Religious Studies

Course summary

Philosophy has been the starting point for every field of academia being studied in our modern time. Questions asked by the ancient Greek philosophers have developed into the modern subjects as diverse as Psychology, Sociology, the Sciences, and Law. A Level RS focusses on the disciplines of Philosophy of Religion and Ethics. Within these two units, some fundamental questions are studied. These are questions such as, “does God exist?”, “is there a purpose to life?”, “how does one live a good life?”, “what is ‘good’?”. Central to the study of Philosophy and Ethics is the discipline of critical thinking. The core skills assessed are knowledge and understanding of religious and philosophical concepts and analysis and evaluation. Students taking A Level Religious Studies develop skills that are transferable to other subjects and learn to analyse other ideas, justify their own and evaluate the validity of theories. The main topics studied in A-Level Religious Studies are: Classical arguments for the existence of God; Challenges to the existence of God; Life after death; Religious experience; Religious and ethical language; Ways of making moral decisions; Free will; Application of ethics to topics such as immigration, homosexuality, abortion and nuclear weapons.