Eduqas A-Level Religious Studies Component 2 Philosophy of Religion overview quiz quiz

The contingency of things in the world

The very concept of God as the greatest conceivable being

The order and beauty of the universe as a whole

Direct personal religious experience

He fully accepted the principle of sufficient reason as applied to the cosmos

He said the universe is 'just there, and that's all', a brute fact

He argued the universe was carefully designed

He defended the ontological argument for God

A great sailing ship and its skilled human captain

A flowing river traced all the way back to its source

A watch found on a heath, implying a watchmaker

A blik held without any evidence

That natural beauty has no Darwinian survival value at all, yet humans still strongly perceive it

That existence is not a real predicate that adds anything to a concept

That the sheer scale of evil in the world disproves God

That the universe is fine-tuned with exactly the conditions needed for intelligent life

That existence is not a predicate (it adds no property to a concept)

The perfect island objection that was raised originally by the monk Gaunilo

That God is simply a brute, unexplained fact

That all religious language is literally meaningless and empty

Evil is a necessary instrument that God deliberately uses for the making and growth of human souls

Evil is a privation of good that entered through the misuse of free will (the Fall)

God is not truly omnipotent and so simply cannot prevent evil

Evil is nothing more than an illusion

Evil is the just punishment inflicted on the whole of humanity for the original sin committed at the Fall in the garden of Eden

God is genuinely unable to prevent the evil that occurs in the world

God created humans imperfect and at an epistemic distance so they can freely grow into God's likeness through facing evil

Evil does not really exist at all and is purely imaginary

By flatly denying that evil exists anywhere at all within the whole of the created world

By saying that evil is merely a privation, an absence of due good

By appealing to the Fall of humanity in the garden

By denying God's omnipotence: God works by persuasion within an uncreated universe

As wish-fulfilment, an illusion projecting a protective father-figure to cope with helplessness

As a healthy and natural expression of the collective unconscious and its many shared archetypes

As a verified and well-evidenced factual claim about reality

As nothing more than a self-contained language game

Empirically verifiable scientific facts that can be precisely measured in a laboratory

Universal symbols in the collective unconscious (such as the self and the God-image)

Strictly logical and deductive proofs of the existence of God

Particular types of intense mystical experience

Mysterium, tremendum, fascinans and the numinous feeling

Credulity, testimony, fruits and roots of the experience

Ineffability, noetic quality, transiency, passivity

Pragmatism, relativism, positivism, personalism

We should never under any circumstances at all trust a person's report of a religious experience

Only statements that can be empirically verified are genuinely meaningful

Existence is not a real predicate of a thing

In the absence of special reasons to doubt, we should believe that things are as they seem

A statement is factually meaningful only if it is analytic or empirically verifiable

All statements whatsoever are meaningful, regardless entirely of their content or form

All religious language is best understood as symbolic

The existence of God is logically necessary

That religious statements are completely meaningless because nothing at all could ever count against them

That the believer treats 'God loves us' as a factual claim held on trust despite ambiguous evidence

That God does not exist at all in any sense

That religious language is only ever an unfalsifiable blik

Univocally (exactly as for creatures)

Equivocally (with totally different meanings)

Analogically (by attribution and proportion)

Only by negation