RLGN 104 - Chapter 5, Powell
Question and answers already passed
2025/2026
Atheism - correct answer ✔claims that God does not exist
- or that if He does exist we cannot know anything about Him
Buddhism - correct answer ✔the only religion proper to adhere to a form of atheism
- regards the existence of God as ultimately irrelevant
- if God did exist nothing about Buddhism would change, it is a religion without a God
A logical conclusion that is self refuting - correct answer ✔to make the claim that God exists is simply to
say that God is among the things that exist, but to say that God does not exist is to say that out of all the
things that do exist, God is not among them. Someone would have to have a complete exhaustive
knowledge to make that claim.
Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell gave this rejection: - correct answer ✔religion is based primarily
and mainly upon fear. Science can teach us, and I think out own hearts can teach us, no longer to look
around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts
here below to make this world a fit place to live in.
Agnostic(ism) - correct answer ✔to have no knowledge. God is unknown but not necessarily
unknowable is agnosticism. Neither for nor against the claim that God exists.
A quick sampling of other notable atheists: - correct answer ✔Sigmund Freud
Charles Darwin
Friedrich Nietzche
Karl Marx
, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA
Helen Keller
Thomas Edison
Woody Allen
Ayn Rand
Frank Zappa
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Pantheism - correct answer ✔Everything that exists is God.
- One view: God is a force that is in all things (like in Star Wars)
- Another view: sees God as the totality of everything. All is one and one is all.
- Others see: God as manifest in many forms each a part of the ultimate reality.
- Many believe nature is just part of the whole, others believe material reality is only an illusion.
-God is impersonal so God cannot have a moral will- whatever is, is reality and the rest is illusion; our
individual personhood is only illusion. When we die, we are absorbed into the impersonal whole. God
cannot be intelligent since only persons have intelligence. Cannot be engaged in the world since
intentionality and engagement are also characteristics exclusive to persons.
-Dualities or opposites do not exist - there can be no right or wrong, good and evil or true and false.
- no difference between benevolence and malevolence
- logic and reason are also examples of illusions, logic and reason both deal with opposites
- fails to account for features of reality that are expressed in the cosmological, design, and moral
arguments.
- if everything that exists is iteself a part of God, then nothing can be transcendent
- the universe is eternal and unchanging, it has no beginning or end.
- a strain of pantheism that is based on the observation that the same matter and energy that makes the
universe makes us
-fraught with very difficult problems - with morality. we all share the same fate returning into the
impersonal whole, there is no ground for morality.
Question and answers already passed
2025/2026
Atheism - correct answer ✔claims that God does not exist
- or that if He does exist we cannot know anything about Him
Buddhism - correct answer ✔the only religion proper to adhere to a form of atheism
- regards the existence of God as ultimately irrelevant
- if God did exist nothing about Buddhism would change, it is a religion without a God
A logical conclusion that is self refuting - correct answer ✔to make the claim that God exists is simply to
say that God is among the things that exist, but to say that God does not exist is to say that out of all the
things that do exist, God is not among them. Someone would have to have a complete exhaustive
knowledge to make that claim.
Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell gave this rejection: - correct answer ✔religion is based primarily
and mainly upon fear. Science can teach us, and I think out own hearts can teach us, no longer to look
around for imaginary supports, no longer to invent allies in the sky, but rather to look to our own efforts
here below to make this world a fit place to live in.
Agnostic(ism) - correct answer ✔to have no knowledge. God is unknown but not necessarily
unknowable is agnosticism. Neither for nor against the claim that God exists.
A quick sampling of other notable atheists: - correct answer ✔Sigmund Freud
Charles Darwin
Friedrich Nietzche
Karl Marx
, Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA
Helen Keller
Thomas Edison
Woody Allen
Ayn Rand
Frank Zappa
Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Pantheism - correct answer ✔Everything that exists is God.
- One view: God is a force that is in all things (like in Star Wars)
- Another view: sees God as the totality of everything. All is one and one is all.
- Others see: God as manifest in many forms each a part of the ultimate reality.
- Many believe nature is just part of the whole, others believe material reality is only an illusion.
-God is impersonal so God cannot have a moral will- whatever is, is reality and the rest is illusion; our
individual personhood is only illusion. When we die, we are absorbed into the impersonal whole. God
cannot be intelligent since only persons have intelligence. Cannot be engaged in the world since
intentionality and engagement are also characteristics exclusive to persons.
-Dualities or opposites do not exist - there can be no right or wrong, good and evil or true and false.
- no difference between benevolence and malevolence
- logic and reason are also examples of illusions, logic and reason both deal with opposites
- fails to account for features of reality that are expressed in the cosmological, design, and moral
arguments.
- if everything that exists is iteself a part of God, then nothing can be transcendent
- the universe is eternal and unchanging, it has no beginning or end.
- a strain of pantheism that is based on the observation that the same matter and energy that makes the
universe makes us
-fraught with very difficult problems - with morality. we all share the same fate returning into the
impersonal whole, there is no ground for morality.
