Deck 11: Science, Religion, and Knowing

Question 1

A cosmology is

A) a model for understanding how the world is organized and how it works
B) a government with laws based on both science and religion
C) a society that was once heavily influenced by religion that is transitioning to being heavily influenced by science instead
D) a nation where private devotion to religion is high but public expression of it is low

Answer 1

A

Question 2

Ancient Greeks worshipped a variety of gods, each associated with one or more domains of life, such as childbearing, agriculture, and warfare. This religion was

A) polytheistic
B) monotheistic
C) Abrahamic
D) scientific

Answer 2

A

Question 3

All of the following are examples of monotheistic religions EXCEPT

A) the Serer religion of Senegal, Gambia, and Mauritania, which has a supreme deity (Roog) and many minor deities
B) Judaism, which focuses worship on G-d, a deity whose name is too sacred to be written out fully
C) Christianity, which sees God as having three co-equal parts (Father or Creator, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit) that comprise a single deity
D) Islam, which has as one of its pillars the creed that "There is no god but God"

Answer 3

A

Question 4

Which of the following is a source of religious authority and teaching for Buddhists?

A) The gospels
B) The Sutras
C) The Torah
D) The Vedas

Question 5

Which of the following is a source of religious authority and teaching for Muslims?

A) The gospels
B) The Vedas
C) The Torah
D) The Quran

Question 6

Which of the following is a source of religious authority and teaching for Jewish believers?

A) The gospels
B) The Vedas
C) The Torah
D) The Quran

Question 7

Which of the following is a source of religious authority and teaching for Christians?

A) The gospels
B) The Vedas
C) The Torah
D) The Quran

Question 8

Who developed the theory of the multiverse?

A) Albert Einstein in the 1930s
B) Galileo in the early 1600s
C) Andrei Linde in the 1980s
D) Charles Darwin in the mid-1800s

Question 9

What was the source of Galileo's conflict with the Catholic Church?

A) His teachings about the age of Earth
B) His teachings about how vaccines could prevent disease
C) His teachings about how species change over time in relationship to their environment
D) His teachings about the relationship between the sun and Earth

Question 10

Why was Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species so controversial when it was published in 1859?

A) It argued for a heliocentric, rather than a geocentric, universe.
B) It argued that race did not exist because there were no genetic markers for racial characteristics.
C) It argued that humans were subject to evolution.
D) It argued that climate change was caused, at least in part, by human behavior.

Question 11

An imaginary, perfect world in which there is no conflict, hunger, or unhappiness-whether achieved through the perfection of science, morality, religion, or some other system-is called

A) a mysphonia
B) a myopia
C) a dystopia
D) a utopia

Question 12

In his 1912 book Elementary Forms of Religious Life, which sociologist defined religion as a unified system of beliefs and practices related to sacred things, which unite adherents into a moral community?

A) Franz Boas
B) Karl Marx
C) Émile Durkheim
D) Max Weber

Question 13

In sociological terms, the opposite of something sacred is something

A) evil
B) sinful
C) forbidden
D) profane

Question 14

Which religion's sacred objects include the Star of David and the tallit?

A) Islam
B) Hinduism
C) Judaism
D) Christianity

Question 15

Which religion's sacred objects include the mosque and the crescent and star?

A) Islam
B) Hinduism
C) Judaism
D) Christianity

Question 16

All of the following are rituals EXCEPT

A) a child rushing home from school to watch his favorite cartoon show every afternoon
B) a Christian being baptized
C) two atheists exchanging rings at their wedding
D) a Muslim removing his shoes upon entrance to his mosque

Question 17

Most Christians, Muslims, and Hindus live in a place

A) where their religious practices are looked down upon or even banned
B) without a clear religious majority
C) where they are in the majority religion
D) that is religious heterogeneous, with many people of different faiths

Question 18

Which of the following is not considered one of the major world religions?

A) Sikhism
B) Judaism
C) Buddhism
D) Islam

Question 19

Worldwide, there are just under 15 million Jews, with the largest population in ___________ and the second largest in ______________.

A) the United States, Israel
B) Israel, the United States
C) Russia and other former Soviet Republics, Israel
D) Israel, Russia and other former Soviet Republics

Question 20

Which of the Abrahamic religions is oldest?

A) Islam
B) Judaism
C) Christianity
D) Bhai

Question 21

A diaspora is

A) the mass execution of a people because of their religion
B) the dispersion of a people group from an ancestral land
C) the renewal of a religion that was thought to be lost to history
D) the mandated segregation of a people group to a section of a city because of their religion

Question 22

From the 12th century onward, Jews in Europe and Russia were often forced to live in segregated sections of cities in poor, crowded neighborhoods called

A) enclaves
B) gulags
C) barrios
D) ghettos

Question 23

Pope Francis is Argentinian. This makes him the first leader of the Catholic Church who is not European since

A) Pope John Paul II in 1978
B) Pope Gregory III in 731
C) Pope Leo IX in 1513
D) Pope Benedict XVI in 2005

Question 24

Which nation was formed as a homeland for Jewish people worldwide?

A) Palestine
B) Syria
C) Israel
D) Russia

Question 25

Some religious texts are shared by

A) Christians and Jews
B) Christians and Muslims
C) Jews and Muslims
D) Jews and Christians and Muslims

Question 26

Of the approximately 9 million people killed in the Holocaust, how many were Jewish?

A) 8 million
B) 7 million
C) 6 million
D) 5 million

Question 27

During the Holocaust, Nazis required Jewish people to identify themselves by wearing a particular religious symbol on their clothing and marking their passports this way. What symbol was it?

A) Crescent and moon
B) Star of David
C) Cross
D) Image of the god Ganesh, who is easily recognizable because his head looks like an elephant's

Question 28

In what part of the world did Judaism originate?

A) Northern Europe
B) Western Europe
C) Middle East
D) Central Asia

Question 29

The Muslim Tawrat is the same as

A) the Jewish Torah
B) the Christian gospels
C) the Hindu Vedas
D) the Buddhist Sutras

Question 30

Which world event led to the first international trial for crimes against humanity?

A) The Nazi genocide of Jews and the murders of millions of others in concentration camps during World War II
B) The ethnic cleansing of Rohingya, a Muslim minority in majority-Buddhist Myanmar (also called Burma), which has increased since 2012
C) The U.S. government's effort to outlaw the Ghost Dance among Plains tribes in the latter half of the 19th century
D) The Chinese government's persecution of practitioners of Falun Gong since 1999, including accusations of organ harvesting

Question 31

In Israel, Jewish people make up ____ of the population.

A) 99%
B) 75%
C) 50%
D) 25%

Question 32

Most nations of the world

A) are majority Christian
B) are minority Christian
C) are majority Muslim
D) do not have a single religion that more than 50% of the population adheres to

Question 33

Which religious text is seen by believers as a record of the life of Jesus?

A) The Old Testament
B) The Hebrew Bible
C) The gospels
D) The Sutras

Question 34

What world event helped Christianity spread rapidly after a few centuries of being a minor and persecuted religion?

A) The fall of the Ottoman Empire
B) Its adoption as the official religion of the Roman Empire
C) The invention of the printing press, which allowed the Bible to be produced more cheaply and efficiently that priests copying it by hand could work
D) The invention of vaccinations, which allowed Christians who used them to survive disease outbreaks at a higher rate than non-Christians who did not use them

Question 35

In Christianity, which ritual re-enacts, commemorates, honors, or symbolizes the last meal that Jesus ate before his execution?

A) The exchange of marriage vows
B) Baptism
C) Communion
D) Tithing (giving 10% of your income to charity)

Question 36

By the end of the 16th century, there were three major branches of Christianity. They were:

A) Anglican, Lutheran, and Catholic
B) Roman, Syrian, and Russian
C) Lutheranism, Methodism, and Pentecostalism
D) Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and Protestantism

Question 37

Compared to a sect, a denomination is typically

A) smaller
B) less stable
C) newer
D) more established

Question 38

Which of the following is not a Protestant denomination?

A) The Catholic Church
B) Evangelical Lutherans of America
C) Presbyterian Church USA
D) Missouri Synod Lutheran

Question 39

Today, the majority of the world's Christians live in places

A) that were colonized by European nations
B) that were colonizing nations
C) where Christianity was once illegal
D) where they are the religious minority

Question 40

The election of Pope Francis in 2013 marked the first time that a pope was

A) a woman
B) not Catholic
C) from North or South America
D) openly hostile to African Catholics

Question 41

The religion of Islam is organized around the teachings of a prophet named

A) Jesus
B) Moses
C) Abraham
D) Muhammad

Question 42

During their lifetimes, Muslims are supposed, if they are able, to travel to Mecca on a pilgrimage called hajj. Where is Mecca located?

A) Israel
B) Palestine
C) Egypt
D) Saudi Arabia

Question 43

During which month are Muslims to fast-that is, not to eat or drink between sunrise and sunset?

A) Muharram
B) Rajab
C) Ramadan
D) Zulhijjah

Question 44

Which of the following is not a major branch of Hinduism?

A) Kabballah
B) Smartism
C) Shaivism
D) Shaktivism

Question 45

The only African nation in which the most popular religion is Hinduism is

A) Nepal
B) India
C) Egypt
D) Mauritius

Question 46

In Hinduism, the Supreme Being, which is beyond human comprehension in its original essence, is

A) Brahman
B) Shiva
C) Vishnu
D) Lakshmi

Question 47

Despite its long history of religious persecution, this nation is home to almost half of the world's Buddhists.

A) Russia
B) Georgia (the nation, not the U.S. state)
C) c. Chechnya
D) China

Question 48

Which sacred texts do believers say recorded the words and teachings of Siddhartha Gautama?

A) The Sutras
B) The Torah
C) The gospels
D) The Vedas

Question 49

Which of the following answers includes all (and only) the religions that teach reincarnation as a tenet of the faith?

A) Buddhism
B) Hinduism
C) Buddhism and Hinduism
D) Buddhism, Hinduism, and Judaism

Question 50

According to research on religious violence, fundamentalists from what kind of nation are most likely to engage in violence to dramatize their cause, announce their presence, or strike at the symbols of the societies they are trying to dominate?

A) Affluent, advanced industrial nations
B) Democratic nations with a strong tradition of freedom of religion
C) Poor nations with few social services
D) Religiously diverse nations

Question 51

Which of the following people has not been an outspoken critic of religion?

A) former Apple executive Steve Jobs
B) French philosopher François-Marie Arouet
C) German sociologist Karl Marx
D) Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud

Question 52

To be secular means to be

A) disdainful toward religion
B) supportive of a prominent place for religion in a culture
C) relatively uninfluenced by religion
D) highly influenced by religion

Question 53

Which part of the world listed here has seen the largest decline in engagement with Christianity?

A) Latin America
B) The Caribbean
C) Western Europe
D) Sub-Saharan Africa

Question 54

Which statement accurately describes trends in religion in the U.S. today?

A) Most Americans participate in religion in public but are not privately religious.
B) Most American political leaders publicly reject a religious identity.
C) A greater percentage of people today are a member of a religious congregation than in the past.
D) The number of people who claim no religious identity, even if they are not hostile to religion, continues to rise.

Question 55

Liberation theology, which has a focus on human rights and criticizes global capitalism, developed within Christianity during the 1950s, especially in what region of the world?

A) Latin America
B) Sub-Saharan Africa
C) Areas that were, at the time, "behind the Iron Curtain" but not Soviet Republics, like Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Bulgaria
D) Areas that were, at the time, Soviet Republics, like Latvia and Lithuania

Question 56

The Matthew effect says that, in general,

A) the more a scientist is paid, the more successful they will be
B) scientists working in private laboratories achieve more than those who are employed by public universities
C) those who have early advantages in their career in science are more likely than those who do not to have further advantages over the course of their career
D) most scientists peak at an early stage of their career and achieve relatively little after their mid-career

Question 57

In Western approaches to science, there is

A) a hierarchy of sciences, with physics and other natural sciences at the top and the social sciences at the bottom
B) a hierarchy of sciences, with physics and other natural sciences at the bottom and the social sciences at the top
C) no hierarchy; once something is labeled as "science," it is as equally respected as the other sciences
D) considerable openness to non-scientific epistemologies

Question 58

In the largest and fastest-growing scientific fields,

A) gender-based job disparity is even worse than it is in other scientific fields
B) women are actually outpacing men in new hires
C) women have fewer jobs than women, but their average salary is higher
D) men have fewer jobs than women, but they advance in rank more quickly

Question 59

Which of the following values is NOT one of the four basic values that Robert Merton discovered among scientists?

A) National interest, which says that scientific discoveries should first benefit the people of the nation the scientist is a member of
B) Universalism, which is the idea that findings should be evaluated according to their objective truth rather than the personal qualities of the scientist
C) The communal character of science, so all scientific information should be fully and openly shared
D) Disinterestedness, which is the idea that scientists pursue science as knowledge rather than for personal profit

Question 60

In 1968, physicist Anthony Hewish won the Nobel Prize, but the work he was credited for was performed by

A) Jocelyn Bell
B) Katherine Johnson
C) Rosalind Franklin
D) Harriet Zuckerman

Question 61

In a post-secular society,

A) religious ideas and scientific ideas learn from each other
B) religion is outlawed and science is given highest priority
C) religion becomes the basis of government
D) religion and science are both considered equally valid ways of answering any question, from the causes of climate change to questions of why bad things happen to good people

Question 62

If you are trying to gain insight into why you believe what you believe, you are studying your own

A) theodicy
B) antisemitism.
C) epistemology
D) cosmology

Question 63

In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional an Arkansas law that prohibited the teaching of evolution, saying in Epperson v. Arkansas that the state could not allow teaching to be "tailored to the principles or prohibitions of any religious sect." This decision invalidated any state law that prohibited the teaching of evolution, such as the law at the center of

A) Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
B) The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes
C) Engel v. Vitale
D) Abington School District v. Schempp