Religious Studies

Course summary

This course is designed to help students to become knowledgeable, reflective, critical and creative thinkers able to approach academic work and intellectual discourse confidently and effectively. Religious Studies A Level is a good background for a wide range of careers especially those that involve working with the public or helping people such as youth work, counselling, policing, and humanitarian aid work. This course is split into three sections, Christianity, Philosophy and Ethics. This course gives students the opportunity to have a thorough understanding of diverse philosophical and ethical viewpoints. Students will gain critical and evaluative skills that are not just sought after in academic settings, but in life. When studying Christianity, students will dive deep into the religions major figures and sacred texts, and study concepts like The Nature of God, the Holy Trinity, and Atonement. They will also get a chance to assess the historical journey of Christianity and how wealth, migration and discrimination has shaped the religion over the last 2000 years of its existence. During their study of Philosophy, students will look at cosmological and teleological, and ontological arguments for the existence of a God. They will look at challenges to Religious Belief from figures like Freud and Jung and will look at many other topics including The Problem of Evil, Religious Experiences and Language, and Miracles. Finally, in the Ethics section, students will look at many theories within ethical thought such as: Divine Command Theory, Virtue Theory, Ethical Egoism, and Meta Ethics alongside studying Deontological and Teleological ethics as well as the concepts of Determination and Free Will.