THE NATURE OF BELIEF IN GOD

Each option is made up of a number of sub-questions (A, B, C, etc). It will give your essay a nice and transparent structure if you use those sub-questions as sub-titles within the text of your answer, thereby dividing your essay into clear parts with a clear progression. (If you think that you can better respond to all the sub-questions in your option in some other order, however, then you are free to do so – but then make sure that the structure of your essay is very obvious to the reader, and make sure that you do actually respond to all the sub-questions).

OPTION 4: PANENTHEISM

(A) Present the strongest argument that you can, for the claim that if there is a God then the world must be – in some sense – included within God, or be a part of God. (You can reconstruct and develop one of the arguments put forward by Nozick, Eriugena, Dinant, Maimon, Kook, or others ; or you can construct one of your own).
(B) Explain what exactly your argument means by the world being ‘included in’ or ‘a part of’ God. And then...
(C) Evaluate whether or not, or to what degree, the argument you have presented is successful.
(D) If you have space, you can extend your discussion to a second argument (but there is no need to do so if you would prefer to dedicate more space to the previous sections).

OPTION 5: DECREATION

(A) Describe in what important ways your life would change and in what important ways your life would stay the same if you became ‘decreated’ right now, i.e. if you annihilated your own separate will and realized your nothingness within the Divine unlimited. (E.g. would you retain your current relationships, and if so, in what ways, if any, would they change? Would you continue to engage in your current projects, and if so, in what ways, if any, would your involvement in them change? Etc).
(B) Justify the various elements of your description, and respond to potential objections that might be made to the effect that the ramifications would not be as you have claimed.
(C) Briefly conclude by discussing whether or not, and why, these changes would be for the better or worse.

OPTION 6: POLYTHEISM (DRAWING FROM BOTH LECTURES 6 AND 8)

Imagine that Lake Ontario is a god.

(A) What would be involved in its being so?
(B) What would be involved in your experiencing it as such? And…
(C) What is the relationship (if any) between the word ‘god’ as applied to the lake and the word ‘God’ as applied to the unique highest being of Ontotheism?

In each of these sub-questions, make sure to justify the claims that you make.

OPTION 7: ATHEISM

(A) Pick, and briefly describe in concrete terms, one example of each of the following three categories: (i) a horrible life-situation that you might find yourself stuck in (e.g. having a degrading job, being in jail, etc); (ii) a tragedy that might befall you (e.g. losing a loved one, the shattering of a dream that you had built your life around, etc); and (iii) an everyday kind of annoyance (e.g. having three assignment deadlines on the same date, being in a rush and then discovering that you have just missed the bus you needed, etc).
(B) Present a ‘reinterpretation’ of each of the examples you have picked – drawing on Nietzsche’s tools of foregrounding/backgrounding and of re-evaluation (and any other tools you find useful) – so that each of these three things become something that you could truly embrace and love, rather than something that you resent and are bitter about. Do this in as concrete a way as you can.
(C) Explain what the advantages of engaging in this kind of reinterpretation would be; explain what its disadvantages would be; and explain what limitations the effort of reinterpretation might have.
(D) Conclude by saying whether or not you think – or to what degree you think – that engaging in such reinterpretation of one’s life is a good (or possible) idea.

OPTION 8: THE NATURE OF BELIEF IN GOD

(A) Confronted by someone who says that they believe in God, how might you go about investigating whether their belief is an hypothesis about super-empirical reality, or something very different from such an hypothesis? (E.g. what questions would you ask them? What responses or behaviours would you look out for? And the like).
(B) Why might someone who takes belief in God to be an hypothesis about super-empirical reality (e.g. Swinburne, Dawkins, and others) claim that belief in God which is not such an hypothesis is not real belief in God? And why might someone who takes belief in God to be very different from such an hypothesis (e.g. Wittgenstein, Hare, and others) claim that belief in God which is such an hypothesis somehow misses the point?
(C) Explain what role (or roles) arguments for God’s existence might play in connection with belief in God which is not an hypothesis about super-empirical reality (and if you think that arguments would become irrelevant, explain why).