PhD Doctor of Philosophy Philosophy of God and Religion 5

Question 1

The 'divine command theory' of ethics faces the 'Euthyphro dilemma,' which challenges theists to explain whether:

Accepted Answer

God's commands are arbitrary or whether God commands things because they are independently good

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Moral facts are more fundamental than God's existence

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Religious morality conflicts with secular morality on all substantive questions

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God's goodness can be known independently of revelation

Question 2

Open theism, associated with Clark Pinnock and Gregory Boyd, differs from classical theism primarily in denying:

Accepted Answer

That God has exhaustive foreknowledge of future free human actions

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God's omnipotence over the natural world

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Divine omnipresence and immanence in creation

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The personal nature of the divine being

Question 3

In William Alston's 'Perceiving God,' the epistemological parallel he draws to ground the reliability of mystical perception is:

Accepted Answer

The practice of sense perception, which is also a doxastic practice that cannot be non-circularly validated

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The reliability of moral intuition in ethical reasoning

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The coherentist justification of scientific belief systems

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A priori rational intuition of necessary truths

Question 4

Friedrich Schleiermacher located the essence of religion not in doctrine or morality but in:

Accepted Answer

The feeling of absolute dependence (schlechthinnige Abhängigkeit)

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Rational demonstration of God's existence through natural theology

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Obedience to divine commands mediated through scripture

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Mystical union with the divine that transcends all feeling

Question 5

The 'transcendental argument for God's existence' (TAG), associated with Cornelius Van Til and Greg Bahnsen, argues that:

Accepted Answer

Logical laws, induction, and moral absolutes are intelligible only if the Christian God exists

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The cosmological structure of reality entails the existence of a first cause

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Every possible world contains at least one necessarily existing being

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The design of the universe is best explained by intelligent causation

Question 6

Marilyn McCord Adams's response to 'horrendous evils' argues that God's redemption of such evils involves:

Accepted Answer

Integrating horror-participation into a relationship with God that constitutes the defeated individual's own beatitude

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Guaranteeing that future goods will causally outweigh past horrors on a utilitarian calculus

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Proving to humanity that God's power is sufficient to overcome any evil

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Ensuring that perpetrators of horrors receive proportionate punishment

Question 7

The 'principle of credulity,' introduced by Richard Swinburne to defend the evidential value of religious experience, states that:

Accepted Answer

If it seems to a subject that x is present, that is good prima facie reason to believe x is present, absent defeaters

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We should believe religious experiences are veridical only when multiple witnesses corroborate them

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Religious testimony is credible only when the experiencer is morally virtuous

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The credulity of religious believers is explained by psychological projection