The world is experiencing a very fascinating resurgence in belief among Gen Z and Millennials, and filmmaker Michael Ray Lewis, a former atheist-turned-believer, has a new project to help further foster this dynamic.
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Lewis, director of the new documentary “Universe Designed,” told CBN News about how his past atheism was driven by the fact many Christians simply couldn’t answer his questions.
“Questions like, ‘Well, evolution has disproven Christianity,'” he said. “[And], ‘If there’s an all-loving God, then there wouldn’t be the existence of evil in the world.'”
Lewis continued, “I would have objections like, ‘I can’t believe in a God who would send me to an eternal punishment just because I have trouble believing in Him.'”
With people around him unable or unwilling to answer these objections and questions, the filmmaker said he “gravitated towards atheism” and based his worldview on it.
“On top of that, I would watch documentaries by [atheist] Bill Maher. I remember I watched a documentary called ‘Zeitgeist,’ and both of those documentaries were showing how Christianity wasn’t true and that Jesus was just a myth that was copied by all these other ancient myths.”
But eventually, Lewis said something changed, and he found himself doing a double-take.
“It wasn’t until I took a second look at Christianity and dug deeper than just the surface level questions that I really started to discover that there were answers to not only the questions that I was asking, but there were positive arguments for the existence of God,” he said.
After he married his wife — a woman who had grown up in church but drifted away — something surprising happened. She approached him one day and said she felt Jesus was calling her back.
“I remember thinking to myself, ‘Oh, no. I don’t want to deal with this. But you know what? I love her. So I’ll go to church and I’ll see what all this is about,'” Lewis recalled. “I figured all I have to do to stop going to church is just to show her that it’s not true.”
And it was in that process that Lewis came to a realization: the Christianity he assumed was fraudulent started to come to life.
“That’s where I really started to discover the evidence,” he said. “She ended up buying me a Bible. I remember I read through a few pages of Genesis. I pushed it away and said, ‘This is nonsense,’ but it was actually one particular video of an astrophysicist that popped up on my YouTube feed, and he was showing that science is not incompatible with Christianity. In fact, science actually shows that there’s evidence for there being an intelligent creator. And I remember that was the first moment where it kind of piqued my curiosity.”
Over time, Lewis began examining the evidence more fervently, reading books and consulting resources to delve deeper into these connections. Eventually, he came around to believe.
“I remember, at the end of the three years, I was still pushing back,” he said. “Even though I had all this information, I was still skeptical. And I remember I started asking my wife questions about Scripture, specifically.”
His wife connected him with a theologian, who then helped him cross the finish line in 2016 and embrace Christianity.
“I realized that my reasoning for not believing in God wasn’t based on evidence anymore,” Lewis said. “It was the fact that I didn’t want it to be true, and that was when I thought to myself, ‘That’s not a good reason.’ I threw my hands up, gave my life to Jesus, and I am all in at this point.”
He had been working in the film industry, working on horror films. After finding Jesus, he felt compelled to “do something for the kingdom,” so he embarked on a journey toward creating “Universe Designed,” his new movie exploring evidence of God.
“I knew that I wanted to present a case for the existence of God, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to structure it,” he said. “So I just started collecting as much content as I could. I ended up with 36 hours of interview content that I ended up having to condense into an hour-and-25-minute film, have it make sense, have it tell a story, but not be too information-heavy to lose people. … I hope that that’s what I’ve done.”
Find out how to watch “Universe Designed” here.
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