Philosophy of Religion

What Philosophy of Religion covers

Paper 1. The arguments for and against God's existence, the problem of evil and the theodicies offered in reply, how religious language can mean anything at all, and what if anything survives death.

The 15 subtopics

Each one has its own page.

• The Design ArgumentRecall questions on the design argument as inductive and a posteriori, Paley's watch and his two kinds of design, analogy and regularity, the anthropic principle, Swinburne's cumulative case, Hume's objections, evolution by natural selection and the problem of deism.Open →
• The Cosmological ArgumentRecall questions on Aquinas's arguments from motion, causation and contingency, his rejection of an endless series, the principle of sufficient reason, the Kalam version, the objections of Hume and Kant, the brute fact reply and the fallacy of composition.Open →
• The Ontological ArgumentRecall questions on the argument as a priori and analytic, Anselm's two formulations, the definition of God and aseity, Gaunilo's island, Kant on existence as a predicate, Russell's account of existence, and proof against probability.Open →
• The Nature of Religious ExperienceRecall questions on defining religious experience, theistic and monistic accounts, James's four marks of mysticism, Otto's numinous, conversion, prayer and meditation, propositional and non-propositional revelation, and physiological, naturalistic, objectivist and subjectivist interpretations.Open →
• Religious Experience as an Argument for the Existence of GodRecall questions on Swinburne's principles of credulity and testimony, Hick's experiencing-as, Persinger's temporal lobe research, Dawkins' case against the argument, and the objections from conflicting traditions, divine transcendence and the limits of language.Open →
• The Problem of Evil and SufferingRecall questions on the inconsistent triad, moral and non-moral evil, the logical and evidential forms of the problem, Mackie's Evil and Omnipotence and his rejection of the free will defence, Hume's case from needless suffering, and whether evil makes belief irrational.Open →
• Theodicies and Solutions to the Problem of SufferingRecall questions on the Augustinian and Irenaean theodicies, Hick's soul-making, process theodicy, and the free will defence.Open →
• Analogy and SymbolRecall questions on the via negativa, univocal and equivocal language, Aquinas's analogy of attribution and of proportionality, Tillich's distinction between sign and symbol, symbols across religious traditions, and the problems of treating religious language as symbolic.Open →
• Verification and FalsificationRecall questions on the Vienna Circle and logical positivism, Ayer's principle, Flew's parable and the replies of Hare and Mitchell.Open →
• Language GamesRecall questions on Wittgenstein's abandonment of the picture theory, language games and forms of life, religious language as non-cognitive, D Phillips on religious belief, and the charge of fideism.Open →
• Critiques of Religious Belief: Atheism and AgnosticismRecall questions on the varieties of atheism and agnosticism, Dawkins' scientific case against God and his account of religion and morality, Westphal on the atheists of suspicion Freud, Marx and Nietzsche, postmodern approaches, and the probability debate.Open →
• Russell and CoplestonRecall questions on the 1948 debate, the dispute over sufficient reason and brute fact, and the argument from religious experience within it.Open →
• Life After DeathRecall questions on resurrection and immortality of the soul, reincarnation and transmigration, Hick's replica theory, and karma.Open →
• Mind, Body and the Evidence for SurvivalRecall questions on substance dualism and Ryle's objection, property dualism and monism, Plato and Aristotle on the soul, the moral argument for a world to come, near-death experiences, and the problems of evidence and language for survival.Open →
• Religion and ScienceRecall questions on scientific method, the conflict, independence and dialogue models, miracles and Hume's argument, the Big Bang and steady state theories, irreducible complexity and creationism, the cosmological constant, Darwin and Dawkins on evolution, and the Gaia hypothesis.Open →

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Take Philosophy of Religion further

The same content, four other ways.

Commonly confused

Pairs that lose marks when they are blurred together.

• A priori argument vs A posteriori argument

  A priori argument: reasoning whose conclusion follows independently of sensory evidence. A posteriori argument: reasoning that begins from observed features of the world.

• Deductive argument vs Inductive argument

  Deductive argument: reasoning whose conclusion must follow if the premises are true. Inductive argument: reasoning whose premises make the conclusion probable but not certain.

• Moral evil vs Natural evil

  Moral evil: suffering brought about by the deliberate misuse of human freedom. Natural evil: suffering arising from the workings of the natural world.

Questions from this topic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Explain why the Design Argument is called a posteriori and inductive, and what that means for what it can establish.

   Model answer

   It starts from what we observe in the world - order, complexity, apparent purpose - rather than from the meaning of the word God, so its premises come after experience. Its reasoning is inductive: the conclusion is not guaranteed by the premises but offered as the best explanation of them. That is why its defenders normally claim only that a designer is probable, and why a rival explanation can weaken it without formally contradicting it.

2. 2

   Why do two people look at the same natural world and only one of them sees design?

   Model answer

   Because the argument turns on how evidence is read rather than on disputed facts. Believer and sceptic agree that eyes focus light and that planets keep to their orbits; they disagree about what those facts show. One reads them as the marks of intention, the other as what unguided processes throw up. The argument is therefore an invitation to compare two interpretations of a shared world, not a discovery of new data.

3. 3

   What did W Paley argue with the watch found on a heath?

   Model answer

   Paley said a stone on a heath needs no explanation, but a watch does: its parts are shaped and fitted together so as to produce motion, and if any part were different it would not work. That contrivance forces the inference to a maker, and it does so even if we have never watched a watch being made, even if the watch runs badly, and even if some parts baffle us. He then argued that the eye, the joints and the muscles show contrivance of the same kind on a far greater scale.

4. 4

   Explain the difference between the two sorts of design Paley pointed to.

   Model answer

   Design as purpose is the fitting of parts to an end inside an organism - the eye assembled for seeing. Design as regularity is the large-scale orderliness of the whole system, such as the stability of planetary orbits and the laws that keep them. Paley used both: the first shows intelligence at work in fine detail, the second shows a single mind behind the arrangement as a whole.

5. 5

   How does analogy work in this argument, and where is it vulnerable?

   Model answer

   It reasons that like effects have like causes: since natural objects resemble machines in their ordered complexity, their cause probably resembles the cause of machines, namely intelligence. Its strength is that we do reliably and correctly infer design from artefacts. Its weakness is that the inference is only as good as the resemblance, and organisms differ from machines in obvious ways - they grow, they reproduce and they repair themselves, and no machine does any of that.

6. 6

   Explain the two kinds of regularity a design argument can appeal to.

   Model answer

   One is order among things existing alongside each other, the way the parts of a body or an ecosystem are arranged so as to fit one another; Swinburne calls this co-presence. The other is order across time, where the same kind of event reliably follows the same kind of event, which is what a law of nature is; Swinburne calls this succession and thinks it the stronger basis, since the sheer fact that the universe runs on simple laws at all is what most demands explaining.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.

Philosophy of Religion revision questions

What does Philosophy of Religion cover in Edexcel A-Level Religious Studies?

15 subtopics: the design argument, the cosmological argument, the ontological argument, the nature of religious experience, religious experience as an argument for the existence of god, the problem of evil and suffering, theodicies and solutions to the problem of suffering, analogy and symbol, verification and falsification, language games, critiques of religious belief: atheism and agnosticism, russell and copleston, life after death, mind, body and the evidence for survival and religion and science. Each one has its own page with questions and model answers.

How is Philosophy of Religion organised?

By the Edexcel 9RS0 specification, subtopic by subtopic, so it matches the order you are taught it in.