Philosophy Mock Paper

3 marker on evil (moral evil vs natural evil)

  • must give an idea of what evil is, not just moral versus natural

  • ensure you emphasise human ‘responsibility’ for moral evil - negligence is still included in moral evil

  • must show a) responsibility b) understanding of evil c) example of natural evil

  • must identify the difference between moral and natural

5 marker on Malcolm’s ontological argument

  • make sure to memorise it

  • write it in the full form

  • establish that ontological arguments are a priori deductive arguments for the existence of God

  • god cannot come into or go out of existence. god cannot come into existence, so if he doesn’t exist he is impossible. if he cannot go out of existence, if he exists he cannot cease to exist so he exists necessarily

5 marker on Ayer

  • talk about strong versus weak verification

  • empirically verifiable:

    weak version: analytic, directly verifiable or indirectly verifiable (its probable truth could be empirically verifiable)

    strong verification: analytic or empirically verifiable

  • explain why this is an issue for claims about God/religious language

12 marks

  • ‘supremely good’ doesn’t refer specifically to Descartes

  • supremely good could refer to:

    1. Moral perfection — God does not do or command anything that is morally wrong, either (a) because God always refrains from commanding anything that is morally wrong despite the possibility of him doing this because of God’s omnipotence or (b) because God cannot possibly do/command anything that is morally wrong: God is necessarily supremely good (note that this now causes issues for God’s omnipotence)

    2. Maybe also discuss divine command theory

    Give more detail to integrate the idea of the Euthyphro against exactly why it is an issue for benevolence exactly.

25 markers - Design Arguments:

  • must address Swinburne

  • evolution is not a better account for design, it just shows the possibility of the appearance of design without a designer. Evolution and Gods are not at odds (as God could have designed evolution) but evolution does challenge God as the obvious/immediate conclusion of design arguments

  • you could also bring in the idea that evolution explains the world and the evil in it better than God does → goes into the problem of evil

  • your paragraphs are crucial (the point you are making is more or less important to your overall argument) to your conclusion - individual arguments within the paragraph are not crucial, they are strong or weak. Include the cruciality of the argument in the R and E of the paragraph.

General Key Points

Malcolm, Swinburne, Lane-Craig, Plantinga — these are the crucial, most modern arguments you must learn

all omni- words can be understood as limitlessly or limited (either everything there is to know, ore everything possible but not the future/contradictions etc)

In 12 Markers: set up your integration. e.g. in the Euthyphro dilemma, set up the possible options of how God’s goodness could be understood which then allows you to tackle it in the exploration of the Euthyphro dilemma

not all knowledge is innate - plato is wrong

knowledge gained later would be indistinguishable from other knowledge - leibniz is wrong

ability knowledge is not propositional - peter carruthers is wrong

could also explore chomsky and grammar knowledge but piraha tribe