Another PBS Hatchet Job: "The Question of God"

I recently had the misfortune of watching the PBS special, "The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud with Dr. Armand Nicholi" (part 1, first aired on 9/15/2004). Though the historical accounts of the lives of C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud were interesting, the underlying discussion was sickening. The panel assembled consisted of, on the side of theism, people who seemed to have no qualifications to intelligently address the question of the existence of God. To my utter disbelief, they based their argument for the existence of God on emotionalism and personal revelation. Any attempt at using thought processes to come to a realization of the existence of God was drowned out by emotionalism and new-age sounding spiritualism. On the side of atheism, one of the members was none other than Michael Shermer (editor of Skeptic magazine). I was baffled by the fact that Dr. Nicholi could not seem to find a single theist that based his or her belief in God on scientific evidence. It wouldn't have been difficult to find such a theist. He would need have only visited the World Wide Christian Web for numerous references along with scientific evidence for the existence of God.

The PBS special repeatedly juxtaposed science (what they claimed is rational) and revelation (belief in the supernatural, what they claimed is not rational). As the WWCW has shown for years, an honest evaluation of the scientific evidence leads to belief in God (see Arguments for the Existence of God). Personal revelation, or any other subjective "evidence," cannot be used to show that something is true. Historically, personal revelations are often contradictory. The law of non-contradiction states that two contradictory statements cannot both be true at the same time in the same way. Thus, at least some personal revelations are not true and do not reflect reality. This makes them useless for evidence for truth, since we cannot analyze the truthfulness of any personal revelation outside the one claiming the revelation.

What this program neglected to underline is that atheists seem to come to their lack of belief through emotionalism. Many atheists are such because they felt spurned by God. God somehow didn't come through at a critical time in their lives or they had a problem. They did not quarrel with the existence of the supernatural initially but with the existence of evil or suffering in the world or with their own suffering. Not many so called "ex-Christians" that later turned to atheism did so by the study of science alone. In fact, as previously mentioned, a thorough study of the evidence leads one to the existence of a creator, as you will see herein. Welcome to the WWCW.

-ed
e-mail: wwcw@wwcw.org

I want to learn more about how I can have a relationship with the creator of the universe.

Return to the Editor's Page