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

Answer

Socrates' dilemma in Plato's Euthyphro asks whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because the gods love it—threatening to make divine commands either arbitrary or redundant.

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

Answer

Open theists hold that future free choices are genuinely open and unknowable even by God, preserving libertarian freedom but revising the classical doctrine of complete divine foreknowledge.

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

Answer

Alston argues that Christian Mystical Practice (CMP) is epistemically on a par with sense perception—both are socially established doxastic practices whose reliability cannot be established without circularity.

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)

Answer

In On Religion and The Christian Faith, Schleiermacher argued that religion's distinctive essence is the immediate self-consciousness of absolute dependence, from which doctrine and ethics are secondary elaborations.

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

Answer

TAG contends that the preconditions of intelligibility—logic, induction, ethical absolutes—are only possible if the Christian God exists, making atheism self-refuting when it uses logic to deny God.

PhD Doctor of Philosophy Practice Test

PhD Doctor of Philosophy Practice Test

PhD Doctor of Philosophy Philosophy of God and Religion 5