**Nature alone.**

The earlier chapters show *that* Nature must exist; this chapter asks how that necessary structure is realized in the physical and biological world. Physics already studies its ordinary furniture: spacetime, fields, conserved quantities, symmetry, cosmic history, and life. The chapter does not derive those particular sciences from the modal proof. It shows how their independent inquiries encounter the same structural roles.

The distinction is exact. The structure is necessary; its particular realization remains open to inquiry. The chapter argues that no additional **structural** supplement is needed to explain the roles physics realizes. A proposed transcendent or essence-prior ground remains a further metaphysical posit, not an empirical gap physics needs filled; its credentials were tested in Chapters 5–6 and are not settled here by declaration. Seen whole, Nature is sufficient for the structural and empirical work this chapter addresses.

Nature, understood as the necessary presence of Time, Space, and Substance as structural conditions for concrete change-realizing Reality, is the structural totality this chapter investigates.

Three names converge on one thing. *Reality*, what anything real belongs to ([§1.1](<1.1 Reality.md>)), was shown to be necessarily Nature: there is no residue by which Reality could exceed it, nothing standing outside it. And *the universe*, taken not as this contingent configuration of matter but as the whole of what there is, is that same one thing. Reality, Nature, the universe-as-totality are one referent under three descriptions. The distinction the argument still requires is not one between two things but one drawn *within* the single thing: between what it necessarily *is* (the structure, T∧S∧Φ, which could not have been otherwise) and how it *happens to be arranged*: this configuration, which could. Nature is not a second order of being standing over the cosmos; it is what the one cosmos necessarily is. Nor is the plenum punctured by holes of genuine non-being: every ‘nothing’ one can point to (the vacuum, the gap between bodies, the empty region) is a *relative* nothing, a local absence within structure, not the absolute Null State, which is precluded at every world and at every past time ([§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>)). There is one thing; it is seamless; it is all there is.

The earlier chapters place strong pressure on theistic claims that a determinate active ground stands wholly outside T, S, and Φ. They do not turn every transcendent or apophatic proposal into an empirical falsehood. What this chapter carries forward is narrower: the sciences do not require an extra-natural explanatory item to account for the structures they study. Religious, mystical, and transcendence experiences remain phenomena for structural, experiential, and social inquiry. Mystical experience, transcendence, the sense of unity, and the weight of the sacred are phenomena within the structural conditions, not exceptions to them; [§8.14](<8.14 Spirituality.md>) returns to them on those terms.

*The empirical realization.* The chapter's framing is realization rather than refutation. By the time the reader arrives, Chapters 5 and 6 have pressed the classical theist's structural commitments to ∅, and at the analytic level there is no God-object remaining to view, not God hidden from view, but no analytic object there to view in the first place. What remains is the recognition that the modal-structural framework of Chapters 1 through 3 is what the empirical project of physics and the special sciences has been presupposing all along. The chapter's lens is the philosophy of physics and the metaphysics of science (Maudlin, Albert, Earman, Norton, Wallace, Saunders, Healey, Ladyman, Ross), and its convergence claim is not that the framework predicts physics from outside but that the framework articulates the structural conditions any physics has already assumed. That claim is about T, S, and Φ as role-conditions, not about spacetime being fundamental: programs on which spacetime is emergent or derived (background-independent quantum gravity, or wavefunction realism with an emergent 3-space) still realize those role-conditions at their effective level, which is where the convergence is claimed ([§7.4.2](<7.4.2 What is Required.md>), [§7.5](<7.5 Binding of the Conditions.md>), [§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>)). The natural rival to the necessity claim (Nature as brute initial state rather than necessary structure, without the modal posit) is priced against the present argument under Oppy's comparative-total-theories discipline at [§2.9.3](<2.9.3 Total-Theory Comparison.md>).

*Religious phenomena as empirical and first-person data.* Chapters 4–6 challenge specific philosophical claims about a God conceived as a wholly structureless active ground. They do not establish that religious experience has one exhaustive causal explanation or that every claimed divine referent has been eliminated. Religious practice, community, felt orientation, and the effects on lives and societies are empirical and first-person phenomena open to sociology, cognitive science of religion, history, and phenomenology. Hyperactive agency detection (Barrett, J. L., 2004); (Boyer, P., 2001); (Guthrie, S. E., 1993), terror management (Becker, E., 1973); (Solomon, S., J. Greenberg, and T. Pyszczynski, 2015), and pattern completion offer important naturalistic explanations for religious interpretation, but they are explanatory proposals to be assessed in their relevant literatures, not deductive substitutes for a complete account of religious phenomenology. The chapter's claim is limited: physics does not require an extra-natural explanatory item to do its explanatory work.

*Registration-tension as institutional failure mode.* A parallel observation, sourced to the conditions for the framework's evidential mode to function: religious institutions, taken at the population level (not at the level of sophisticated philosophy-of-religion specialists, who engage critically and are explicitly out of scope) tend to suppress the conditions for honest first-person reporting. Practitioners cannot question, critically engage, or register felt doubt without institutional friction; the result is the registration-tension this chapter names. The same institutional failure mode appears in Chapter 9 under coercive political force; the chapter names it once in its religious instance, with the explicit caveat that this is a structural observation about institutional dynamics at the population level, not a polemic against religion or religious people. The chapter's primary subject remains the philosophy-of-physics convergence; the religion-related observations are framing, not the chapter's main argument.

What becomes visible across the chapter is the structural framework appearing in empirical registers Nature makes available: entropic gradient, complexity emergence, singularity resolution, and living self-maintenance. These are empirical realizations and proposed convergences, not automatic modal consequences of the necessity claim. Chapter 8 asks what begins to appear when the account turns inward.

The chapter's standard is convergence. The case is made when independent modes of inquiry, pursued on their own terms, report the structural facts the argument predicts.


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← [6.10 No Exit](<6.10 No Exit.md>) | [7.1 Convergence of Method](<7.1 Convergence of Method.md>) →
