“Mystery humbles you”: Scott Derrickson on why skepticism and faith aren’t enemies

More than a decade ago, the director Scott Derrickson invited me to serve as the science consultant on the 2016 film Doctor Strange. It was a high point of my professional life, and it also sparked a dialogue between the two of us, one made rich by the insight, resolve, and honesty that Derrickson brings to his thinking about science and religion.

Derrickson is an acclaimed filmmaker whose work spans from horror (The Exorcism of Emily Rose, Sinister, The Black Phone) to tightly paced, genre-breaking action films (The Gorge) to blockbuster Marvel movies (Doctor Strange). We were introduced years ago by the wonderful science journalist Jennifer Ouellette after I’d completed my first book, The Constant Fire: Beyond the Science vs. Religion Debate.

I was a scientist with a strong interest in human spiritual endeavor. Scott was an artist with deep religious convictions and his own love of science. That’s why Ouellette thought we’d have an interesting conversation — we did, and that dialogue has continued for the past decade and a half. 

Scott’s interest lies in what’s true for us as human beings and how we can find those truths through both science and art. In this interview, we sat down to talk about the questions that arise in that pursuit. What follows is a shortened version of our discussion.

Adam Frank: You’ve always been someone with a strong personal spiritual life, but also someone deeply interested in science. So, I wanted to start by asking: What’s your take on the tension — or maybe the harmony — between science and religion today?

Scott Derrickson: I think that the “science vs. religion” culture war that was so prominent in the ’70s, ’80s, even into the early 2000s has largely quieted. What you see now isn’t so much science vs. religion, but a deeper philosophical divide: faith vs. skepticism.

Skepticism, to me, is a healthy sensibility — it values falsifiability and verification. But faith, contrary to what many skeptics think, isn’t just the embrace of the irrational or unprovable. It’s another kind of sensibility — one that values communal human experiences like prayer, mystery, and the sacred. Both skepticism and faith are ways of trying to make sense of the world. They’re not enemies; they’re different languages.

My favorite Western philosopher, Kierkegaard, spoke about that leap of faith. The idea is that even though you leap into nothing, you land on something. And that something you land on is experientially very powerful and very real, but you can’t understand it until you leap.

Adam Frank: That’s a beautiful distinction — sensibilities rather than ideologies. So, when someone asks if you’re religious, how do you answer?

Scott Derrickson: Well, first of all, these sensibilities were with me from when I was young. I wasn’t taught them. I wasn’t raised in a religious environment. But I have these early memories from when I was probably three of looking at the room and seeing the table and the sofas and the dirty tile floor and thinking, “What is really important here is not just what I can see.”

But when people ask that question about being religious, I usually ask them, “What do you mean by that?” Even when someone asks if I’m Christian, I want to clarify what they’re really asking. These terms — “religious,” “Christian” — have shifted so much in public consciousness. But at my core, I’m a lover of truth and mystery. I think any good scientist is, too.

I love science. I’m not a scientist — I’m terrible at math — but I deeply appreciate it as the most rigorous truth-telling system we’ve got. What I’ve come to believe is that science is incredibly good at answering the “what” and “how” of the world, but faith is often better at the “why.”

Adam Frank: And yet, as we’ve both seen, people often mistrust science — or religion — without really engaging with what either is.

Scott Derrickson: Exactly. I used to be more skeptical of science, until I realized the only way to disprove science…is with better science. It’s self-correcting, and that makes it beautiful. But I’ve also tried as hard as I can to put my spiritual sensibilities and beliefs on the chopping block — to interrogate them, to apply skepticism to them. And every time I’ve done that, I’ve come out with a stronger conviction that faith is not only reasonable — it’s essential.

Adam Frank: So, how does all this make its way into your films?

Scott Derrickson: Emotion is central to cinema, and fear is the emotion I understood best growing up. That’s why I gravitated toward horror. But it’s not just fear for fear’s sake — I’m drawn to questions like: What if we’re not alone in the Universe? What if demons or ghosts really exist? These are ancient, human questions that keep showing up across cultures and time.

With The Exorcism of Emily Rose, I wanted to create a serious conversation about possession and exorcism as a real anthropological phenomenon. I wasn’t trying to give answers — I wanted the viewer to wrestle with both sides. But some critics labeled it a politically conservative film just for treating the question seriously, which I thought missed the point entirely.

Adam Frank: You did something similar with Doctor Strange — you brought spiritual questions into a Marvel movie.

Scott Derrickson: That film was a real spiritual pivot for me. I dove into Eastern philosophy — Buddhism, Hinduism — and came out of it more of a mystic than anything else. If you asked me today what I am spiritually, I’d say that: a mystic. Someone who sees mystery not as the absence of meaning, but as the presence of more meaning than we can comprehend.

Both science and religion often act like they have all the answers. But mystery humbles you. It shifts your worldview. It forces you to accept that we live in a magical, enchanted world — not in a metaphorical sense, but in a deeply experiential one.

Adam Frank: You and I have talked about this before, but I love what you said once — that enchantment is part of experience. It’s not a side effect. It’s foundational.

Scott Derrickson: Absolutely. That enchantment is real. It’s in music, in language, in our collective sense of justice — the moral law within. It’s in the feeling that we’re not what we’re supposed to be — what Chesterton called the “only provable tenet of Christianity.” That sense of falling morally short, and of longing to be better — where does that come from?

Adam Frank: So, last question: If someone handed you a blank check to make any film you wanted — one that really dives into this science-faith overlap — what would you do?

Scott Derrickson: I’d love to adapt Paradise Lost — to tell the story of Lucifer’s fall, and the subsequent war in heaven in a new way. These old myths still hold enormous symbolic truth. As we advance scientifically, we are given amazing new models for the origin of the world, but we forget to tell fresh, human origin stories from a spiritual point of view.

Also, I think no one explores that overlap better than SF author Ted Chiang. His short stories — especially Hell is the Absence of God — are incredibly profound. Even though he’s not religious, he continually taps into something deeply spiritual. That’s the kind of work I admire most. And that’s the space I hope to keep exploring — between what we empirically know and what we spiritually experience.