Religious Studies

Course summary

Component 1: Students will study the following philosophy of religion topics: the design argument; the ontological argument; the cosmological argument; evil and suffering; religious experience; religious language; miracles; self, death, and the afterlife. They will also study the following ethics topics: natural moral law; situation ethics; virtue ethics; application of ethical theories to issues of human and non-human life; meta-ethics; free will and moral responsibility; conscience; Bentham and Kant. Component 2: Students will study the following topics from a Christian perspective: sources of wisdom and authority; God; self, death, and the afterlife; good conduct and key moral principles; expressions of religious identity; gender and sexuality; science; the challenge of secularisation; migration and religious pluralism. They will also consider the dialogue between Christianity and the philosophy and ethics topics studied in Component 1.