How do you bring that subject down to earth? And what do you do for visuals?

But the ineffable can be made accessible.

Behold The Question of God, two unusual two-hour programs (9 p.m. today and next Wednesday, Channels 48, 16).

Director Catherine Tatge produced past PBS series about mythology scholar Joseph Campbell and the Bible's Book of Genesis, both hosted by Bill Moyers.

Question stems from a book of the same title by psychiatrist Armand Nicholi, who for decades has taught Harvard University courses that compare the lives and religious thought of this odd couple:

• Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the founder of psychoanalysis, arguably the most influential atheist of modern times (now that the credibility of communist Karl Marx has imploded).

• C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), English literature scholar at Oxford and Cambridge universities, a hard-bitten atheist who then embraced Christianity and became arguably the era's most influential defender of belief.

These two fascinating fellows allow Tatge to leaven the inevitable talking heads with documentary materials and dramatized re-creations from their lives, artfully filmed in European locales and using their actual words. Peter Eyre plays Freud and Simon Jones is a pipe-puffing Lewis.

Believers may be so pleased PBS is even taking the God issue seriously and portraying Lewis' conversion that they'll overlook the tilt against belief. If Lewis had been on the panel he would have answered skeptical challenges that are left hanging and have assailed Freud's lack of proof for his supposedly scientific theories.

So Question unwittingly indicates that faith remains on the defensive among cultural elitists, notwithstanding popular-level revivals and the supposed Twilight of Atheism proclaimed in a new book by Alister McGrath, a Lewis-style atheist turned Oxford theist.

The programs seem to reflect less of Nicholi, a churchgoing Protestant, than of Tatge, a former Catholic on a "faith journey" wed to an agnostic who co-produced.

At the conclusion, Nicholi intones, "Is it possible that Freud and Lewis represent conflicting parts of ourselves, a part of us that yearns for relationship with the source of all joy, hope and happiness ... and another part that raises its fist in defiance?"