Answer the following questions in about 150 words each: (a) Discuss Cārvāka's critique of the belief in the existence of…

(a) Cārvāka’s critique of suprasensible entities rests on a narrow epistemology. It accepts only pratyakṣa, direct perception, as valid knowledge and rejects śabda/āgama as pramāṇa because Vedic testimony cannot be verified by sense experience. It also treats anumāna as fallible: inference may produce anavasthā, an infinite regress of reasons, or cakraka, circularity, and therefore cannot establish dharma, heaven, soul or God. For Cārvāka, suprasensible claims are unobservable and hence not credible; the only reliable aim is bhuñjita, enjoying what is present, because pleasure and pain are perceptible. This critique is epistemologically radical: it denies that reason or revelation can bridge the gap between the sensible and the suprasensible, though it risks reducing ethics to immediate experience. It thus challenges the authority of śruti and the metaphysical assumptions of dharmaśāstra, while leaving little basis for moral obligations beyond perceptible consequences. Its strength is clarity; its weakness is exclusion of insight.

(b) Whether religious language is symbolic depends on what it is taken to do. Tillich argues that religious symbols are not literal descriptions but vehicles of meaning: they point beyond themselves to ultimate reality, disclose the heart, and are open, penetrable and non-exclusive. This avoids the literalist error of treating God as an object among objects, but critics say it may make doctrine non-cognitive or unverifiable. Braithwaite offers a non-cognitive view: religious statements are not factual claims but expressions of a way of life, commitments and responses to God. Aquinas, by contrast, defends analogical predication: terms such as good, wise and living are applied to God neither univocally nor purely metaphorically, but according to a real relation between Creator and creature. Against literal verificationism, which demands empirical testability, these accounts preserve the truth-claim of religion by reinterpreting its mode of reference: symbolically, existentially or analogically, rather than as straightforward factual assertion.

(c) Nietzsche’s criticism of religion and morality is genealogical: he asks not whether moral truths are valid, but how they arose. In On the Genealogy of Morality, he argues that Christian slave morality inverted the noble values of strength, honour and self-affirmation, replacing them with humility, pity and obedience. Its driving force is ressentiment: the weak, unable to act, reinterpret their powerlessness as virtue and condemn the strong as evil. The “death of God” intensifies this crisis, because the loss of the Christian metaphysical foundation exposes the arbitrariness of moral values and threatens nihilism. Nietzsche therefore calls for a transvaluation of values, a move beyond good and evil in which life, creativity and the will to power are affirmed rather than denied. His critique is powerful in exposing the psychological and historical roots of morality, but it risks making moral evaluation itself a matter of power and taste and not reason.

(d) In Advaita Vedānta, jīvanmukti is liberation while embodied. It is jñāna-niṣṭhā: the removal of avidyā through knowledge of the identity of ātman and Brahman. The jīvanmukta remains in the body because prārabdha-karma, the karma already bearing fruit, continues to sustain the present life, but no new saṃchita-karma is created and the sense of individual agency ceases. This differs from videhamukti, where the body is finally relinquished. The contrast with other schools is nuanced. Dvaita, while accepting release from fresh bondage, stresses eternal difference and graded liberation in divine service rather than non-dual identity. Viśiṣṭādvaita also accepts a form of jīvanmukti: the liberated soul may remain embodied until prārabdha-karma is exhausted, yet its final beatitude is union with and service to God, not impersonal identity. Thus jīvanmukti is not mere survival but the lived experience of freedom. It shows that embodiment is not the obstacle; ignorance is the true barrier.

(e) For Aquinas, faith is not blind acceptance but an intellectual assent, assensus, to revealed truths, given by the will under grace. In the Summa Theologiae, he classifies faith as a theological virtue rather than an intellectual virtue, though it resides in the intellect and is directed toward truth. This allows him to reconcile reason and faith: truths knowable by natural reason, such as God’s existence, may also be revealed, forming a twofold truth that is not contradictory but complementary. Theology is subalternated to reason in the sense that it uses rational argument, logic and natural philosophy, yet it is guided by revealed principles. Faith therefore does not oppose reason; it extends it. The formula fides quaerens intellectum captures the movement: faith seeks understanding, and reason illuminates what faith accepts. The result is a harmonious order: reason prepares for, supports and deepens faith, while faith opens to truths beyond unaided demonstration.