(a) Discuss Cārvāka's critique of the belief in the existence of suprasensible entities. (10 marks) (b) Is religious language…

(a) Cārvāka's critique of suprasensible entities

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. On this basis each suprasensible entity is rejected. There is no soul apart from the body (dehātmavāda): consciousness arises from the four elements when they combine as a body, as intoxicating power arises from mixing fermenting agents (kiṇva) that are not intoxicating by themselves. There is no God, since the world arises from the nature (svabhāva) of the elements. There is no heaven, hell, rebirth or unseen merit (adṛṣṭa), and the Vedas are dismissed as the work of "buffoons, knaves and demons" who profit from rituals. The only reliable aim is pleasure (kāma), because pleasure and pain are perceptible: "while life lasts, live happily... when the body is reduced to ashes, how can it return?" 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) Is religious language symbolic?

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, participate in that to which they point, and open up levels of reality and of the soul. 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 commitment to an agapeistic way of life. 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. The answer is therefore yes, largely: talk of God as "father" or "rock" is symbolic. But not wholly: believers also make claims meant literally (that God exists, that God acts), which is why Flew's falsification challenge and Hick's reply of "eschatological verification" treat religious statements as genuine assertions.

(c) Nietzsche's criticism of religion and morality

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. Religion, especially through the priestly "ascetic ideal", turns suffering against life itself; the Übermensch is the figure who creates values, and eternal recurrence is the test of whether one can affirm life as it is. 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) Jīvanmukti in Advaita Vedānta

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 āgāmi-karma is created and the sense of individual agency ceases. This differs from videhamukti, where the body is finally relinquished. Śaṅkara grounds it in Chāndogya 6.14.2 ("the delay is only until the body falls") and in the Gītā's portrait of the sthitaprajña, and Vidyāraṇya's Jīvanmuktiviveka systematises it. The jīvanmukta lives like a potter's wheel that keeps turning after the push has stopped: actions continue, but without doership or bondage. The contrast with other schools is nuanced. Dvaita rejects liberation-while-embodied altogether: release follows only when the body falls, and its beatitude is eternal, graded service of Viṣṇu amid enduring difference, not non-dual identity. Viśiṣṭādvaita rejects jīvanmukti: liberation comes only after the body falls with the exhaustion of prārabdha-karma, and 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) Aquinas: faith as intellectual assent

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 (II-II, q. 2, a. 9) faith is "an act of the intellect assenting to divine truth at the command of the will moved by God through grace"; it stands between knowledge and opinion, as firm as knowledge in its adherence but without vision of its object. 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 the preambles of faith (praeambula fidei), which are complementary rather than contradictory. Truths above reason, such as the Trinity, are not contrary to reason; since both reason and revelation come from God, truth cannot contradict truth (Summa contra Gentiles I.7). Theology is a subalternate science whose principles come from the higher knowledge of God and the blessed; it uses rational argument, logic and natural philosophy, yet it is guided by revealed principles. Faith therefore does not oppose reason; it extends it. Anselm's 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.