All over the world, people are asking the same questions: Why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? What does it mean to be happy? Is there such a thing as evil? Does God really exist? This September, through the brilliant minds and personal struggles of two of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century, PBS presents an emotional and intellectual journey into the meaning of life. THE QUESTION OF GOD: C.S. LEWIS AND SIGMUND FREUD WITH DR. ARMAND NICHOLI, a two-part program airing on PBS Wednesdays, September 15-22, 2004, explores, in accessible and dramatic style, issues that preoccupy all thinking people today: What is happiness? How do we find meaning and purpose in our lives? How do we reconcile conflicting claims of love and sexuality? How do we cope with the problem of suffering and the inevitability of death? Based on a popular Harvard course taught by Dr. Armand M. Nicholi, author of the book The Question of God, the series illustrates the lives and insights of Sigmund Freud, a lifelong critic of religious belief, and C.S. Lewis, a celebrated Oxford don, literary critic and perhaps this century's most influential and popular proponent of faith based on reason. "It may be that Freud and Lewis represent conflicting parts of ourselves," Dr. Nicholi notes. "Part of us yearns for a relationship with the source of all joy, hope and happiness, as described by Lewis, and yet, there is another part that raises its fist in defiance and says with Freud 'I will not surrender.' Whatever part we choose to express will determine our purpose, our identity, and our whole philosophy of life." Through dramatic storytelling and compelling visual recreations, as well as interviews with biographers and historians and lively discussion, Freud and Lewis are brought together in a great debate. "The series presents a unique dialogue between Freud, the atheist, and Lewis, the believer," says Catherine Tatge, director of THE QUESTION OF GOD. "Through it we come to understand two very different ideas of human existence, and where each of us, as individuals, falls as believers and unbelievers." The important moments and emotional turning points in the lives of Freud and Lewis that gave rise to starkly different ideas fuel an intelligent and moving contemporary examination of the ultimate question of human existence: Does God really exist? Part one of THE QUESTION OF GOD presents the early stories of C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, two men with different ideas of human existence. In childhood, each embraced the religion of his family, but the early death of Lewis' mother and the horrors he witnessed in World War I tested his faith. In middle age, Lewis found his once-passionate atheism troubling, and began searching for faith again. Freud, studying medicine in the age of Darwin, found he had no use for a creator. As he developed his theory of psychoanalysis, he came to see belief in God as just another human fantasy. To grapple with the questions raised by the lives and ideas of Freud and Lewis, Dr. Armand Nicholi leads a panel of seven men and women in a wide-ranging discussion of some of the fundamental questions. What influences us to embrace or reject religious belief? Is the scientific method, as Freud wrote, the only path to the truth? Does the human longing for God, as Lewis wrote, actually prove that God exists? Do miracles actually happen? As Freud and Lewis entered middle age, their divergent beliefs about the existence of God were fixed. But tragedy would test each man's convictions. For Freud, it was the terror of the Third Reich and the death of a beloved daughter. For Lewis, the brief happiness of new romance in his fifties turned to ashes with the untimely death of his wife, igniting the greatest spiritual crisis of his life. In the end, each man confronted his own death with his beliefs intact. In the second part, Dr. Armand Nicholi and his panel continue their debate, exploring the implications of choosing a spiritual or secular worldview on the primary questions of life - of love, morality, suffering and death: From where do we get our concept of right and wrong - from the creator or from human experience? How do we square the existence of an omnipotent, all-loving God with the evidence of evil and suffering in the world? How do these starkly different worldviews help us resolve the riddle of death?
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