The question of God

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Dr. Armand M. Nicholi Jr. has been discussing the question of God for more than 25 years. As an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, he teaches a class that compares the secular beliefs of Sigmund Freud with the spiritual beliefs of C.S. Lewis.

The popularity of Dr. Nicholi's course has lead to a four-hour documentary on PBS, which airs tomorrow and Sept. 22. It also will be released on videocassette and digital video disc, with a companion book. As the life stories of Freud and Lewis are told, analysts comment on the two philosophies. Dr. Nicholi also moderates a round-table discussion among people with varying points of view.

"Everyone has a worldview, which is our attempt to make sense of our existence on this planet," Dr. Nicholi says. "It's about how you answer the most basic issues of life. Is there an intelligence beyond the universe? Is there a universal moral law? How do you decide what's right and wrong? Where does that come from? What is happiness? Everyone wants it and almost no one can really define it. What is love? ... How do you deal with the problem of suffering? ... How do you possibly process the fact that we will not be on this Earth very long, when we have a burning desire for permanence?"

As part of the documentary, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, speaks on behalf of the spiritual worldview of Lewis.

While an atheist in medical school at the University of North Carolina, Dr. Collins first read "Mere Christianity" by Lewis, who died in 1963. Dr. Collins says he found the logical thinking breathtaking, but threatening because it caused his "house of cards" to collapse.

Lewis, a professor at Oxford University and Cambridge University, argued that if there is a God, he would have put in people the desire to know him. Mr. Lewis wrote, "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world."

When "first things," such as God, are put in their proper place, the result is joy, Lewis espoused. "It is after you have realized that there is a real moral law, and a power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that power -- it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk," Lewis wrote.

"It was clear that the arguments that I had constructed in a sort of schoolboy way against the rationality of faith were really seriously flawed arguments that you could drive a truck through," Dr. Collins says. "I realized something I had completely not anticipated, that you could approach faith from a logical perspective and arrive at the conclusion that it is more plausible to believe in God than to disbelieve in God."

Although today Dr. Collins finds a harmonious relationship between science and faith, he struggled for about a year, trying to reconcile the two worlds. Other books by Mr. Lewis include "The Screwtape Letters," "The Great Divorce," "The Problems of Pain," "Miracles," "A Grief Observed," "The Abolition of Man" and "The Chronicles of Narnia."