Philosophy Worksheet
Kreeft, Philosophy 101 by Socrates

Directions:
1. Please type your answers to these questions. (Handwritten answers will be accepted, but at a 15-point penalty.)
2. Put your name on at the top of the page.
3. Number your answers. Each answer should be at least four sentences long.
4. Print out two copies of your answers -- one for you and one for me -- and bring them to class. Late papers (turned in after the class is over) will earn a zero for the assignment.

II. From the Euthyphro: Philosophy Exemplified

pages 104-114

1. Why is divine revelation necessary if one is to answer Socrates’ question about the source of holiness?

2. How should faith and reason work together?

3. Why does Euthyphro stop answering Socrates’ questions? What reason does he give? Is this the real reason?

4. Why is the “question of God or the gods” a philosophical question?

5. Comment on the following excerpt. Does Freud make a compelling argument that belief in God is actually a psychological question? What do you think of his argument that “God is a father-substitute”?

To begin with, we know that God is a father-substitute; or, more correctly, that he is an exalted father; or, yet again, that he is a copy of a father as he is seen and experienced in childhood - by individuals in their own childhood and by mankind in its prehistory as the father of the primitive and primal horde. Later on in life the individual sees his father as something different and lesser. But the ideational image belonging to his childhood is preserved and becomes merged with the inherited memory-traces of the primal father to form the individual's idea of God. (Sigmund Freud, "A seventeenth century demonological neurosis" [1923])

6. Do we need God to be good? Survey the views of those philosophers and writers that Kreeft mentions, then give your biblically-based opinion.

7. Kreeft says that “God has come out of hiding.” What does that mean? Why does it matter?