“The Question of God”

16 September 2004 (updated 23 September 2004)

“Whether we realize it or not, all of us possess a worldview. … We make one of two basic assumptions: we view the universe as a result of random events, and life on this planet a matter of chance; or we assume an intelligence beyond the universe who gives the universe order, and life meaning.”¹

Sound like a quote from AiG-USA president Ken Ham from one of his books or lectures? Actually, it’s a quote from the producers of a new Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) TV documentary in the US entitled “The Question of God: Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis.”² Part two (the final episode) was broadcast Wednesday evening (September 22) throughout America.

In order to best represent the only worldviews which exist, atheism and theism, the TV producers decided to contrast the beliefs of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (who called religion a “neurosis”), and Christian apologist and author C.S. Lewis (who wrote Mere Christianity).³ Freud and Lewis were the documentary’s representative examples of how Western society continues to be torn between the worldviews of atheism and a belief in God.

Using drama and panel discussions, the TV documentary touched on such worldview issues as creation versus evolution (Freud “had no use for God” because of Darwin, declared the series), why there is pain and suffering in this world and, most of all, whether there really is a God.

Each of these three issues—including the “question” of God—is tackled in depth by three AiG booklets, which can be easily read on this site (and also printed out):

1. Why is there Death & Suffering?—by the way, this is a question dealt with by Lewis in some of his writings
   
2. Is there Really a God?
   
3. From Evolution to Creation

We should note that PBS, which has had a track record of sometimes portraying “matters of faith” in an unsympathetic light (e.g. the way AiG was misrepresented in the PBS series Evolution), was fair and balanced in this documentary.

Reference and notes

1. www.PBS.org
2. This four-hour TV series, which concluded Wednesday evening, was based on a 2002 book by Harvard professor Armand Nicholi.
3. The question of the orthodoxy of C.S. Lewis’s Christian beliefs continues to be a matter of some debate. For many years, he was a theistic evolutionist. Towards the latter part of his life, however, he apparently gave up his beliefs in evolution—in a 1951 letter by Lewis, cited by Ronald Numbers in The Creationists (1992, p. 153), Lewis wrote that evolution was “the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives…”

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