AQA A LEVEL PHILOSOPHY PAPER 2 EP QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Exam Practice: Answers Section 1: The Metaphysics of God Page viii: Three-mark questions Question 1 Answers might include some of the following points: • ‘God is supremely good’ can be taken to refer to the theological claim that, according to religious texts within monotheistic religions, God is all loving and omnibenevolent. • ‘God is supremelygood’ could also mean that God is perfect. In this sense – emphasised by Aquinas working within an Aristotelian tradition – God has no flaws or deficiencies and contains all perfections (including omnipotence, omniscience, immutability etc.). • ‘God is supremely good’ could also mean that God is morally good, incapable of sin or of evil, and is the source of all goodness, establishing the moral law. Question 2 Answers might include some of the following points: • Non-cognitivism rejects the position that religious language expresses beliefs about that world that are true or false – so for a non-cognitivist there are no truth conditions attached to religious language. • Non-cognitivism rejects cognitivism, i.e. the claim that religious sentences are meaningful only insofar as they are propositions or statements which express our beliefs about the world. • Instead, non-cognitivism views religious language, such as ‘God loves the world’ as having a different function – for example as the expression of a ‘blik’ (Flew) or as a way of seeing the world (Wittgenstein). Question 3 • A theodicy is an explanation or justification of why so much pain and suffering exists within a world created by an all-loving, omniscient, omnipotent God. • Hick’s soul-making theodicy comes from the tradition of St Irenaeus and views a world of pain and suffering as a good thing: as a world in which humans are free to develop as spiritual beings, their souls can be strengthened and they work towards an understanding of God and the world. If the world was free from pain and suffering then humans would not have the opportunity to grow as moral and spiritual beings. • So a world containing pain and suffering is better than a world without any, and this explains why an all-loving, omniscient and omnipotent God created a world with pain and suffering in. Question 4 • The fallacy of composition is the fallacy that because every member of a group has a particular quality, then the group as a whole has a property. But this does not follow – as Russell points out, just because every member of the human species has a mother, it doesn’t follow that there is a mother of the whole human species. • Cosmological arguments commit this fallacy when they move from the premise that every event has a cause to the conclusion that there must be a cause of the whole series of events. • Just because a group of events share the property of ‘having a cause’ it doesn't mean that the group as a whole also has the property of ‘having a cause’. Question 5 The answer might include some of the following points: AQA A LEVEL PHILOSOPHY PAPER 2 EP QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS royaluploads • A deductive argument is one in which the truth of the premises, and the valid structure of the argument, guarantee the truth of the conclusion. • For example: If all humans are mortal, and I am a human, then I am mortal. • In a deductive argument the conclusion cannot go beyond the material already contained in the premises. • An inductive argument is one in which the truth of the premises, at best, lead to a conclusion that is probably true. For example, when examining a finite number of cases (every raven I have seen is black) and drawing a conclusion about all cases (that all ravens are black); or whenlooking back at the past (the sun has always risen) to draw a conclusion about the future (the sun will rise tomorrow). • In an inductive argument the conclusion includes material (e.g. about the future) that goes beyond what’s contained in the premises. Page ix: Five-mark questions Question 1 • Logical positivism puts forward the view that part of the work of philosophy is to restrict its discussions to only what is meaningful, and to identify and root out the parts of philosophical discourse which are meaningless or nonsense. • Ayer developed a tool, the verification principle, to help determine what is meaningful and what is not meaningful. He argued that a claim was meaningful if it was synthetically true or false (it could be either verified or falsified by experience), or if it was analytically true (true by definition or by the meanings of the words). • When applied to religious language, including claims such as‘God loves the world’, the verification principle indicates that such statements are not analytically true (we cannot determine whether this claim is true simply by analysing the meanings of the terms). But nor are such statements synthetically true – we cannot verify the existence of God because God is a ‘transcendent being’, a being beyond experience. • A logical positivist like Ayer concluded that religious statements are pseudo-statements – they look like ordinary statements but actually they are meaningless. Question 2 • The Euthyphro dilemma presents problems for the claim that God is omnibenevolent, or supremely good. • The two horns of the dilemma emerge when we ask ‘what makes God’s commands good?’: o Are God’s commands good just because they come from God? In which case everything that God commands will be good, by definition. o Are God’s commands good because they conform to an external moral source? In which case what God commands will be good insofar as they conform to that external source. • Whichever horn of the dilemma that believers grasp presents a problem for their belief. • If they grasp the first horn, then God might command horrific, terrible things (in the Old Testament God appears to tell his followers on some occasions to commit infanticide or even genocide) and those things would be good just because God commanded them. • But in this case we cannot make sense of God’s goodness – it does not seem to be coherent to say that God is supremely good if on this interpretation such counter-intuitive commands are good. • However believers grasp the second horn, then this places the ultimate moral authority beyond God, and means that we can by-pass God if we wish to be moral. It is this moral authority that is supremely good, not God. • Thus in the second case as well it does not make sense to say that God is supremely good.