The movie Knowing reflects the reality that we all live by faith, and it shows us that the atheist attempt to reduce life to the material is doomed to failure. (Note: this essay includes several plot spoilers.)

The critics didn’t like Knowing. After all, it’s a Nicolas Cage movie, and for many critics he hasn’t done anything worthwhile since Leaving Las Vegas. Then there are the sci-fi, horror, and religious end-of-the-world elements that don’t offer any definitive answers. There is indeed much to complain about in the movie if one has a mind to do so, but the flaws are more a function of its grand (and laudable) ambitions than anything else.

The movie opens in 1959 with the dedication of a new school. A time capsule of student drawings is being placed in the ground to be opened fifty years later. One of the students, an obviously disturbed little girl, obsessively writes a sequence of numbers while all the other kids draw pictures as assigned. When the capsule is opened decades later, the son of the film’s protagonist, John Koestler (Cage), happens to get the envelope with the numbers. As you’ll see, this is no coincidence.

Koestler’s wife died in an apparent accident a year before, and he is struggling to raise his grade-school son alone. Koestler, an MIT professor and astrophysicist, wants to believe his “shit happens” form of atheism is a function of a rigorously scientific mind, but his wife’s death and his alienation from his pastor father clearly inform his atheistic worldview more than science does.

Now he is confronted with a piece of paper that predicted the date and location of every major disaster in the last fifty years. His faith in the random meaninglessness of reality is soon proven to be catastrophically wrong, and the film strongly suggests that he never really wanted to believe in this bleak meaninglessness anyway.

His professor friend, however, is the real deal, and he scoffs at Koestler’s newfound obsession (which of course is an entirely justifiable reaction). Soon, however, even he realizes his pretensions to scientific objectivism cannot stand up to a series of occurrences seemingly well outside the natural course of events.

Koestler’s search for answers leads him to the daughter of that little girl, Diana Wayland (played by Rose Byrne), now grown up with a daughter of her own, and they start searching for answers together. At first she resists Koestler’s entreaties for help, until one of his predictions comes tragically to pass (and the special effects in this sequence are spectacular). We then learn that Diana’s mother predicted the date of her death, which she is understandably not eager to explore because she knows that every prediction her mother made has come to pass.

A puzzle behind the numbers that temporarily stumps Koestler and Diana is that the sequence seems to end abruptly. In the film’s opening scene, the teacher pulls the paper away from the little girl because her time is up, but we that see she has indeed finished the sequence. The last two marks are two instances of the letter E, inverted. Eventually the current-day investigators come to the horrific realization that this stands for “everyone else.”

This, I’m sure, is where many critics and audience members stop accepting the film’s premises, but I can sympathize with the writers: either way they went would risk being hackneyed. The answer must be either God or aliens. In fact, the earlier sequences in the film provide suggestions for both solutions.

I had rather hoped that the force behind the predictions would remain mysterious, so that viewers could draw their own conclusions. If it is aliens, they are some powerful creatures. Omniscience is a divine trait, after all. So maybe it is God.

Throughout the movie we see men in dark clothing, at once menacing yet clearly not intending harm. Somehow they have a connection to the children, as a voice in their heads. There is a reason why only the children can hear them: these mystery beings are there to save these children from a coming global conflagration caused by an enormous solar flare that will destroy earth’s ozone layer.

While we don’t know precisely who does this, whether it is God or some alien race of very powerful beings, the children are rescued in order to continue the human race. How this is done seems to lead to the conclusion that these are alien beings, because what appears to be a space ship comes to take Koestler’s son and Wayland’s daughter from earth. We also see other ships going around the world doing the same thing, so it is safe to conclude that a boy and girl are rescued in each of these. Again, many questions, few answers.

Prior to their departure from earth, we get another indication that God may be behind all this.  The men in dark clothing transform into luminescent beings that appear to have angel wings. When the children are dropped off in their beautifully bucolic new world to begin the human race anew, we are shown something strongly suggesting the biblical Tree of Life.

I believe the writers purposely left this ambiguous because at its heart Knowing is a story not about the mechanics of saving the human race from a fictional catastrophe but instead about redemption and hope. Prior to John Koestler’s encounter with the page of numbers, his life is quite devoid of hope and meaning. He lives what Henry David Thoreau called a life of quiet desperation in what Koestler has concluded is a meaningless universe. The Scotch whiskey he consumes in copious quantities is just one overt testament to that.

Science couldn’t save Koestler, and the movie shows that such a one-dimensional view of reality has no power to address the deep longings of the human heart, the questions, the hopes, and fears common to all humanity.

Near the end of the film, Koestler is shown driving through the city as everything breaks down; he knows annihilation is imminent. In slow motion, we catch a glimpse of his atheist colleague holding on to his girlfriend or wife in a physical attitude conveying complete despair.

It is a poignant moment and resonates with Koestler’s situation. Koestler is on a mission to reach his father’s house before the world ends. Although time is short, he wants to be reconciled to his father before the quickly impending annihilation (religious symbolism alert!).
 
Koestler gets to his father’s house just in time to embrace his father, mother, and younger sister. The father tells him that dire though this situation may be, it is not the end. Koestler, now a man of faith and hope, says he knows that’s true—just as fire overtakes them and all along with it.

Seeing the world and everything in it literally burnt to a crisp in a wave of fire is discomforting, to say the least, but the film ends on a note of hope, moving from this scene of mass destruction to a tableau showing the children being dropped off in their new world.

There is much in this ending to bother everyone. Nonetheless, it answers the most important question, and quite clearly: There is more to life than mere matter randomly coming into being and then crumbling into nothing.

Radical atheists may think themselves brave to face a universe devoid of meaning, ruled by chance, droning on with no purpose, but that doesn’t change the facts of existence. The great mass of humanity understands this crucial truth: all of creation screams out that there is more to this world than atheists can dream of.

—Mike D’Virgilio