PHI 224: Final Exam, Spring 2006

Instructions

Write well-developed, clearly organized answers to all the questions. 

This is an exam that you complete outside of class. In completing the exam, you are free to refer to the readings and your notes, or to talk with other students about your answers. In fact, you are encouraged to work together with other students on this exam. But whatever you finally turn in MUST be your OWN writing, IN YOUR OWN WORDS, expressing YOUR OWN UNDERSTANDING at the time you wrote it.

Please limit yourself to 3000 words all together (typically about 8 pages).  Each question counts equally.  Submit answers printed on paper -- not electronically, and not hand-written.  No fancy stuff like plastic covers, binders, elaborate cover sheets, money stuffed between pages, etc.

bulletDO NOT QUOTE OR CLOSELY PARAPHRASE ANYTHING WITHOUT CITING YOUR SOURCE. (Not even the textbook, or course materials.)
bulletDO NOT INCLUDE MORE THAN A FEW very BRIEF QUOTATIONS OF ANYTHING IN YOUR ENTIRE SET OF ANSWERS.
bulletTHE ONLY ALLOWABLE REASON FOR QUOTING ANYTHING IS TO PROVIDE EVIDENCE TO SUPPORT A POINT YOU HAVE STATED IN YOUR OWN WORDS. THE PENALTY FOR ILLEGITIMATE QUOTING IS "DEATH".

If you work with another student in preparing your answers, don't draft your actual answers together, and don't agree on exactly what examples you will use, or how you will express a particular point.  When you work with someone, talk over the issues and share ideas, but don't do any outlining or writing together.  Don't show your completed answer to someone else in order to help them; there are too many cases in which the helper ends up helping too much and then there is trouble.

Advice

1.  The biggest problem with this kind of exam has been that students write answers that are too incomplete or sketchy.  Don't assume that the reader will "just know" what you're getting at; instead, assume the reader is relatively ignorant about this particular subject matter. Do not assume that the reader has been in the class!  Instead, think of your audience as generally intelligent people who know nothing specific about this subject.

2.  These questions can all be answered quite well simply by drawing ideas from our class discussions and the assigned readings.  You are not expected to go out and find more sources.  You are not prohibited from finding more sources, but if you decide to use more sources, don't get sucked into just paraphrasing something someone else wrote that you don't really understand.  The latter can be a cause of trouble; your answer will read as though you don't understand what you are talking about.  You are much better off saying what you really think and understand than trying to sound profound by half-copying from something you don't really "get".

3.  Your answers are graded on how well they answer the question that is asked.  Don't shoot yourself in the foot by going off on a tangent.  Instead, focus on giving an accurate and complete answer to the question.  Your space and time is limited.  So, be direct, precise, clear.  You have a lot to squeeze into these answers.

Questions/topics

  1. Flew claimed that central religious claims about the world are empty of meaning, because they are treated by believers as being immune from empirical testing -- nothing that we can experience could ever be allowed to count as evidence against the religious claims.  His main example was the religious claim "God loves us".  Mitchell disagreed with Flew about the relevance of  human experience to central ideas of religion.  For the purposes of this question, change the example to the following religious claim:

    The whole universe, including human life, owes its existence to the purposive creative activity of a transcendent force or divine being(s).

    Would things said by Broom, Machina, Gould, and Dawkins in our course materials tend to support Mitchell's view, or Flew's?
     
  2. Explain how the positions taken by Bultmann, Borg, and the US Catholic Bishops are all designed to show that complete naturalism is not the only reasoned response to scientific progress.
     
  3. Gould and Dawkins are in serious disagreement about what to think of religion, and yet neither of them is a religious person.  What exactly do they disagree about?  How is their disagreement related to the competition between naturalism and religious worldviews?
     
  4. It is common today to hear that religion is based on faith, while science is based on reason and evidence.  (The NCSE policy statement, for one example, appears to be taking this line.)  Machina discusses this way of contrasting religion and science.  What would he say about it?
     
  5. According to Broom, there are a number of subjects that science as we now understand it cannot talk about.   What are these subjects and why can't science as we now understand it deal with them?  Does Broom think that the fact that science as presently conceived cannot deal with these subjects implies that these subjects cannot be dealt with by means of rational inquiry?  How does this connect with the negative things he says about "absolutists"?  What does all this show about his views about the advantages or disadvantages of naturalism?