The Story of God with Morgan Freeman — Season 1

What happens to us after we die? Where do we go? Is there any part of us that lives on? As obsessed as humans are with origin stories, we save our most fervent hopes and expectations for where we might spend eternity. In this episode, Morgan Freeman sets out to discover how belief in the afterlife has changed through the ages, how billions believe one man's death allows eternal life for all, and how the desire for immortality has influence scientists and inventors.

Violent cataclysms and fiery judgment fixate the popular imagination and fill numerous holy books. For better or worse, we are obsessed with how our world will end. Morgan Freeman examines both the past and the future to determine what various faith traditions predict about the End of Days, synthesizing history, archaeology, psychology, theology, science, and personal experience to get a glimpse into our cooperate beliefs. What he learns will give him a new meaning for the word "apocalypse."

Is there some sense of God that all religions share? How has the identity of God changed over the millennia? Morgan Freeman embarks on a journey from the birth of monotheism in Egypt and Israel, to India, where Hindus worship millions of gods. He travels from a Houston megachurch to New Mexico where a Navajo girl communes with her divine ancestors. And, with the help of a neuroscientist, he searches for signs of God in his brain.

Morgan Freeman traverses the globe to ask: Where did we come from, and what happened "in the beginning?" Perhaps humanity's first question remains one of its most intensely debated. Science tells us the Universe was created 13.8 billion years ago with the Big Bang. For many believers, though, it is impossible to understand who and what we are without first understanding how we got here…and who (or what) is behind it. His journey takes him from the Vatican, to the streets of Cairo, to the jungles of Guatemala.

If you believe God created the world, and God is good, then why does evil exist? To find out, Morgan Freeman comes face to face with a serial killer in a maximum-security penitentiary and witnesses an exorcism in India. In Egypt, he learns about the belief that souls were weighed for the afterlife, and in California he learns about Zoroastrianism, one of the planet's oldest faiths.

What are miracles, and what might they mean? Morgan meets a man who fell 47 stories and lived, and a man who believes he beat incurable cancer thanks to the power of prayer. In Israel, Morgan joins a Passover celebration of God's miraculous saving of the Jews. He learns how Chinese Taoist belief tells us were are all connected to the energy of the universe. And at the Bodhi Tree in India, Morgan discovers how Buddhists believe the power of miracles lies within us all.