Philosophy of Religion

What Philosophy of Religion covers

Component 01, compulsory. The Greek inheritance behind Western philosophy of religion, soul, mind and body, the teleological, cosmological and ontological arguments for God, religious experience and the problem of evil, the attributes of God, and whether religious language can mean anything at all.

The 14 subtopics

Each one has its own page.

• Plato: the Forms and the analogy of the caveRecall questions on why Plato distrusts the senses, the Forms and their hierarchy, the Form of the Good and the sun, each stage of the analogy of the cave and what it represents, criticisms of the theory of Forms, and Plato's rationalism set against Aristotle's empiricism.Open →
• Aristotle: the four causes and the Prime MoverRecall questions on Aristotle's teleology, the four causes applied to a bronze statue, the argument for the Prime Mover and its characteristics, how an unchanging mover causes motion, its link to the final cause, and how it compares with the God of monotheism and Plato's Form of the Good.Open →
• Soul, mind and bodyRecall questions on Plato's divided and immortal soul, Aristotle's soul as the form of the body, substance dualism and Descartes' arguments from doubt and divisibility, the interaction problem, identity theory and eliminative materialism, the hard problem of consciousness, the category-mistake objection, and whether the soul is a metaphor.Open →
• The teleological argumentRecall questions on a posteriori reasoning, Aquinas' Fifth Way and the archer and the arrow, Paley's watch and his natural examples, design as purpose and as order, Hume's objections from analogy, the Epicurean hypothesis and the character of a designer, the challenge of evolution, and whether chance defeats the argument.Open →
• The cosmological argumentRecall questions on inductive reasoning, Aquinas' First, Second and Third Ways and why they are cosmological, the rejection of an infinite regress, Hume on causation, the whole and its parts and a necessary being, the fallacy of composition, and whether the argument leaps to a creator beyond the universe.Open →
• Anselm and the ontological argumentRecall questions on a priori and deductive reasoning, Anselm's definition of God and his two formulations, necessary and contingent existence, Anselm's purpose, Gaunilo's lost island and Anselm's reply, and whether the ontological argument justifies belief or contains fallacies that cannot be overcome.Open →
• Kant's criticisms of the ontological argumentRecall questions on analytic and synthetic statements, Kant's objection that existence is not a predicate, the hundred thalers, why denying that God exists involves no contradiction, Kant on necessity, how a defender of Anselm might reply, and whether a priori argument is more persuasive than a posteriori.Open →
• Religious experienceRecall questions on mystical and conversion experiences and examples of each, William James's four marks, method and conclusions, union and the numinous, explanations of experience as illusion or as psychological and physiological effects, taking experience at face value, testimony, corporate experience, and religious experience as a basis for belief.Open →
• The problem of evilRecall questions on moral and natural evil, the logical and evidential problems, theodicy and defence, Augustine on privation, the Fall and humanity present in Adam, Hick's two-stage creation, epistemic distance and vale of soul-making, the criticisms of both theodicies, and other responses to evil.Open →
• Omnipotence, omniscience and benevolenceRecall questions on the ways omnipotence has been understood, divine self-limitation of power, the paradox of the stone and Aquinas' answer, Matthew 19:26, definitions of omniscience and benevolence, why omniscience is said to conflict with human freedom, and whether the conflicts between the attributes can be resolved.Open →
• Eternity, foreknowledge and free willRecall questions on the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, eternal and everlasting models of God, Boethius on eternity and simple and conditional necessity, Anselm's four-dimensionalist approach, Swinburne's everlasting God and qualified omniscience, the criticisms of each, and libertarian and compatibilist free will.Open →
• Religious language: via negativa, analogy and symbolRecall questions on univocal and equivocal language, the apophatic and cataphatic ways, Aquinas' analogy of attribution and of proper proportion and whether it remains valuable, Tillich on sign and symbol, Being-Itself and ultimate concern, cognitive and non-cognitive language, and the strengths and criticisms of each approach.Open →
• Verification and falsificationRecall questions on logical positivism, Ayer's verification principle in its strong and weak forms, the self-refutation problem and other criticisms, eschatological verification, Flew's parable and challenge and believers' responses, Hare's bliks, Mitchell's partisan and stranger, and whether verification shows religious language to be meaningless.Open →
• Language games and non-cognitive approachesRecall questions on Wittgenstein's view that meaning is use, language games, forms of life and family resemblance, how religious language can be meaningful yet non-cognitive, the criticisms of language games, Aquinas' analogy compared with Wittgenstein, and the influence of non-cognitive approaches on reading religious texts.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.

• Substance dualism vs Materialism

  Substance dualism: the view that mind and body are two distinct kinds of thing. Materialism: the view that a person is wholly physical.

• Via negativa vs Analogy

  Via negativa: speaking of God only by saying what God is not. Analogy: speaking of God in terms drawn from creatures but proportionally.

Questions from this topic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

1. 1

   Why did Plato hold that the senses are an unreliable route to knowledge?

   Model answer

   The senses only ever report the changing, particular world, and Plato argued that what is always coming to be and passing away cannot be an object of genuine knowledge. Sense reports also conflict with one another, and the same thing looks different to different observers. Real knowledge, he held, must be of what is stable and unchanging, and only reason working through disciplined argument can reach that. The senses at best yield opinion; reason yields understanding.

2. 2

   Explain what Plato means by a Form.

   Model answer

   A Form is a perfect, unchanging, immaterial and eternal archetype which exists independently of the physical world. There is one Form of Beauty, one of Justice, one of Circularity, and every beautiful, just or circular thing we encounter is an imperfect copy of it. The Form is what makes a thing the kind of thing it is, and it is grasped by the intellect rather than by sight or touch.

3. 3

   How does Plato explain the link between an ordinary object and its Form?

   Model answer

   He speaks of particulars participating in, or imitating, the Form. A particular horse is a horse because it shares imperfectly in the single Form of Horse, and it is that Form which lets us recognise very different animals as horses at all. The Form is also the standard against which the copy falls short, which is why we can judge a drawn circle to be imperfect without ever having met a perfect one.

4. 4

   What is the hierarchy of the Forms, and what stands at its summit?

   Model answer

   Plato arranges the Forms in an ascending order, with the Forms of everyday objects and artefacts at the bottom, mathematical Forms above them, then the great moral and aesthetic Forms such as Justice, Beauty and Truth. At the summit is the Form of the Good, which gives all the other Forms both their reality and their intelligibility. It is the hardest to grasp and the last thing reached by the philosopher's ascent.

5. 5

   Why does Plato compare the Form of the Good to the sun?

   Model answer

   The sun makes physical things visible and also makes them grow, so it is both the source of sight and the source of life. In the same way the Form of the Good makes the other Forms knowable and gives them their being. And just as the eye cannot stare directly at the sun without pain, the mind can only approach the Good at the very end of a long training.

6. 6

   Describe the prisoners' situation at the opening of Plato's cave analogy.

   Model answer

   Prisoners have been chained since childhood facing the back wall of an underground cave, unable to turn their heads. Behind them burns a fire, and between fire and prisoners runs a walkway along which figures carry statues and objects. All the prisoners ever see are shadows thrown on the wall in front of them, and all they hear are echoes. They take those shadows for reality and award prizes to whoever is quickest at predicting which will appear next.

What is inside Levo

Six ways to work the same material.

Philosophy of Religion revision questions

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

14 subtopics: plato: the forms and the analogy of the cave, aristotle: the four causes and the prime mover, soul, mind and body, the teleological argument, the cosmological argument, anselm and the ontological argument, kant's criticisms of the ontological argument, religious experience, the problem of evil, omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence, eternity, foreknowledge and free will, religious language: via negativa, analogy and symbol, verification and falsification and language games and non-cognitive approaches. Each one has its own page with questions and model answers.

How is Philosophy of Religion organised?

By the OCR H573 specification, subtopic by subtopic, so it matches the order you are taught it in.