Submission by a staff writer

Why is there anything here at all? Not just matter or light, but order. Laws that behave consistently. Numbers that don’t dissolve into chaos. How does the universe hold together long enough for life to exist, for consciousness to emerge, for people to sit across from one another and argue about how anything came to be?

Further, what causes the incongruity in the way two people think? How is it that one person can hear a testimony of faith and feel their chest crack open, while another hears the same story and, emotionally unmoved, proceeds to ask, Okay, but is this story true? Throughout the journey of this article, I urge the believing reader to surrender the idea that the second person is cold or combative. For the next few minutes, view them simply as a human with a mind oriented toward explanation — someone who needs a line of logic that can withstand scrutiny before belief can follow.

Michael Ray Lewis was that person, or, for the sake of this article, the “intellectual nonbeliever,” for most of his life. He spent years identifying as an atheist, not out of a rebellious or contrarian nature, but because he felt that belief in God was unsupported by evidence. “I claimed the title of atheist because I didn’t see any good reason to believe God existed,” he told Katy Christian Magazine in a recent interview. 

Today, Lewis is the director of Universe Designed, a documentary shaped by the very questions he once assumed Christianity couldn’t answer — questions about the universe, about evidence, and about whether faith has any right to claim truth at all.

Christianity was not entirely absent from Lewis’s childhood, but it was far from a prominent force. His family likely, if asked, would have claimed to believe in God, yet said belief was not something discussed, questioned, or explained. God existed in the background of life, without much emphasis. Jesus was even less present. Faith was certainly not framed as something that required investigation.

As Lewis grew older, the explanations he did encounter arrived as fully formed conclusions against the biblical worldview, rather than open-ended discussions that beckoned participation.

“I had heard slogans like, ‘If there is a good God, why would He allow all the evil and suffering in the world?’” Lewis recalled. Questions about science followed a similar pattern. Evolution was presented as settled. The age of the universe was presented as settled. Christianity, by contrast, appeared outdated and unsupported. Without exposure to deeper engagement on either side, atheism became the position that felt internally consistent.

His perception of Christians reinforced that distance. What stood out to Lewis the most were encounters that left little room for dialogue. “All I could think about were those Christians on the street corners yelling that I was going to hell,” Lewis said. “I didn’t want anything to do with that.” In retrospect, Lewis does not describe his atheism as the result of a dramatic rejection of God. It was the result of unanswered questions accumulating over time. Christianity, as he encountered it, offered purported certainty without actual explanation. And without being shown that it could withstand scrutiny, he had little reason to treat it as a serious account of reality.

When Lewis’s wife told him she felt called back to church, the topic stopped being theoretical. It was in his house. It was in his marriage. He attended church with her a few times and watched the room the way a skeptic watches any room like that: alert and measuring the gap between spouted beliefs and what seemed logical. He began to ask his wife the same questions he’d had about the biblical worldview since childhood, questions about human suffering, science, evolution and justice. She couldn’t answer most of them, yet she still believed.

For Lewis, that created a problem that pestered him relentlessly. He needed a belief system to be able to withstand scrutiny, so he began consuming media that addressed the skepticism directly. That’s when he discovered something he didn’t know existed. 

“‘Christian apologetics’ is an entire field of study of people giving a defense for their faith,” he said, “and I had no idea it even existed.” Within apologetics, Lewis finally began to find his answers. Surprisingly, people had already been thinking about these objections for centuries, writing books about them, and building cases that attempted to explain reality rather than simply assert it.

One of the first places he hit a wall was Genesis. His wife had bought him a Bible, and he opened it with the assumptions he’d always held about what Christians were asking a person to swallow. “I opened the Bible, saw six days of creation, and thought, ‘This is ridiculous. We know the universe is 13.73 billion years old.’” That reaction carried real weight for him. Cosmology felt measurable, and Genesis felt like a mismatch.

Then he watched a video featuring astrophysicist Hugh Ross. Lewis doesn’t remember the exact title, but he remembers the moment his curiosity engaged. “That was the first moment that it really piqued my curiosity,” he said. Ross walked through the range of Christian interpretations of Genesis and the language behind them, including the ways the word translated as “day” can function. Lewis began to understand that Christians were not all making the same claim about timeframe, and that his argument had been built against one narrow reading.

From there, his question changed shape. Instead of deciding whether Genesis contradicted science, Lewis began asking what Genesis was actually claiming and how interpretation works at all. “When I learned there were multiple legitimate interpretations of Genesis, it knocked down one of the biggest roadblocks for me,” he said. He started treating Christianity as something that could be examined with seriousness, the way he treated any other claim about reality. The investigation had a starting point now, and he kept going.

And the process stretched out over years. He didn’t move from curiosity to belief quickly, and he didn’t follow a single line of reasoning to its end and stop. Instead, he kept raising objections and following them as far as he could. When one question found an answer, another surfaced behind it.

He read widely and unevenly, following whatever issue seemed most pressing at the time. Some weeks it was cosmology and the beginning of the universe. Other weeks it was philosophy, questions about morality and consciousness. He spent time with history as well, particularly the claims surrounding Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. What surprised him was the depth and quality of the answers he found. They weren’t improvised or thin; they were structured, argued, and often anticipated the very objections he was trying to raise.

Over time, a pattern emerged. “Every avenue I would try to take to prove Christianity wrong, I would find a very compelling answer to the question I had,” Lewis said. Each discipline pointed in the same direction. He did not find the same couple arguments being repeated, but a multitude of well constructed arguments that reinforced a larger picture. Christianity began to function as a legitimate framework for existence, capable of holding many different kinds of evidence at once.

That accumulation mattered more than any single breakthrough. Lewis describes undergoing an internal shift that was gradual but decisive. “At the end of three years, the cumulative case was just overwhelming,” he said. “I couldn’t deny it anymore.” The explanations he had assumed didn’t exist had been there all along, scattered across fields he had never thought to connect. Christianity had become the explanation that best accounted for the reality he observed.

Lewis felt persuaded by the evidence, yet he still felt internal resistance in adopting belief. The questions that had once dominated his thinking had largely been addressed, but he struggled with committing to Christianity. This delay was no longer about argument, but about what belief would require of him personally.

As he describes it, the resistance became clearer the longer he sat with it. “I realized that I wasn’t rejecting Christ on the basis of evidence,” Lewis said. “I was rejecting Him because I didn’t want it to be true.” The idea of God carried implications that reached beyond intellectual agreement. It meant accountability. It meant re-evaluating who was ultimately in control.

That recognition brought a different kind of pressure. “I felt like I was in control of my life,” he said, “and giving my life to Christ meant admitting that I wasn’t.” The cost he was weighing involved authority, direction, and the possibility that his life would no longer be shaped solely by his own preferences.

Lewis describes his conversion as something that arrived after long consideration and finally settled into place. His investigation had reached its end, and he made the informed decision to give his life to Christ.

As his new belief took hold, it didn’t remain abstract and philosophical or reserved for Sunday sermons. Lewis felt a sense of responsibility to uphold his walk with Christ in his ordinary decisions and daily life, and eventually, the shift reached into his work.

Filmmaking had been part of his life since he was young. He had spent years behind the camera, working as a cinematographer and editor, often on horror films. After his conversion, the work he had once pursued comfortably began to feel misaligned with what he now believed mattered.

“Everything shifted when I gave my life to Jesus,” Lewis said. “My conscience started telling me I needed to stop working on things like that.” The question that followed was practical. How should the skills he had developed be used now? What kind of work reflected the conclusions he had reached about reality and truth?

The move toward documentary took shape through conversation. As Lewis considered how to redirect his work, his wife suggested he create a film based on the evidence that had reshaped his own thinking. His belief had formed through investigation, and a documentary would offer the perfect space to crack open a door and invite his viewers to question their own worldviews.

He began by imagining a small project. The initial plan centered on conversations with people who had once identified as atheists and later came to believe. As the idea developed, his wife encouraged him to widen the scope and contact the authors and scholars whose work had guided his research.

Lewis reached out to them directly. Many responded and agreed to participate. He arranged travel, brought his camera, and met with them one at a time. Each interview followed the same pattern: Lewis raised the questions he had once carried himself and listened closely to how each person responded.

“I didn’t start with a story in mind,” Lewis said. “I just went and asked the difficult questions I had as an atheist.”

That process shaped the structure of the film as it took form. Each conversation informed the next. Ideas accumulated through sequence rather than summary. The film, Universe Designed (2025), developed at the pace of inquiry, allowing concepts to build through explanation rather than assertion.

As the project grew, Lewis recognized that he was creating the kind of resource he had searched for years earlier. The film assumed that questions belonged at the center of the conversation. It treated doubt as a place to begin thinking, not as something to move past quickly.

As the film approaches its conclusion, Lewis turns toward Christianity directly. The shift follows the logic that shaped his own investigation. The questions raised by cosmology and the origin of life led him toward the possibility of divine design. For Lewis, that possibility required further examination. Design alone did not answer questions about meaning, morality, or responsibility.

He wanted the film to follow that same trajectory. “I don’t want to stop at design,” Lewis said. “I want to take people all the way to the claims of Jesus.” For him, Christianity mattered because it made specific claims about reality and about human life within it. Those claims could be examined historically and philosophically, just as earlier questions had been.

Lewis focused on Jesus for that reason. The claims Jesus made about himself shaped the structure of Christian belief and carried implications that extended beyond general spirituality. Lewis saw those claims as central, not supplemental. “It’s the gospel that saves,” he said, “and there aren’t enough films that are explicit about who Jesus claimed to be.”

That conviction shaped the final movement of Universe Designed. The film moves from questions about the universe to questions about history, identity, and purpose. It presents Jesus as a historical figure whose life and resurrection stand at the center of Christian faith. Lewis wanted viewers to understand what Christianity actually asserts before deciding what to do with it.

By the time Universe Designed ends, the questions it raises no longer belong only to Lewis. They sit with the viewer. For some, they sound familiar. They resemble the questions a child keeps asking at the dinner table, the ones that never seem satisfied by emotional reassurance. They resemble the questions a partner raises late at night, out of an insistence that things don’t add up. For others, they sound uncomfortably close to their own private thoughts, the ones they learned to keep quiet because they didn’t know where to take them.

Lewis understands that posture well. He doesn’t expect a single film to resolve anyone’s doubts or bring belief into focus all at once. His hope is more modest and more patient. He wants the film to linger. He wants it to stay with people after the screen goes dark. He borrows a phrase from apologist Greg Koukl to describe that aim. “My hope is that this film would be a stone in your shoe,” Lewis said, “something you can’t stop thinking about.”

The metaphor is simple. A stone doesn’t force movement, but it changes how you walk. It reminds you, with every step, that something is there. For Lewis, that is how serious questions work. Once they’ve been introduced honestly, they tend to return. They press for consideration. They ask to be dealt with on their own terms.

This is where his story widens beyond biography. Many Christians have learned to speak about faith through emotion because emotion is how faith reached them. That approach carries power, but it also carries limits. For people whose minds are oriented toward explanation, coherence, and evidence, emotional language often leaves the central question untouched. The question remains the same: does this account of reality hold?

Lewis’s journey suggests that allowing space for that question is an act of respect. It treats the person asking as serious, attentive, and honest. It acknowledges that belief forms differently in different minds, and that patience can be a form of care.

Whether the reader sees themselves in Lewis or perhaps recognizes someone they love, the invitation is the same. Listen closely to the questions being asked. Notice what kind of answers they are seeking. Some people are looking for comfort. Others are looking for coherence. Both are human responses to the same universe, one that continues to exist, to operate by laws, and to invite explanation.

For Lewis, following that invitation led him to Christianity through evidence he once believed did not exist. For others, the path may unfold differently. The point, he would argue, is to take the questions seriously enough to let them do their work.

Universe Designed (2025) is available to rent or purchase on Google Play, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime Video.