An essential part of any academic discipline at any level is being able to use the right terminology, at the right times, and in the right places. This will be true of all your A-level subjects, including religious studies which abounds with specialist vocabulary. If you took GCSE religious studies some of it will already be familiar: you will have referred to the classical attributes of God as omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent, as well as defining more common, but sometimes misused, terms such as ‘miracle’, ‘abortion’, even ‘Bible’ perhaps, or ‘church’. These will inevitably be used during your A-level studies too, but you also need to become fluent with terms belonging to the realms of philosophy and theology at a high level. Let’s identify some of the terms that recur most frequently.
When you are introduced to arguments for the existence of God, possibly the first major topic that you’ll cover on the philosophy of religion paper, you are likely to find the arguments described using Latin terminology. Arguments for the existence of God are usually understood to be either a priori or a posteriori. These terms apply to discussions about the nature of knowledge and proof in general philosophy too — they are fundamental in our understanding of how we gain knowledge about the world and the value and status we think that knowledge has.
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