergence.

Metaphysics discovers purpose.

Science discovers unanswered questions.

Apologetics discovers God.

And suddenly the universe has been explained.

Except that it hasn't.

The real story is unfinished

There is nothing embarrassing about saying that we don't know why there is something rather than nothing.

There is nothing embarrassing about admitting that the origin of life remains incompletely understood.

There is nothing embarrassing about acknowledging that consciousness remains philosophically and scientifically difficult.

There is nothing embarrassing about debating fine-tuning, cosmology, emergence or the limits of naturalistic explanation.

These are precisely the questions that make science intellectually exciting.

What is embarrassing is pretending that an unexplained phenomenon has become evidence for your preferred metaphysics merely because you have run out of scientific explanations.

That is not intellectual courage.

It is metaphysical opportunism.

Meyer's Story of Everything is therefore less a story of everything than a story about the persistent human desire to put a divine signature at the end of every scientific question mark.

The universe may indeed have a deeper explanation.

Perhaps it even has a transcendent explanation.

But Meyer hasn't demonstrated that.

He has done something much more familiar.

He has taken the frontier of human ignorance and painted God on the other side.

The great irony is that the scientific worldview he seeks to defeat is perfectly capable of saying something much more intellectually modest—and much more honest:

Here is what we know. Here is what we don't know. Let's find out.

That may not be a story of everything.

But at least it is a story that hasn't been written in advance.