Michaelmas Trials Quotes

Question 1

Augustine - Free Will

Answer 1

‘I affirmed that the evil of mankind has sprung from free choice of the will’

Question 2

Augustine - Privatio Boni

Answer 2

‘There is no possible source of evil except good’

Question 3

Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica - Natural Law

Answer 3

‘To the Natural Law belongs everything to which a man is inclined, according to his nature’

Question 4

St Paul - Romans 2:15 - Natural Law

Answer 4

‘The requirements of the law are written on their hearts’

Question 5

Heraclitus - Cratylus - Change

Answer 5

‘Everything changes and nothing stays still - you cannot step into the same stream twice’

Question 6

Aristotle - De Anima - Soul

Answer 6

‘When seeing is removed, the eye is no longer an eye’

Question 7

Descartes - Meditations - Divisibility

Answer 7

‘A body is by nature divisible, but the mind is not’

Question 8

Plato - Phaedo - Soul

Answer 8

‘The soul is in the very likeness of the divine… immortal, and intelligible, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable’

Question 9

Thomas Aquinas - Summa Theologica - Soul

Answer 9

‘Man is not a soul only, but something composed of soul and body’

Question 10

Ernest F Kevan - Situation Ethics

Answer 10

‘The New Testament teaches unambiguously that the Ten Commandments are still binding upon all men’

Question 11

Genesis 1:26 - Irenaeus

Answer 11

‘Let us make mankind in our image (icon), in our likeness (homoiosis)’

Question 12

Irenaeus - Against Heresies

Answer 12

‘Moral and spiritual growth comes through response to challenges’

Question 13

Richard Swinburne - Free Will

Answer 13

‘The less God allows men to bring about large scale horrors, the less freedom and responsibility he gives them’

Question 14

Richard Dawkins - World’s Purpose (Four Causes)

Answer 14

The world has ‘no purpose in mind… no vision, no foresight, no sight at all’

Question 15

J.S. Mill - Utilitarianism

Answer 15

It is better to be ‘Socrates dissatisfied’ than a ‘fool satisfied’

Question 16

Maria von Herbert - Kant

Answer 16

They only get their prestige from the attractiveness of sin, and it costs me almost no effort to resist that

Question 17

Immanuel Kant - Reason and will

Answer 17

Reason constrains the will to act

Question 18

Romans 7:14 - Augustine’s view of temptation

Answer 18

‘For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do’

Question 19

Augustine - City of God Book 16 - Evil

Answer 19

‘They would not have arrived at the evil act if an evil will had not preceded it’

Question 20

John Locke - Essay Concerning Human Understanding - Counter to Original Sin

Answer 20

‘Tabula Rasa’

Question 21

Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature

Answer 21

‘Nature is a hanging judge’ - requoted

Question 22

Rousseau - A Discourse on Inequality - Original Sin

Answer 22

‘There is no original perversity in the human heart’ - society is to blame

Question 23

Richard Dawkins - The God Delusion - Original Sin

Answer 23

‘What kind of ethical philosophy… condemns every child… to inherit the sin of a remote ancestor’

Question 24

Sigmund Freud - Three Contributions to the Theory of Sexuality

Answer 24

Sex is important in development and is perfectly moral and natural (paraphrase)

Question 25

Matthew 25:31-46 The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats

Answer 25

Kolasin Aionin - (Eternal?) Punishment

Question 26

Newton - Principia - Teleological Argument

Answer 26

‘[The World] could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being’

Question 27

Paley - Natural Theology - Teleological Argument

Answer 27

‘The watch must have had a maker… there cannot be design without a designer’

Question 28

Hume - Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion - Teleological Argument x2

Answer 28

‘[One] cannot compare temporal things with the universe itself’

‘Three world is more like a cabbage than a machine’