SIGMUND VS. CLIVE

My friends from Walden sent the following release about their upcoming PBS doc.

Walden Media, WGBH Present Lewis/Freud Series “The Question Of God”

Special Program To Air On September 15 & 22nd On PBS

The Question of God, a four-hour series on PBS, 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 Nicholi, author of The Question of God,

the series illustrates the lives and insights of Sigmund Freud, a life-long

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 re-creations, 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 – which gave rise to such starkly different ideas – fuel an

intelligent and moving contemporary examination of the ultimate question of

human existence: Does God really exist?

Airing September 15 & 22, 2004, at 9:00 pm ET on PBS (check local listings)

The Question of God is produced by Tatge/Lasseur Productions in association

with WGBH and Walden Media.

For more information or to schedule an interview with Dr. Nicholi please

contact: Erin Mackey at: [email protected]

PROGRAM OVERVIEW

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 twentieth century, PBS presents an emotional and

intellectual journey into the meaning of life.

About Part One

The Question of God Part I presents the early stories of C.S. Lewis and

Sigmund Freud, two men with very different ideas of human existence. In

childhood, each embraced the religion of his family. But the early death of

Lewis’s mother, and the horrors he witnessed in the First World War 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 thoughtful 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?

About Part Two

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, in his fifties, the brief happiness of new romance was

turned to ashes with the untimely death of his wife, igniting the greatest

spiritual crisis of his life. Yet in the end, each man confronted his own

death with his beliefs intact.

Dr. Armand Nicholi and his panel continue their debate, exploring the

implications of choosing a spiritual or secular worldview for 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 all of the evidence of evil and suffering in the world? How do these

starkly different worldviews help us resolve the riddle of death?