Where do you stand?
Place yourself on a map of ethical positions and see how six traditions judge the same dilemma, build a twelve-mark evaluation, and weigh the problem of evil.
Put yourself on the map
FIG. 01 · THEMES B, D & E · AO2How each position judges this
All four are on the AQA themes: religion and life, peace and conflict, crime and punishment.
Left: life is sacred, God-given, and not ours to end. Right: what matters is whether a life can be lived well, and whose choice it is.
Top: some acts are always wrong, whatever the outcome. Bottom: the right act is the one that does most good here.
Why the map is drawn this way. The named positions do not move — they are settled teachings, described as adherents themselves would put them, and traditions contain real internal disagreement. Only your marker moves. In a twelve-mark answer, AO2 credit comes from showing you understand why a tradition holds its position — the principle underneath it — not just what its answer is.
Build the twelve-mark answer
FIG. 02 · EVALUATION · AO2Your answer, as it stands
What the twelve-mark question actually asks. Not what you feel — whether you can argue both sides properly, using religious teaching, and then reach a conclusion that follows from the argument you just made. An answer with five points on one side and nothing on the other cannot reach the top band however good those five points are. Notice that the meter refuses to move until both columns have something in them.
The problem of evil, weighed
FIG. 03 · CHRISTIAN BELIEFS · THEME BThe challenge. If God is omnipotent, God could prevent suffering. If God is omnibenevolent, God would want to. Suffering exists. Believers have answered this for two thousand years; each answer covers some of the ground and leaves some uncovered.
How much of the challenge each response meets
Left: moral evil — suffering people cause. Right: natural suffering — earthquakes, disease, the death of a child. The two are not answered by the same arguments.
A world where love is possible is a world where cruelty is possible. Genuine freedom cannot be given with the harm removed.
The idea, developed by Irenaeus and by John Hick, that the world is a 'vale of soul-making' in which people grow into moral maturity.
Judgement and heaven mean this life is not the whole account; injustice here is not the last word.
The answer given to Job: God's purposes are not fully available to us, and faith is trust without a complete explanation.
Handle this one carefully. For most believers this is not a puzzle but a lived question, met with prayer, lament and practical care for those suffering as much as with argument. A good evaluation says so — and it also takes seriously the position of those who conclude, from the same evidence, that there is no God. Both belong in a twelve-mark answer.