OCR A-Level Religious Studies Component 01 Philosophy of Religion: a complete overview

OCR A-Level Religious Studies Component 01 is Philosophy of Religion. It asks whether reason can establish that God exists, what a human being is, whether suffering counts against God, whether religious experience is evidence, and whether talk about God is even meaningful. This overview ties together the topic pages and explains how the paper is examined.

How Component 01 works

Component 01 is a two-hour written exam worth 120 marks. It sets four essay questions and you answer three, each worth 40 marks. It covers seven areas: ancient philosophical influences, the soul, mind and body, the arguments for God (teleological, cosmological, ontological), the nature and impact of religious experience, the problem of evil, the nature of God, and issues in religious language. The two assessment objectives, AO1 (knowledge) and AO2 (evaluation), are weighted 40 per cent and 60 per cent overall, and each essay carries a separate AO1 mark out of 25 and AO2 mark out of 15.

Ancient influences and the soul

Plato is a rationalist whose Theory of Forms locates reality in a realm of perfect Forms grasped by reason, with the Form of the Good at the summit; Aristotle is an empiricist who explains the world through four causes and a Prime Mover. The same divide shapes the soul debate: Plato's immortal, separable soul and Descartes's substance dualism against Aristotle's soul as the form of the body and the materialism of Dawkins, which together decide whether life after death is coherent.

The arguments for the existence of God

The teleological (Aquinas's Fifth Way, Paley) and cosmological (Aquinas's first three Ways, Kalam) arguments are inductive, reasoning from order and existence to a designer and a first cause, and are challenged by Hume, Darwin and Russell. The ontological argument (Anselm, Descartes, Malcolm) is deductive, reasoning from the definition of God, and is challenged by Gaunilo and Kant. The key skill is judging whether any of them amounts to a proof.

Religious experience, evil and the nature of God

Religious experience is offered as evidence (James's mysticism, Swinburne's principles of credulity and testimony) and challenged by physiology, Freud and diversity. The problem of evil comes in logical (Mackie) and evidential (Rowe) forms, answered by the Augustinian and Irenaean (Hick's soul-making) theodicies. Ideas about the nature of God test whether omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence and eternity are coherent, turning on whether God is timeless (Boethius, Aquinas) or everlasting (Swinburne).

Religious language

The classical strand asks how to describe a transcendent God: the via negativa, Aquinas's analogy, and Tillich's symbol. The twentieth-century strand asks whether God-talk is meaningful at all: Ayer's verification principle, the Flew, Hare and Mitchell falsification debate, and Wittgenstein's language games, with the cognitive versus non-cognitive distinction running throughout.

How Component 01 is examined

• Four essays, choose three. Each is a sustained AO1-plus-AO2 argument, not a description.
• The extended essay (AO2-heavy). Build a case that sets scholar against scholar and reaches a justified conclusion, because AO2 is the larger mark band.