The Search for Meaning and Values
This domain asks how humans make sense of existence and how religions and non-religious worldviews answer that question. The exam tests key terms, comparison of thinkers, and evaluation of claims rather than mere description.
Core concepts
- Worldview: a comprehensive framework of beliefs about reality, value and purpose; everyone has one, religious or secular.
- Religion: a family-resemblance concept involving beliefs, practices, community, sacred texts and ethics; no single essential definition is uncontested.
- Revelation, faith and reason: revelation is self-disclosure (propositional or non-propositional); faith is trust and commitment, not simply credulity; reason can clarify and critique.
- Philosophical responses: Plato's cave (appearance versus reality), Aristotle's eudaimonia (flourishing through virtue), Socrates' examined life.
- Existentialist responses: Kierkegaard's leap, Nietzsche's death of God and nihilism risk, Sartre's radical freedom, Frankl's will to meaning.
- Religious responses: Buber's I-Thou relation, Tillich's ultimate concern, Otto's numinous.
- Critiques: Feuerbach (projection), Marx (opium), Freud (illusion), Dawkins (delusion/meme).
- Myth, symbol and ritual express meaning non-propositionally.
Worked example
Claim: 'Religion is merely a projection of human needs.' Reason: Feuerbach argues God is the projection of human qualities; Freud sees religion as infantile wish-fulfilment. Evaluate: the critique has explanatory power for some religious language, but it is a genetic fallacy if it dismisses belief solely by origin. Tillich and Buber offer alternative accounts of transcendence and relation; the claim also struggles to explain prophetic critique and costly discipleship. Conclusion: a nuanced verdict, not a slogan.
Traps
Conflating agnosticism with atheism; defining faith as blind belief; ignoring secular meaning systems; naming thinkers without explaining their argument; asserting or dismissing proofs without criteria.