PR Keywords

These are some of the terms that you need to know. Here is a link that tests you on them.

Atheism	Belief in no God.
Atheist	A person who believes that there is no God.
Theism	Belief in a God.
Theist	A person who believes in God.
Agnostic	A person who believes we cannot be sure whether god exists or not.
Monotheism	Belief in one God.
Monotheist	A person who believes one God exists.
Allah	The name of God in Islam, meaning ‘one God’.
First Cause	St Thomas Aquinas’ theory to prove the existence of God – based on God as First Cause of the World.
Fundamentalist	A person who believes that Holy scriptures are the literal word of God.
Progressive	A person who believes that the Holy scriptures are partially true.
Myth	A widely held idea presented in story form.
Creation	The act of causing something to exist; the religious view that God made the universe.
Creation stories	Religious explanations of how the universe came about, how God made the world; Genesis creation story.
Design	A preliminary plan or idea for something to be established.
Teleological argument	Argument to prove the existence of God through evidence of design in the world (the design argument).
William Paley	He put forward the teleological argument for the existence of God.
St Thomas Aquinas	A monk and theologian that wrote the First Cause argument.
Cosmological argument	The other name for the first cause theory.  The idea that nothing cannot turn into something by itself, that the universe must have had a creator.
Morality	The sense of right and wrong.
The Moral Argument	The argument that God exists because people have a sense of duty, a
Immanuel Kant	A German philosopher who wrote the argument from morality.
Proof	A fact or thing that helps to show the truth.
Nature of God	What God’s character is like.
Immanent	God involved in the world, taken an active role in history, e.g. in the person of Jesus Christ.
Incarnation	God took human form in the person of Jesus in Christianity.
Transcendent	God outside and beyond the world, doesn’t directly act in the world, limitless.
Personal	God described in human terms, able to relate to him.  He listens, speaks, cares, knows, etc.
Impersonal	God described as a force or idea, unable to relate to him personally.
Omnipotent	All powerful (almighty).  He is as powerful as it is possible to be; includes the ability to create the world; God’s power is unlimited.
Omniscient	All knowing.  He knows everything it is possible to know; God’s intelligence is unlimited.
Benevolent	All loving.  He loves each of us as individuals; God’s love is unlimited.
Merciful	Forgiving and compassionate.
Just	Judges fairly.
Creator	Maker and designer of everything.
Revelation	When God reveals himself to humans.
Religious Experience	An experience that leaves one feeling one has met God, feeling God’s presence in some way.
Saul	In the New Testament, he was a Jew who became a Christian known as Paul.
Conversion	When a person becomes a member of a faith often following a dramatic change of heart.
General Revelation	Indirect experience of God, where a person sees something of God through something else, for example through observing nature or the work of good people.
Special Revelation	Direct experience of God through a particular event, i.e. meeting God.
Empirical evidence	Factual verified proof or scientific proof.
Illusion	A false belief; a something wrongly believed to exist; deceptive appearances, ‘all in the mind’.
Reality	What is real or actually exists.
Prayer	Words of praise, thanks or sorrow, etc offered to God.
Charismatic worship	Highly enthusiastic form of Christian worship, filled with and led by the Holy Spirit.
Speak in tongues	A feature of charismatic worship, when people find themselves able to speak and understand strange languages, believed to be a gift of the Holy Spirit.
Sacrament	A ritual that gives a special blessing to those involved.
Natural suffering/evil	Suffering or pain caused by the activity of nature, e.g. because of earthquakes, volcanoes, floods.
Human made suffering (moral evil)	Suffering caused by the words and actions of humans.
Evil	That which is deliberately bad or harmful, or goes against the will of God.
Malevolent	God described as cruel and unkind.
Free Will	Having the ability to choose or determine one’s own actions.  The idea that we are free to choose whether we do good or bad.
Original Sin	The disobedience of Adam and Eve that every human is born with.
The Fall	The term given to Adam and Eve being banished from the Garden of Eden resulting in a perfect world becoming one of evil and suffering.
Paradise	A state of complete bliss often used as a reference to God’s Garden of Eden.
The Devil (Satan or Lucifer)	The name given to the supreme spirit of evil.  Some refer to this as a personal being who tempts people to sin.
Theodicy	Defence of God against accusations for the problems of suffering and evil in the world.
Nature of evil	What evil is like, whether a personal being, a psychological phenomenon or impersonal force.
Psychological Phenomenon	An idea about the nature of evil that it is something arising from the mind of a person.
Impersonal force	The idea that evil is a power outside of people that draws them to evil.
Personal being	The idea that evil is an evil spirit or devil rather than an impersonal force.
Immortality	Live forever, never die; eternal life.
Resurrection	Idea that each person will be physically brought back to life at the Day of Judgement.
Reincarnation	The belief that our soul will be reincarnated (reborn) many times to live many lifetimes in a search for enlightenment.
Enlightenment	Breaking free from the cycle of reincarnation/rebirth.
Rebirth	The belief that our ever-changing self will be reborn into many lifetimes in a search for enlightenment.
Anatta	A Buddhism term for ‘not soul’, the combination of elements (skandhas) such as emotion and intelligence which makes each person unique and individual.  These are always changing, and there is ‘no soul’.
Life after Death	Life after the death of the body in this lifetime.
Eternal	Everlasting, never ending.
Medium	A person who has psychic abilities and can communicate with the souls of the dead.
Spiritualism	Religious belief that disembodied spirits of the dead surviving in another world/dimension can make contact with the living in this world, especially through mediums.
Near-death experience	An experience whereby someone is close to death or in an intense operation situation, claim to have had a sense of themselves leaving their bodies and seeing what exists beyond this life.
Soul	Non-physical part of a human, which is thought to continue after the death of the body, e.g. going to heaven.
Dualism	Idea that mind and body are completely distinct elements that make up a human.
Miracle	An event that is contradictory to the normal order of things; impossible – usually applied to an action of God, and is always good.
Laws of nature	Descriptions of how scientists expect nature to work, assuming it follows certain principles, e.g. day always follows night.
David Hume	A philosopher and historian who thought that observation and experience should be the foundation of human knowledge.
Vision	Seeing something, especially in a dream or trance, that shows something about the nature of God or the afterlife.
Benevolence	Goodness, being all-loving, a quality of God
Immanence	The idea that God is present in and involved with life on earth and in the universe (quality of God).
Omnipotence	Almighty, unlimited power (a quality of God).
Ganesha	Hindu God – statues of Ganesha were said to be drinking milk.
Scripture	The sacred writings of the religion.
Belief	What someone accepts as being true for them.
Religious truth	Truth established from religion
Moral truth	Truth established through morality, based on ideas of right and wrong.
Scientific truth	Truths established by science, through observed regularity and testing of hypotheses.
Spiritual truth	Truth established through religion and spirituality, often giving answers to ultimate questions.
Compatibility	When two or more different ideas can be used together without problems or tension, e.g. whether a scientific view of the origins of life is compatible with a religious one.
Big Bang theory	Scientific theory about the origins of the universe – from an explosion all the matter that makes up the universe came into being.
Charles Darwin	Author of ‘On the Origin of Species’ (1859), which discussed ideas of evolution.
Natural selection	Survival of the fittest amongst species – those that adapt to the changing environment survive; those that don’t adapt become extinct.
Genesis	The first book of the Bible and Torah that refers to the creation story shared by Christians and Jews.
Cosmological revolution	The change in understanding of the layout of the universe.
Infallible	Not capable of being wrong.  Religions believe God is infallible.
Evolution	Theory of development of life from simple to complex forms.
Anthropic Principle	Evaluation of scientific evidence in relation to the universe; can be read in two ways, one to prove God, the other to ignore God.
Weak anthropic	Evaluation of scientific evidence that says the world simply is the way because of fluke or random chance NOT God.
Strong anthropic	Evaluation of scientific evidence that says the world must have been designed by God since it is so perfectly suited for life.
Evolving changing truth	The idea that what is considered true changes as new knowledge becomes available or circumstances change.