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Pike's Objection To The Divine Argument

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In this paper, I am going to present an objection to the “divine argument” explained above. An obvious objection to this argument is that it begs the question of its readers, as it forces them to accept the fact that God exists. If one does not accept this fact, then the entire argument is rendered unusable. However, this objection is, quite frankly, boring, and so I shall attempt to give a more nuanced objection. I believe that line 3, which discusses how nobody can change the past, is actually false. Additionally, the inference from premise 7 to the conclusion is false, which renders the argument invalid. Indeed, the idea that the past can be changed is first discussed by Pike himself while he addresses a paper written by John Saunders. In said paper, Pike describes two types of facts about the past: “hard” facts, which are finished in the past, and “soft” facts, which depend at least partially on events in the future to be true. Pike concedes that “soft” facts about the past can be changed, as they aren’t considered true until an event in the future comes to …show more content…

In fact, according to Marilyn Mccord Adams, the existence of God is in fact not a “hard” fact at all, and is instead a “soft” fact(Marilyn McCord Adams, “Is the Existence of God a “Hard” Fact?”, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 76, No. 1, 1967, p. 493.) The reason for why God is a “soft” fact is relatively simple: God being eternal depends partially on the future, and if his eternality is a “soft” fact then God must also be a “soft” fact(Ibid, p. 496.) This is because, technically, one could act so that God would cease to exist at a current time even if He still existed in the past. Furthermore, since God can only be God if He believes events about the future that later become true (premise 2), His existence depends partially on future events, and a “hard” fact must depend solely on events completed in the past(Ibid, p.

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