Viewers disappointed by television’s reluctance to tackle the really big questions should sample “The Question of God: C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud” (8 p.m., PBS, check local listings). Based on a popular undergraduate course taught by Harvard professor Dr. Armand Nicholi, “Question” uses dramatic reenactment, numerous interviews and Nicholi’s narrative to examine the lives and writings of the two seminal 20th-century figures, and their very different positions on life, reason and spirituality.

Freud saw reason as supreme, dismissing religion as “the universal obsessional neurosis of humanity.” After the carnage of World War I, Lewis had also abandoned God, only to develop a spiritual thirst that reason alone could not quench.

Nicholi and “Question” employ each man’s teachings and biography as object lessons in the eternal battle between believers and unbelievers. He also discusses how an individual’s choices color their experience of life’s other great questions about love, sexuality, right, wrong and the meaning of life itself.

• If Sigmund Freud and C.S. Lewis get too heavy, try Siegfried and Roy! Maria Shriver sits down with Roy Horn for a one-hour interview special called “Siegfried & Roy: The Miracle” (8 p.m., NBC). Horn discusses his onstage mauling at the hands, or rather paws, of one of the tigers in the duo’s casino act. He and his doctor also offer details about his injuries, his subsequent stroke and his recuperation.
• Also from Las Vegas: “The 2004 World Music Awards” (8 p.m., ABC) take place in America’s gambling mecca for the first time ever. The broadcast is live. For the last 10 years the festivities were broadcast from the European gambling mecca of Monte Carlo. Scheduled performers, award recipients and red-carpet denizens include Usher, Celine Dion, Alicia Keys, Josh Groban, Avril Lavigne, Hoobastank, Kanye West and Hilary Duff.

Tonight’s other highlights

• Scheduled on “60 Minutes II” (7 p.m., CBS): a hoax that may have launched a war; an interview with Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker.
• The New York crossover episode of “CSI: Miami” (9 p.m., CBS).
• A chat room Romeo may have earned the wrath of his pistol-packing Mama on “Law & Order” (9 p.m., NBC).