The dialogue between philosophy of religion and the studied religion, including how philosophical arguments about God, evil and the afterlife relate to and challenge religious belief.

What this dot point is asking

AQA wants you to bring philosophy of religion into dialogue with the studied religion (Christianity): to show how philosophical arguments about God, evil, religious experience, language and the afterlife challenge, support and reshape Christian belief, and to evaluate how well faith answers philosophy and philosophy tests faith. The dialogue papers reward connection: you are expected to draw threads between the philosophy section you studied (Paper 1) and the Christianity section (Paper 2), not to re-run a single essay.

How philosophy challenges religion

The sharpest single challenge is the problem of evil. Mackie sets it out as an inconsistent triad: God is omnipotent, God is wholly good, and yet evil exists. If God has the power to abolish evil and the goodness to want to, then a wholly good, all-powerful God and the reality of suffering cannot both stand. The challenge is aimed precisely at the God of classical theism whom Christians worship in the creeds, so it cannot be sidestepped by retreating to a vaguer deity. The evidential version (Rowe) presses further: even granting that some evil might serve a purpose, apparently pointless suffering, a fawn dying slowly in a forest fire, gives positive evidence against the Christian God.

Philosophy of religious language adds a different kind of attack. Logical positivism's verification principle holds that a statement is meaningful only if it can be verified by sense experience (or is true by definition). On that test, "God loves us" is neither, so it is not false but literally meaningless. Antony Flew sharpens this with the falsification challenge: in his parable of the invisible gardener, the believer keeps qualifying the claim until nothing could count against it, so the assertion "dies the death of a thousand qualifications" and asserts nothing. Hume's separate attacks bear on the arguments and on miracles: he undercuts the design argument (the universe is a poor analogy to a machine, and a flawed world implies at best a flawed designer) and argues that the wise proportion belief to evidence, so testimony can never make a miracle more probable than the standing weight of natural law. Materialist philosophy of mind (Dawkins, and more carefully Ryle's critique of the "ghost in the machine") also challenges Christian belief in life after death by denying a separable soul that could survive the body.

How philosophy supports and reshapes religion

Philosophy also supplies and sharpens reasons for faith. The cosmological argument (from contingency, in Aquinas's Third Way) and the teleological argument (from order and apparent purpose) can support belief in a creator who is the necessary ground of a contingent universe. Swinburne builds a cumulative, probabilistic case in which no single argument is decisive but the data together (a universe at all, its order, consciousness, religious experience) make theism the more probable explanation; his principles of credulity and testimony give evidential weight to religious experience. Crucially, Christianity answers the problem of evil with theodicy, and philosophy is the tool that hones it: Augustine's free-will defence locates evil in the misuse of free will by angels and humans (evil is a privation, a falling away from good, not a thing God made), while Hick's soul-making theodicy (developed from Irenaeus) argues that a world with real suffering at an "epistemic distance" from God is the necessary environment for free beings to grow into mature virtue. On meaningfulness, Aquinas's doctrine of analogy (we speak of God's goodness neither univocally nor equivocally but by analogy of proportion and attribution) and Tillich's account of religious language as symbol (which participates in the reality it points to) answer the verificationist charge by showing religious claims are not failed scientific statements. Hare's "bliks" and Mitchell's parable of the partisan likewise reframe faith-claims as meaningful commitments rather than empty assertions.

Evaluating the dialogue

The strongest answers treat this as a real conversation rather than a one-sided attack. You should ask: do philosophical objections succeed, or can Christianity answer them? Does philosophy strengthen faith by giving it reasons, or does it expose it as irrational? Hick's view that the world is religiously ambiguous (it can be read either way) is a useful evaluative tool: if the evidence underdetermines the question, then philosophy neither proves nor disproves faith, and the believer's interpretation is rationally permissible. A nuanced conclusion might be that philosophy tests faith (forcing it to justify itself, to refine its doctrine of God, and to develop theodicy) while faith answers enough of the objections to remain a live, reasonable option, so the dialogue is mutual rather than a demolition.