Plantinga's modal ontological argument(Plantinga, A., 1974) runs as follows.

1. A being is *maximally great* just in case it is omniscient, omnipotent, and morally perfect in every possible world, so that maximal greatness includes existence in every possible world.

> [!argument]
> 1. *Possibility premise.* Possibly, a maximally great being is instantiated: ◇□G.
>
> 1. *S5.* Possible necessity yields necessity: from ◇□G, □G.
>
> 1. *Conclusion.* A maximally great being exists in every possible world, the actual one included: □G, and so G.

The crux is the possibility premise: is maximal greatness coherent?

The argument has antecedents and successors that sharpen what is being claimed. Hartshorne(Charles Hartshorne, 1962) develops an earlier modal version of the argument from Anselmian materials, and Adams(Robert Merrihew Adams, 1971) defends the broader thesis that the modal-ontological strategy survives the Kantian objection that existence is not a predicate. Plantinga's own assessment in *The Nature of Necessity* is more modest than the argument's later reception: the argument shows that belief in a maximally great being is rational, not that disbelief is irrational. The objection developed below establishes a stronger result. It does not merely show that disbelief is rational alongside belief; it shows that the classical version of the argument cannot succeed even at its more modest target.

The argument's modal core relies on the same fixed-domain S5 framework the present book operates within. The present account does not contest the transfer rule; it contests whether the classical possibility premise supplies a determinate candidate within the global domain of real possibility.

*Try to conceive of an atemporal, aspatial, immaterial being.* The conception fails not because the being is alien or unlike anything in experience but because the description subtracts from its object the conditions of statehood itself: temporal location, spatial-relational differentiation, substantial bearing. The collapse of the conceiving act (succession of imaginative acts, distinction of the imagined being from background, sustained representational substance, each withdrawn by the very content entertained) is the symptom of that subtraction rather than the engine of the argument; the load is carried by what the description withdraws from its object, made exact in the conditions-for-statehood argument below. The general result has already been pressed at [§3.3](<3.3 Triconditional Necessity Negative Account.md>): structural absence cannot be coherently conceived, because every attempt to represent it instantiates what it denies, and the asymmetry between conceivability-to-possibility and inconceivability-to-impossibility favors the downward direction when the inconceivability is of this structural kind. The maximally great being is the case where structural absence is dressed in classical-theistic predicates. What follows works the same point through Plantinga's machinery directly.

Plantinga's possibility premise concerns maximal excellence—omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection—instantiated in every world. Atemporality, aspatiality, immateriality, and strong divine simplicity are additional classical-theist doctrines, not premises of the modal ontological argument itself. Coherent possibility, in the relevant sense, requires that the conjunction's content be specifiable in a way that does not contradict itself or contradict the conditions on which content is possible. If a defender adds the strongest negative classical attributes, the book can press whether a personal being so characterized retains determinate cognitive, volitional, and grounding roles. That pressure does not show that Plantinga's thinner maximal-greatness predicate is contentless; it challenges one theological development of the candidate.

A defender may attempt the Plantingian reply: vehicle and content come apart. One can conceive a colorless object using a colored display; conceiving an atemporal being does not require the thought itself to be atemporal. The reply works for single properties: color, mass, charge, shape, all can be absent without the object collapsing. T, S, and Φ fail the test categorically. An object lacking temporal location is not an object existing timelessly but an object of which no moment can make 'this exists' true; an object lacking spatial-relational differentiation is not an object with unusual geometry but an object with no interval separating it from anything else; an object lacking Substance is not an object existing for zero duration but an object with no being through which predication could run.

T, S, and Φ are not properties within a state of affairs; they are conditions for statehood. The colorless-object analogy does not carry here, not because the maximally great being is missing more properties, but because it is missing the conditions under which properties could be instantiated at all.

The claim is scoped to concrete existents. Abstract objects (numbers, propositions, the possible worlds Plantinga's own abstract-worlds actualism reifies) bear properties without instantiating T, S, or Φ, and nothing here denies it; the status of abstracta is treated in its own right at [§4.2.4](<4.2.4 Platonism.md>). But the maximally great being is not an abstract object. It is a concrete person who knows, wills, and acts, and those are the very acts that require succession, distinction, and a persisting subject. The Platonist's atemporal existents are no refuge for it, and neither is a third category: the classical theist may reply that God is neither a structural concretum nor an abstractum but sui generis, pure act on the divine-simplicity model, and so exempt from the dilemma. The reply relocates the burden rather than discharging it. A being that knows, wills, and acts has already been given a personal profile whose exercise requires succession, distinction, and a persisting subject, whatever category label is invoked to secure the exemption; the constitutive case that a bearer of those acts must instantiate T, S, and Φ is pressed against the *ipsum esse* construal directly at [§6.1](<6.1 Greatness.md>).

Because these are conditions for statehood and not features within a state, the description does not specify an object that then proves impossible (an impossibility would make the possibility claim about it false, true in no world) but fails to specify a possibility-candidate at all.

The diagnosis should not be placed automatically before truth-value. Standard semantic treatments can assign falsehood, presupposition failure, or undefinedness to defective descriptions. Here the safer verdict is dialectical: the defender owes a coherent account of how the added classical attributes combine with personal agency; semantic emptiness does not follow merely from their negations. Where standard modal semantics assigns falsity to an impossible proposition, the fully classical candidate leaves no determinate proposition for any world to evaluate: the presupposition on which the description's content depends is exactly what the description withdraws. The possibility premise, read with the full classical conjunction, is not false but empty: it carries no modal content for S5 to operate on.

> [!corollary]
> **Possibility-Premise Emptiness** · **R13** · *Result of the Conceivability Asymmetry*
>
> The possibility premise of Plantinga's modal ontological argument carries no modal content: the conjunction of classical attributes specifies ∅ under personal description, and S5 cannot transmit necessity from an empty input. The argument is therefore not unsound but inapplicable. The local Chapter 5 verdict rests on the [§3.3](<3.3 Triconditional Necessity Negative Account.md>) conceivability-asymmetry result and the §5 machinery already established; the Result form anticipates Supernatural Preclusion ([§6.1](<6.1 Greatness.md>)) via Horn 1 of the Trilemma Closure, where the same result is restated under Supernatural Preclusion once that result is in place downstream. ([§3.3](<3.3 Triconditional Necessity Negative Account.md>), [§6.1](<6.1 Greatness.md>))

The standard objection remains central: S5 transfers the possibility premise but does not support it. The structural critique can add that some classical enrichments of the candidate create tensions with personal agency. It should not claim that Plantinga's possibility premise carries no modal content simply because those additional doctrines are contested. What is described by the conjunction of the classical attributes is not a genuine possibility-candidate, because what is described is not a possible configuration but the absence of the conditions for any configuration.

The present objection should also be distinguished from the symmetry objection developed by Oppy(Oppy, Graham, 1995) and Sobel(Jordan Howard Sobel, 2004). The symmetry objection observes that the same modal apparatus generates a parody: possibly there is no maximally great being, therefore necessarily there is no maximally great being. The objection's force is that the argument and its parody share a form, so neither tells us which possibility actually obtains. The present objection does not rely on parody. It denies that the classical maximally great being is in the possibility space at all. The parody objection is consistent with the possibility premise being meaningful; the present objection denies that the possibility premise carries the kind of modal content that being true or false would require. Where the symmetry objection leaves the modal-ontological project a stalemate, this objection denies the project its starting move.

The S5 inference is intact. The modal framework is intact. What fails is the input. A *modus ponens* (the inference from P and 'if P then Q' to Q) transmits a conclusion only from a premise that carries modal content; a possibility premise that specifies no possibility-candidate carries none, so nothing is transmitted, regardless of how impeccable the inference rule. The failure is not that the premise is false (a false premise would still be a premise) but that no modal content is present for truth or falsity to attach to.

A second front is available, independent of the foregoing rebuttal. Van Hamme(van Hamme, Carlos, 2025) argues that modal logic alone does not supply a substantive account of a necessary *personal* God. This should be stated precisely. S5 can transfer necessity to any determinate proposition in the global domain W; it does not restrict its scope to structural vocabulary. What it cannot do by itself is establish that personhood-attributing predicates — omniscience, omnipotence, moral perfection — form a coherent necessary package or that they apply to the candidate described. The modal-ontological argument therefore needs more than the transfer rule: it needs an independently supported, determinate possibility premise for a personal being.

This front constrains the present account too, harmlessly: the book does not derive the personal or the axiological from S5 alone. Chapter 6 must ground its claims about value, agency, and greatness in the structural and dialectical arguments specific to them. The two rebuttals therefore do different work. The first challenges the classical candidate's content; the second blocks the inference from a bare modal rule to the full personal-theistic conclusion. Together they show that S5 neither repairs an empty specification nor substitutes for an argument about the attributes.

*The formal derivation.* A more rigorous version of the modal ontological argument does not assert the possibility premise but derives it. Gödel's ontological proof (his axiomatization of *positive properties*, sharpened in Anderson's emendation against modal collapse and analyzed in Hájek's formal treatment) lays down that every property is positive or its negation is, that positive properties are closed under entailment, and that necessary existence is positive, and from these proves as a theorem that a God-like being, one bearing every positive property essentially, is possibly instantiated; S5 then delivers necessary existence. Deriving the possibility premise looks to answer the present objection at its root: the premise is no longer left unsupported but established by proof.

It does not answer it. Gödelian derivations shift the burden to the positive-property axioms, their consistency, and the definition of God-likeness. Those axioms do not by themselves encode atemporality, aspatiality, or immateriality, so the earlier structural critique cannot simply be transferred to them. Formal derivability still does not show that the axioms provide the intended theological interpretation. Formal derivability manufactures no more modal content than the axioms supply: the proof is valid, and whether its input carries the intended theological content is exactly what the axioms leave unsecured.

The personhood front closes the same gap from the other side: Gödel's positive properties include the personhood-attributing predicates, omniscience and omnipotence and moral perfection, that fall outside the structural vocabulary any modal logic can certify, so even granting the axioms their domain the apparatus cannot necessitate the personal. The Gödelian formalization raises the rigor of the derivation; it leaves untouched the status of what is derived.

A respondent may revise maximal greatness to drop the classical attributes, making the maximally great being temporal, extended, and embedded. The revision changes the subject in two respects. First, the present argument does not dispute such a being's possibility, only the inference from possibility to necessity by S5: the inference depends on the being's maximal greatness across worlds, which the revision has redefined and which now requires independent argument. Second, the revised being instantiates T, S, and Φ rather than grounding them, and a being so embedded depends on structure for its existence. The aseity the modal-ontological tradition was specifically trying to secure (necessary existence as a feature of the being rather than of its conditions) is the property [§6.1](<6.1 Greatness.md>) and [§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>) (Horn 3) establish the embedded deity cannot have. The revised argument may go through to a different conclusion, but the conclusion is no longer the conclusion the classical modal-ontological project was constructed to deliver.

*What is established.* S5 validates the transfer from possible necessary existence to necessary existence, but it does not establish the possibility premise or the coherence of the full theological package. Structural tensions arise when strong negative classical attributes are added to a personal agent; those tensions qualify the candidate without making Plantinga's thinner premise semantically empty. The personhood front closes the same line from the inference side: modal logic cannot necessitate the personal even where the structural conditions are present. Revising the maximally great being to drop the classical attributes preserves the inference at the cost of what the classical project was specifically trying to secure: aseity as a feature of the being rather than of its conditions.

*No rescue by changing the modal logic.* A defender may retain the classical candidate while rejecting S5, so that ◇□G no longer transfers to □G. This is not self-undermining merely because it is stated in modal vocabulary; it is a rival account of real possibility and its global domain. But it is self-defeating for Plantinga's specific derivation: the step from possible necessary existence to necessary existence is the inference that makes the modal ontological argument go. Rejecting S5 does not save that derivation; it replaces it with a different argument that needs its own modal semantics and its own defense of the possibility premise. The present account maintains the fixed-domain S5 analysis of [§2.1](<2.1 The S5 Pipeline.md>). Granting it, the argument still needs a determinate classical candidate; rejecting it leaves the Plantingan transfer unavailable. Either way the original possibility line has not been secured.

*A parallel epistemological line.* Pascal's wager is taken up at [§5.1.11](<5.1.11 Pascal's Wager.md>), where the temptation to run the same possibility-of-classical-necessary-being premise through a probability claim is closed off and the wager is returned to its own decision-theoretic ground.

*Plantinga's reserve: de re/de dicto and EAAN.* Plantinga would press two further questions on the present account. First, the modal-scope question: □(T∧S∧Φ) can be read de dicto (necessarily, whatever constitutes the modal constraint on change instantiates the three roles) or de re (these specific structural occupants necessarily exist). The two readings differ on whether contingent states of Nature inherit necessity from Nature's necessity. The de dicto reading is the intended scope: what is necessary is that the roles be instantiated, not that any specific instantiator is necessary. Contingent states of Nature remain contingent within a necessary structural framework ([§2.8.4](<2.8.4 Necessity Precedes Contingency.md>)); the scope-limit argument at [§2.5](<2.5 Triconditional Necessity.md>) ('P4's necessity attaches to F, not to every item within the field F makes possible') is the relevant disambiguation; and the co-instantiation claim at [§2.6.5](<2.6.5 Mutual Containment.md>) secures the de dicto reading without collapsing into de re necessity for contingent occupants. Second, Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (*Warrant and Proper Function*(Alvin Plantinga, 1993)): the present argument is delivered by cognitive faculties selected for survival; whether such faculties can reliably track necessary structural conditions is the EAAN question. The structural account's response (that any functioning cognitive faculty operates within T, S, and Φ by the transcendental conditions on operation itself) lives in Chapter 8.


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← [5.1.6 Intelligent Design](<5.1.6 Intelligent Design.md>) | [5.1.8 Modal-Grounding Argument](<5.1.8 Modal-Grounding Argument.md>) →
