God, the tradition says, does not merely happen to exist. God exists necessarily: in every possible world, unable to be otherwise. The reply is that necessity of that kind is a feature of the modal structure any world must have, not something that can be pinned to a being defined as standing apart from that structure. What exists necessarily, on the argument, is Nature itself.

> [!info]
> **Core concept.** The tradition says God doesn't just happen to exist—God exists necessarily, in every possible world, unable to be otherwise. Necessity is the highest compliment the argument can pay. The hitch is what necessity actually describes. To call something necessary is to say it holds in every way things could have gone, which is a fact about the space of possibilities itself, the frame every world shares. A being defined as standing outside that frame can't inherit the frame's built-in status—you can't pin the weather to one house. What genuinely can't fail to be is whatever the frame is made of: time, space, and persistence. Necessity names their standing, not a tenant's.

*What the tradition holds.* The classical doctrine of divine necessity assembles several reinforcing claims. God exists in every possible world (Anselm of Canterbury, (1078) 1998), II–III; (Plantinga, A., 1974); (Charles Hartshorne, 1962). God exists *a se*: not depending on anything else for divine being Anselm, *Monologion* 6; (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.3.4; (Pruss, A. R., 2011). God is the *ens necessarium*, the being whose non-existence is incoherent (Leibniz, G. W., (1714) 1989), §§38–45; (G. W. Leibniz, 1710). The same modal status is developed in the Islamic *falsafa* tradition by Avicenna's distinction between *wajib al-wujud* (necessary existence) and *mumkin al-wujud* (possible existence) in the *Kitab al-Shifa* (Jon McGinnis, 2010); (Peter Adamson, 2013), with the *wajib*'s necessity made the ground of the *mumkin*'s possibility. On the most developed contemporary refinement, God grounds the modal structure itself: there are no possibilities prior to God for God to range over (Leftow, *God and Necessity* (Leftow, Brian, 2012); cf. (Thomas V. Morris and Christopher Menzel, 1986) on theistic activism). Each move tries to keep necessity from being a feature borrowed from elsewhere by a being whose excellence might otherwise have been contingent. At its most ambitious, the doctrine reaches for a being whose non-existence is held to be incoherent precisely because the being's existence is held to be what makes coherence possible to detect at all.

*What cannot be answered.* Eight questions fall to divine necessity that the doctrine, in the form structural reasoning addresses, cannot answer. What runs underneath all eight is structural, modal invariance (§[§2.1.4](<2.1.4 Modal Stability.md>)–2.1.5): modal status does not vary across worlds. What is necessary is necessarily necessary; what is possible is necessarily possible; what is impossible is necessarily impossible. A modal structure is not the kind of thing whose status another agent or being could fix. The S5 framework on which the necessity operator runs here is defended for metaphysical-modal scope at [§1.1](<1.1 Reality.md>) and [§2.1.3](<2.1.3 Modal Constitution.md>). The possible worlds the operator ranges over are read here in actualist terms: ways the one actual Nature could be configured, the alternatives grounded in the structural conditions T, S, and Φ rather than in concrete Lewisian worlds standing alongside it, in merely abstract ersatz constructions, or in primitive potentiality; the alternatives are alternatives of Nature, not parallel universes beside it. The eight pressures run three at the level of the predicate, five at the level of the conditions necessity-talk runs on.

**Q1.** *In which possible worlds does the ground of all possible worlds exist?* Modal predicates can apply non-trivially to an invariant subject: necessary beings, propositions, and mathematical objects are standard candidates. The sharper issue is whether God is represented within the modal domain or proposed as its ground, and how those two roles relate. A modal subject is a coordinate of modal space: existing in some worlds and not others (contingent), in every world (necessary), or in no world (impossible). The classical doctrine wants God to be a modal subject in the strongest sense (necessary in every world) while defining God as outside the modal structure, as the being whose existence makes that structure possible at all (Leftow, Brian, 2012); (Pruss, A. R., 2011). Wanting both at once is the structural difficulty itself. If God is constitutive of the modal structure, then God's existence is not a coordinate over which the operator ranges; it is a part of the apparatus that makes ranging possible. The verdict the operator returns is then degenerate: trivially-true (every world is God-grounded) or trivially-false (no world contains God as an element of its furniture), with neither tracking the informative modal claim the believer's intuition reaches for. The believer who says *God could have existed* (or its negation, *God could not have failed to exist*) is making a modal claim about a being whose existence is alleged to be the precondition of any *could*. The claim cannot be both a substantive modal predication and a claim about the precondition of modal predication without trading on the very ambiguity the predicate was supposed to settle. The mathematical analogue is instructive: *possibly 2+2=4* collapses harmlessly into the truth claim itself because mathematical truth is itself the abstract overlay of what quantitative event-modality supports, and the operator's trivialization preserves the content. For God's existence the trivialization is the cost: the believer wants the operator to do substantive work, and the doctrine has removed what the operator could substantively track. The line of treating divine necessity as ontological independence (Pruss, Alexander R., and Joshua L. Rasmussen, 2018) preserves the verbal *necessary* by relocating it to aseity (Q4); the line of grounding modality in God (Leftow, Brian, 2012); (Thomas V. Morris and Christopher Menzel, 1986) applies the predicate at the level whose conditions it presupposes (Q6). The present pressure runs prior to both: before asking whether necessity-as-aseity or necessity-as-frame-grounding can do the work, the question is whether the modal predicates apply to God at all. The seven pressures that follow proceed under the assumption (granted for the sake of the argument) that the predicates do apply, and find that each of their applications has been preserved by removing what the predicate tracks.

**Q2.** *If all the proof shows is that something exists in every world, what makes it a being rather than the structure?* Anselm's *id quo maius cogitari nequit* (*Proslogion* II) reasons that the greatest conceivable being must exist in reality, since existence-in-reality exceeds existence-in-the-understanding alone. Gaunilo's island and Kant's predicate-objection are well-known; Plantinga's (Plantinga, A., 1974) modal recasting, anticipated by a decade in Hartshorne's revival of the modal ontological argument (*Anselm's Discovery* (Charles Hartshorne, 1965)), the structural ancestor of the modern form, answers them at the level of the predicate by treating necessary existence as instantiation in every possible world rather than as a real property added to a thing. The recasting is genuinely available, and the formal validity of S5 ontological arguments is not in question. What is in question is the being the argument's conclusion picks out. Plantinga's premise (it is possible that maximal greatness is instantiated) entails, in S5, that maximal greatness is instantiated in every world. Maximal greatness does not name whatever is instantiated in every world; it includes maximal excellence—omniscience, omnipotence, and moral perfection—across every world. Showing that T, S, and Φ are invariant would not show that they satisfy those personal predicates. The argument has shown that something modally invariant must obtain. It has not yet shown that the modally invariant something is a being defined by the negation of the structural conditions invariance requires. The conclusion fits Nature more cleanly than it fits the being the doctrine names.

**Q3.** *If 'exists in every world' is a fact about the worlds, what has it told you about God?* Kant's (Kant, I., (1781) 1998) objection has been treated as resolved by the modal recasting. The resolution is only partial. Existence in every possible world can be treated as a de re modal property of a subject as well as represented by a fact about the modal landscape. The live question is whether the subject is coherently specified and whether its necessity is explained rather than whether the grammar permits de re predication. Pruss and Rasmussen (Pruss, Alexander R., and Joshua L. Rasmussen, 2018) and Leftow (Leftow, Brian, 2012) argue that necessary existence is properly construed as ontological independence rather than as cross-world ubiquity, and so escapes the Kantian concern at a different level. The reply rephrases necessity as aseity (treated at Q4) and so shifts the locus rather than answering the original question. Even granting the de re reading, the informative content of the predicate lies not in an additional way the being is but in the relation between the being and the modal structure. The distinction is *de re* / *de dicto*: the modal-structure necessity affirmed here is *de dicto* of Nature (necessarily, Nature obtains) and *de re* of its conditions (each of T, S, and Φ is such that it necessarily obtains) while no *de re* necessity attaches to a being specified apart from the modal structure. The same point is pressed from the side of identity at [§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>), Q3; here it returns from the side of necessity itself.

**Q4.** *If aseity just means depending on nothing, what can it ground?* The classical reading of divine aseity (being-from-itself, *a se*) holds that God depends on nothing for divine being (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.3.4. The doctrine is sometimes pressed into service as the ground of divine necessity: God exists necessarily because God exists *a se*. The concern here is that aseity, fully stated, is the negation of every dependence, not a positive ground from which existence flows. To exist *a se* is to fail to depend, and a failure to depend is not yet a positive explanatory base. What grounds the necessity, on the doctrine, is asked for and not delivered: aseity tells us what God is not (dependent), without telling us what makes God's existence not-otherwise. The analysis here points, in answer, to Nature: T, S, and Φ do not depend on anything else, because there is no anything-else for them to depend on: Nature is the condition for there being something rather than nothing for any subsequent dependence to obtain within. Aseity, on this reading, is the negative shadow of Nature's positive role.

**Q5.** *What makes creation contingent, if God's act is God's necessary nature?* If God's nature is necessarily what it is, and God's act is identical with God's nature (the strongest version of divine simplicity), then God's act is necessarily what it is, and what God's act produces is necessarily what God's act produces (Mullins, R. T., 2013); (Mullins, R. T., 2016); (Tomaszewski, Christopher, 2019). Creation collapses into necessity. The classical reply distinguishes God's act-in-itself from the act's *terminus ad extra*, holding the act necessary while leaving the terminus contingent (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.19; (Stump, Eleonore, 2003); (Dolezal, James E., 2017). The reply preserves the contingency of creation by introducing a structured relation between act and effect that the doctrine of strong simplicity is supposed to disallow. The concern here is that the more strictly simplicity is held, the more sharply the modal collapse follows; the more relaxedly simplicity is held, the more the doctrine has surrendered the ground from which divine necessity was supposed to flow. The doctrine wants both (strict enough simplicity to ground necessity, loose enough simplicity to let creation be contingent) and these are two incompatible commitments joined only by the shared term. Hartshorne's dipolar account addresses the modal-collapse pressure directly: God's abstract pole is necessarily and immutably what it is; the concrete pole actualizes contingently, responsive to the open alternatives creaturely co-creation supplies, and so provides the modal contrast creation requires without implicating the abstract pole in contingency. On the dipolar reading, the modal-collapse concern targets the abstract pole alone, and the concrete pole's contingency is the structural resource the doctrine needed. The concern here is the one [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) presses against dipolar theism generally: the abstract pole sustains the concrete pole's act-relations only across the directed crossing between them, and that crossing obtains within T, S, and Φ. The modal-collapse question does not dissolve; it migrates from the necessity predicate to the abstract/concrete relation, where [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) records it as a standing account rather than a solution.

**Q6.** *How do you ground possibility by an act, when acting already needs it?* Leftow's (Leftow, Brian, 2012) theistic activism is the most ambitious contemporary defense. What is possible is grounded in divine activity; there are no possibilities prior to God for God's selection to range over. The doctrine preserves divine sovereignty over the deepest layer the doctrine could reach. The structural concern is the one [§6.7.2](<6.7.2 Causality.md>), Q7 raises at the level of agency: to ground a modal structure is to stand in an asymmetric explanatory relation to it. The relation requires determinate ground, grounded content, and direction; it need not be a temporal transition from ungrounded to grounded. To remove those conditions while preserving ground is to keep the verb and lose the structure that gave it its content. Pruss (Pruss, A. R., 2011), Mullins (Mullins, R. T., 2016), and others have raised structural concerns from inside the literature. The point this section adds is that the deepest version of the doctrine, when its predicates are read in the structure that supports them, names Nature and not a being beyond it. Modal invariance is a structural fact about how possibility works, not a contingent product of any agent's exercise. Pruss's positive argument presses from the other side: that only an agent freely selecting among possibilities explains why one contingent cosmos is realized rather than another. Granted in full, the selecting it posits must distinguish alternatives and explain the contingent realization. A timeless-selection model avoids a temporal transition in God but still owes an account of differentiated alternatives and contingent effects. The contingent realization it seeks to explain is Nature's own: the actual configuration among those the structure permits, which calls for no selector standing outside the conditions any selecting would presuppose.

**Q7.** *By what logic does God author logic?* Descartes (Letters to Mesland (Descartes, René, 1644)) extends divine sovereignty to the eternal truths themselves: God could have made 2+2=5, and God's not having done so is a free divine choice. The Thomistic mainstream rejects the move (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.25.3 by indexing omnipotence to logical possibility — God can do whatever does not involve contradiction, and *square circle* names no candidate for divine action because it names no candidate for anything. The contemporary literature (Richard Swinburne, 1977); (Wierenga, Edward R., 1989); (Plantinga, A., 1980) sides decisively with the Thomistic restriction. The cost is that logical necessity is treated as a condition on divine action rather than a product of it, and the locus of the deepest necessity has moved beyond the being. The options include external constraint, grounding in divine nature, identity between divine rationality and logical truth, and voluntarist authorship. The latter faces the presupposition problem; the nature and identity accounts instead face explanatory circularity and content burdens.

**Q8.** *What makes one being necessary, if necessity belongs to the frame it sits in?* The phrase *necessary being* presupposes a contrast with contingent being and a category broad enough to contain both. Beings, on the contrast, range from those that might not have been to those that could not fail to be, with the necessary case at one limit. The concern here is that the limit is not a maximally exalted being. It is a structural condition. What cannot fail to be, when the modal verb is taken seriously, is what would have to be in place for any *could-have-been-otherwise* to be a coherent thought. Possibility presupposes a frame within which alternatives can be set against each other. The frame requires a manifold across which alternatives can be located (S), an ordering across which they can be considered as alternatives at all (T), and a substantial reality whose features the alternatives are alternatives of (Φ). Treating one being within the frame as the being of necessity in its highest form tries to import the modal status of the frame into one of its inhabitants. The status does not transfer. Hartshorne's dual-transcendence doctrine (*Man's Vision of God* (Charles Hartshorne, 1941)) attempts to escape the transfer problem by bifurcating the necessity: the abstract pole carries modal invariance; the concrete pole carries contingent, responsive actuality; the same subject bears both by being the single reality whose abstract dimension is invariant and whose concrete dimension is what creaturely events contingently make it. The structural concern is the one [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) presses: a single subject bears two irreducible modal statuses only by way of the relation between its poles, and that relation is the directed crossing [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) shows obtains within S, T, and Φ, the very frame whose status the transfer problem found could not pass to an inhabitant. The bifurcation relocates the transfer problem into the pole-relation rather than escaping it.

*What is required.* Eight pressures surface what the predicate *necessary* actually runs on. Before it substantively applies at all, its subject has to be a coordinate of the alternation the operator ranges over: a being defined as a constituent of the modal structure rather than as a value within it is not a candidate for the modal verb. Invariance can characterize both a modal framework and entities represented as existing throughout it. The structural account must argue comparatively for Nature as the best ground of necessity rather than infer that no invariant entity can be necessary. The frame requires differentiation among alternatives, modal relations, and a domain or bearer of modal content. Calling these roles Space, Time, and Substance is a substantive identification that depends on the earlier machinery; possible worlds need not themselves be temporally ordered. Necessity is the modal status of these three in their joint operation. Two further conditions follow negatively. The not-otherwise of the necessary is what is in place, not what fails to obtain, so aseity construed as the bare negation of dependence does not do the grounding work the doctrine asks of it. And whatever could author the modal structure appears to presuppose structural conditions only the frame itself can supply, which leaves agent-authored modality facing a presupposition problem at the level the deepest version of the doctrine reaches. The structural form of this reasoning replaces the Principle of Sufficient Reason rather than running through it: where strong PSR demands a sufficient reason for every contingent fact and weak PSR a possible one, the present account reads necessity from the conditions any *otherwise* presupposes. These are not optional supports the predicate could trade among. They are what the verb *necessarily* picks out when its referent is examined.

One rival reading of this result must be met, since it grants that something is modally invariant and presses only on its number. Aggregation arguments (Rasmussen, Joshua, 2009); (Pruss, Alexander R., and Joshua L. Rasmussen, 2018) hold that multiple necessary foundations collapse into one, and so ask why T, S, and Φ are not three necessary beings whose constant co-occurrence requires a single ground to bind them (the structural form of monotheism) rather than one Nature. The reply runs on two levels, and either suffices. First, there is no seam to bind: T, S, and Φ are not three separable necessities that happen to co-occur but are mutually constitutive (succession with nothing persistent to undergo it is not time, a persistent something with no interval to stand in is not substance, an interval with no succession across it is not a manifold), so their co-instantiation is internal and analytic, one structure under three descriptions rather than an arrangement an external ground maintains ([§2.6.5](<2.6.5 Mutual Containment.md>)). To ask what binds them is to ask what binds a figure's three-sidedness to its three-angledness: nothing does, because they are one fact differently stated. Second, even were the seam granted, binding could not be the work of a being beyond Nature. A proposed binder may ground without acting temporally, so the issue is not exhausted by an act/no-act disjunction. If it acts, it operates in T, S, and Φ, a denizen of the conditions rather than a ground above them, and by the transfer result (Q8) cannot itself carry the necessity such a ground would require. If it does not act, it is nothing more than the standing co-obtaining of the conditions, which is Nature already, relabeled. And the necessary needs no binding in the first place: holding-together is a function only where the parties could come apart, and there is no world in which T, S, and Φ decohere, so a binder of the necessary prevents an impossible collapse and does no work. The grounding refinement (that such a being does not hold the conditions against collapse but confers their necessity) returns to the results of Q4 and Q6: a ground that confers necessity is either itself the prior necessary base, in which case it is Nature under another name and the transfer is conceded, or it is contingent, in which case it cannot confer necessity at all. This is the stage at which the naturalist and monotheist readings of the modally invariant finally diverge, and where the divergence is located and carried ([§6.2.2](<6.2.2 Unity.md>)): the monotheist reads the unity of the necessary as a personal ground binding a plurality, while the present account reads it as the triconditionality of one structure — requiring no binder because admitting no seam.

> [!info]
> **Natural worry.** Grant that something must hold in every possible world. Why is that one Nature rather than three necessary items—time, space, and persistence—that happen to travel together and need a single ground to bind them? That's monotheism's opening. Two replies, either one fatal. First, there's no seam to bind: succession with nothing to persist through it isn't time, persistence with no interval isn't substance—the three are one structure under three names, and asking what binds them is like asking what binds a triangle's three sides to its three angles. Second, any binder either acts, and so runs on the very conditions it was meant to ground, or it doesn't act, and is just those conditions standing together—Nature already, relabeled.

A second rival reading presses not on the number of the necessary but on the contingent. Pruss's cosmological argument from the Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact (the conjunction of all contingent truths, the actual cosmos with just these features and no others) holds that this conjunction is itself contingent and, on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, demands an explanation that cannot lie within it, terminating in a necessary being whose act explains why this conjunction obtains rather than another (Pruss, Alexander R., and Joshua L. Rasmussen, 2018). The argument is distinct from the aggregation just met: it asks not why the necessary foundations are one rather than three, but why the contingent whole is this one rather than another. The reply is the restricted Principle of Sufficient Reason this section has already named. What the argument needs is the strong PSR (every contingent fact has a sufficient reason) and that is the principle the present account replaces rather than honors. The necessary frame T, S, and Φ is no member of the contingent conjunction and so is not among what the argument asks after: it is the type, it is necessary, and against the necessary the explanatory demand runs out of contrast, exactly as Q4 and [§4.1.3](<4.1.3 Principle of Sufficient Reason.md>) found. The particular configuration the conjunction records (this cosmos, these constants) is the token, and the token is contingent; its explanation is the cosmic-historical one [§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>) develops, not a selecting act by a being outside the frame, since any such selecting (Q6) runs on the very conditions the frame supplies. Pruss's charge that a brute contingent whole is intolerable has force only against the strong PSR that generates it; under the restricted PSR the contingent token is not a necessity-demanding brute fact but a configuration the necessary frame permits and cosmic history fills in, and the regress of contingent explanation terminates not in a necessary being but in the necessary frame whose modes the token varies. The stopping point is marked, not helped to: the type is necessary, the token is not ([§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>)).

*What is inverted.* Necessity is what cannot fail to be, and what cannot fail to be is what would have to be in place for any *otherwise* to be a coherent thought. The English *necessarily* renders the Latin *ne + cedere*: not to yield, not to withdraw. The word that names what cannot be otherwise is built from the impossibility of retreating, and retreating is a structured act: succession of positions (T), distance to retreat across (S), persistent something that does the retreating (Φ). The etymology of necessity illustrates non-yielding but does not analyze the modal operator: □ expresses truth in every accessible world, not the impossibility of a literal act of retreat. What □ names, when the language is read against what makes the language coherent, is the structural conditions whose withdrawal is impossible. Necessity is the modal status of T, S, and Φ themselves. What necessity names within that modal status is its reach across worlds: there is no possible world from which T, S, and Φ are absent, because a world from which they were absent would be no world at all. The classical predicate has been pointing, across its formulations, at the modal status of Nature while the doctrine has located that status in a being from which the conditions that constitute it have been removed. Nature has the modal status; the being beyond Nature has none of what the status requires.


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← [6.3 Aseity and Modal Standing](<6.3 Aseity and Modal Standing.md>) | [6.3.2 Eternity](<6.3.2 Eternity.md>) →
