A good paper will have conformed to
them.
1. Make sure that you are *very* careful about how you say what you do.
For example, there are (at least) two interpretations of God in the
Gospel of Matthew and the Book of Job, which I've outlined at the
bottom of
this page. But notice that on
neither of these views does God explicitly
contradict himself; he only
seemingly or apparently does so. You needed to show that you were clear
about this distinction, if you brought it up at all.
2. Make sure to CITE YOUR SOURCES!!!! Both of the two interpretations
of God that were discussed in class were suggested by David Reeve in
lecture. So you needed to have cited him if you were going to talk
about them. If you didn't cite, then your paper read as if you were the
one who came up with the two views of God, which borders on a form of
plagiarism.
3. SUPPORT YOUR CLAIMS!!!! If you made any kind of substantial claim
without arguing for it, I marked you off. (See point 7 below.)
4. Any statement that begins "God by definition is..." needs support.
Where is God defined as such? If it's in the text, cite it! If not,
where did you get this?
5. The
paper prompt asked you to
consider a view of God where he was
NOT
a super-nazi. This means that you either had to talk about David
Reeve's interpretation (i.e., God as the Non-Rewarder/Punisher), or you
had to talk about a third interpretation which you needed to have
exlained/defended.
6. If you made the distinction between
morally good/right by human standards
and
morally good/right by God's
standards, and if you thought they were different, then you
needed to explain either (i) which one (if not both) of them was
incorrect or (ii) how both could be right.
7. Make sure you don't say anything that is either (i) trivial or (ii)
unsupported. If you say something trivial, then what's the point? You
want to say something interesting, not something that both you and the
reader already knew going into the paper. If you say something
unsupported, then you might as well not say it at all. For what I am
primarily interested in is
why
you say what you do. So give me your reasons for why you have the
beliefs you do. If you can't figure out why you believe something, then
you should question whether you believe it at all, and you certainly
shouldn't talk about it in your paper. (See point 3 above.)
8. When writing a paper, you need to pretend that I have never been to
lecture, and that I don't know what you are talking about. Take time to
explain the views, and elaborate on them. Be clear and explicit.
Remember, this is my only real way to find out what bits of the course
material you really know and understand.
9. Stop using MSW thesaurus! Anything you can say with big words you
can probably say much more clearly with small, simple words.
10. Your first paragraph should be doing some work. It should say
something, or make a point, an argument, etc. It should not just say
what you are going to say in more detail and more elaborately later on.
So if it's not doing anything for you, take it out!
11. READ your sentences!!!! Do you understand what you are saying?
Would someone who isn't you (and can't read your thoughts) know what
you are saying? Each sentence should make some sense to someone who
hasn't read the rest of your paper.
12. Don't be tempted by the following line of argument: "We cannot know
or understand God's reasons for doing what he does (because he's
infinitely smart and all, and we're not), so there's no point in even
trying to discern why he does what he does (e.g., why he separates the
righteous from the wicked, sending the first to heaven and the second
to hell, etc.)." While it may be true that God is much smarter
than we are, this doesn't mean that it is futile to speculate about why
he does what he does. For at the very least, we can consider
possible reasons for his behavior.
So long as there is
some sort
of story that would make God a good God, even if he really were to
punish the wicked eternally, then this is enough. The story doesn't
have to be a true one, but it would be one way to for us to see how a
morally perfect being can do what God purportedly does. We have the
power of imagination and the use of logic; surely these are tools
enough to let us speculate and
try to
understand how a morally perfect being can do the things that the God
(of the Gospel and the Book of Job) does.
13. NEVER use a dictionary to answer philosophical questions!!! You
should only use a dictionary when you don't know the meaning of a word,
not when you are trying to discover the metaphysical nature of
someting--e.g.,what's good, evil, righteous, pious, beautiful, etc. If
living the examined life simply involved looking things up in the
O.E.D, I seriously doubt it would make life worth living.