Philosophy of Religion | OCR A-Level Religious Studies (H573)

Philosophy of Religion

245 questions
14 subtopics
Component 01: Philosophy of Religion, compulsory
Component 01

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.

Sample questions from Philosophy of Religion

Answer each one closed book first, then open the answer.

Aristotle: the four causes and the Prime Mover

Apply Aristotle's four causes to a bronze statue.

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The material cause is the bronze. The formal cause is the shape and proportions that make it a statue of that particular figure rather than a lump of metal. The efficient cause is the sculptor and the act of casting. The final cause is the purpose it serves, such as commemorating a hero or adorning a temple.
Soul, mind and body

What is Descartes' argument from divisibility?

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Bodies can always be divided: any physical object has parts and can in principle be cut. The mind, he argues, has no parts at all, since when a limb is lost nothing is subtracted from the thinking self. If one thing is divisible and the other is not, they cannot be the same thing, so mind and body must be distinct in nature.
Anselm and the ontological argument

How does Anselm define God at the start of the ontological argument?

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He defines God as that than which nothing greater can be conceived. This is deliberately not a list of attributes but a formula: whatever it would be greater to be, God is. Anselm thinks even someone who denies God's existence must understand this much, since otherwise there would be nothing for the denial to be about.
Kant's criticisms of the ontological argument

What does Kant say about necessity in the ontological argument?

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He argues that necessity attaches to judgements rather than to things. The most the argument establishes is a conditional: if such a being exists, then it exists necessarily. That leaves entirely open whether the condition is ever met, and no amount of analysis of a concept can settle whether anything instantiates it.
Omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence

How does Aquinas answer the paradox of the stone?

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That omnipotence extends only to what is logically possible, and a stone too heavy for an omnipotent being to lift is a self-contradiction rather than a thing.
Eternity, foreknowledge and free will

How does Boethius reconcile divine foreknowledge with free will?

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He argues God is eternal rather than everlasting, seeing all time at once, so God's knowledge is observation rather than foreknowledge.
Verification and falsification

Why does Ayer's position imply that the sentence God exists is not false?

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Because falsity is a status only a genuine proposition can have. If no observation would count either way, the sentence has failed the test for making a claim about the world, so it never gets as far as being assessed. Ayer's point is that it belongs with expressions of feeling rather than with statements about how things are.

The 14 subtopics

One subtopic is one session. Work down the list.

Subtopic	What it covers	Questions
Plato: the Forms and the analogy of the cave	Recall 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.	16
Aristotle: the four causes and the Prime Mover	Recall 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.	9
Soul, mind and body	Recall 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.	24
The teleological argument	Recall 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.	20
The cosmological argument	Recall 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.	12
Anselm and the ontological argument	Recall 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.	15
Kant's criticisms of the ontological argument	Recall 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.	11
Religious experience	Recall 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.	24
The problem of evil	Recall 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.	23
Omnipotence, omniscience and benevolence	Recall 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.	9
Eternity, foreknowledge and free will	Recall 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.	24
Religious language: via negativa, analogy and symbol	Recall 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.	25
Verification and falsification	Recall 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.	24
Language games and non-cognitive approaches	Recall 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.	9

Philosophy of Religion is 245 of the 1,584 questions in the guide.Get the guide, £8

How the guide is worked

Answering a question from memory stores it far better than reading the answer again. The guide runs that as a fixed procedure on one subtopic at a time, about twenty minutes a session.

Step 1 · Closed book
Cover the answers. Work through one subtopic and write down what you can. Leave blanks where you have nothing.
Step 2 · Open book
Go back to the top. Read each printed answer and write it out in full, including the ones you had right.
Step 3 · Closed book again
Same questions, same order, from memory. The gap between pass one and pass three is the session result.

Read the full method, the return schedule and the research behind it.