Among contemporary arguments for a divine ground, Rasmussen's foundation argument(Rasmussen, Joshua, 2019) presses the case on the narrowest and most rationalist basis: no appeal to revelation, scriptural authority, or parochial religious commitment, only the demand that things have explanations. It belongs to a lineage running from Avicenna's contingency argument (*burhān al-ṣiddīqīn*) in the *Kitāb al-Shifā*(Avicenna, (c. 1020) 2005), through Leibniz's *Monadology*(Leibniz, G. W., (1714) 1989), §32 and Clarke's demonstrative cosmology, to its contemporary reconstructions in Pruss(Pruss, Alexander R., 2006) and Koons(Koons, Robert C., 1997). Because it stakes everything on explanatory principles the present account also accepts, it earns engagement at full strength before any reply.

The argument proceeds in three moves.

1. *The Foundation.* Every contingent fact has a sufficient reason (the PSR), so the regress of reasons terminates in a being whose existence is not contingent on anything further, a Supreme Foundation.

1. *Maximal greatness.* Any limit on this Foundation's nature would itself be a contingent fact, and explaining the limit would require something beyond the Foundation, which contradicts its ultimacy, so the Foundation must possess every positive attribute to the highest degree.

1. *Personhood.* Consciousness is among the positive attributes, so the Foundation is personal.

The result is classical theism reached by explanatory first principles alone: a maximally great necessary being, argued for without a premise the naturalist has already refused. What makes the argument difficult to resist is its rationalist honesty: it does not retreat into mystery; it runs the Principle of Sufficient Reason (the PSR: every contingent fact has a sufficient reason for being so rather than otherwise) without flinching and lets the derivation land where it lands.

What the argument gets right is granted from the start: explanatory regress does not terminate in a brute fact. Where it goes wrong is the identity of the terminus. The terminus is located by [§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>) in the structural roles themselves: T, S, and Φ (the three structural conditions, borne by Time, Space, and Substance) as the conditions under which anything is coherently a something-rather-than-nothing. Rasmussen accepts the PSR and rejects that terminus: the roles, he would say, are facts, facts require reasons, and the reason must be something outside them that can ground them without itself requiring grounding. The dispute is not about whether the PSR generates pressure; both accounts agree that it does. It is about where that pressure comes to rest. If the structural roles are themselves the conditions of coherent fact-hood, they do not stand in line with other facts awaiting a reason; they are what allows anything to be a fact waiting for one. The argument reaches its Foundation by three lines, and each, carefully followed, recovers the very structure it means to displace: the Argument from Limits, the Mind-Grounding Isomorphism, and the direct appeal to the PSR.

*First.* The argument from limits runs straight off the PSR: any limit on the Foundation's nature would be a contingent fact requiring further explanation, so the Foundation must possess every positive attribute without restriction. Each restriction would point beyond the Foundation. Maximal greatness follows from the PSR itself, requiring no independent theological assumption, which is why it lands even on readers suspicious of theism.

The move risks treating every determination as a limiting defect. At role-resolution, a proposed Foundation must at least be determinate, distinguishable from what it grounds, and stand in a real asymmetric dependence relation to it. None of that yet proves clock-time, spatial extension, or ordinary causal persistence in an atemporal ground. It does show that maximality cannot be obtained simply by subtracting every form of order, difference, and bearing; a wholly indeterminate posit supplies no intelligible grounding content. The Argument from Limits mistakes the conditions for existence for restrictions on a hypothetical limit-free existent, and concludes by describing ∅ under a greatness-theoretic heading.

A theist will object that this describes ∅, not the infinite plenitude classical theism intends: a Foundation lacking every limitation is maximally full, not empty. But the objection trades on an equivocation the reply can refuse. The limit at issue is not *privation*, some perfection the Foundation lacks, but *determination*: to be anything at all, even infinite fullness, is to be this and not that, full and not empty, being and not nonbeing. The principle descends from Spinoza's *determinatio negatio est* (determination is negation, Letter 50), generalized by Hegel into the *omnis determinatio est negatio* since quoted in his name, and pressed here to its theological conclusion. Determination is not a defect to be maximized away; it is what being a something costs, and a candidate that sheds it entirely does not rise above the roles but falls beneath them into ∅.

So the appeal to infinite fullness faces a fork: either it keeps that determinacy, and it is a determinate, therefore structured, ground, the floor already conceded; or it renounces determinacy, and the plenitude is ∅ under a superlative. Answering that the Foundation merely cannot be empty, since emptiness is no perfection to lack, guards it against privations it never faced and leaves untouched the determinacy it cannot shed. A bolder theist welcomes the second horn: the God of the *via negativa* is "beyond being," so naming it ∅ merely fails to rise past determinate categories. But "beyond being" either marks something determinate, this and not that, and falls back into the first horn, or it marks no determination at all, which [§2.7.1](<2.7.1 Null State (∅).md>) establishes is not eminence beyond being but ∅, nothing under the honorific "beyond."

*Second.* The mind-grounding isomorphism extrapolates from the way finite minds ground propositional content to the way the Foundation grounds existence itself: if minds carry meaning across cognitive acts (entertaining truths, sustaining explanatory relations, grounding one content in another), a maximally unrestricted version of that same relation is the best candidate for grounding reality. So Mind is the most general category of grounding, its range of configurations exceeding what structural mediation could confine.

Range of configurations is idle if the capacity to host configurations is missing. Any mind that entertains a proposition must carry that proposition across its articulation (Time), distinguish it from neighboring propositions (Space), and persist as the same mind across the act of entertaining (Substance). A mind that performs no such act is not a mind; it is the word *mind* with no referent. A classical theist will protest that this pictures only a finite, discursive mind: the divine intellect entertains nothing across an interval but grounds all truths timelessly and without succession, in one simple act or in nothing beyond its own nature. Grant the disclaimer entirely; it changes nothing, because grounding of any kind, timeless grounding included, rests on a minimal floor. An intellect that grounds truths without performing any temporal act must still stand to what it grounds in an asymmetric order of prior and posterior (T as grounding-order), remain distinct from those truths rather than collapsing into them (S as relational distinction), and retain its identity as their ground across the relation (Φ as identity-retention). A timeless, non-discursive intellect that grounds anything has thereby conceded the floor; one that meets none of these conditions grounds nothing at all. Timelessness lifts the mind above succession, not above structure. Rasmussen attributes to his Foundation everything a mind does (entertaining truths, grounding reasons, sustaining explanatory relations), which means the Foundation is already operating on the structural conditions the argument is supposed to explain. Run carefully, the Principle does not elevate Mind above T, S, and Φ. It shows that Mind is where T, S, and Φ operate most densely, which makes it a high-order instance of structure, not an alternative to it. The wider reach of mental grounding is not its escape from the roles. It is the roles running richer.

*Third.* The direct appeal to the PSR skips theistic content altogether and invokes the PSR unadorned: the structural roles are facts, facts require reasons, and the reason must be a necessary being that grounds them without itself requiring a ground. This version is difficult to answer without appearing to abandon rationalism, because refusing the PSR's demand at the structural level looks like allowing a brute fact at the foundation.

The PSR has no purchase against the structural Conditions if the proposed contrast class is simply their total absence: [§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>) argues that ∅ is not a coherent alternative state. That result blocks a demand for a cause of the Conditions construed as an ordinary contingent fact. It does not, by itself, eliminate an essence-prior proposal that takes the Conditions to depend on a primitive metaphysical ground; such a proposal incurs a further explanatory burden rather than being answered merely by the absence of ∅. The present reply is that Rasmussen has not yet shown why a necessary structured ground requires an additional personal Foundation, not that every possible grounding gloss is already contradictory.

The Foundation, moreover, inherits a structural burden. Rasmussen can press that the relevant grounding or explanation need not be causal or temporal: the Foundation may ground without producing, explain without sustaining-through-time, or source without performing a causal act across an interval. The reply should therefore remain at role-resolution. Any intelligible source/ground relation must at least distinguish source from grounded, order the dependence asymmetrically, and obtain as a real explanatory or grounding fact rather than as a bare label. The book identifies these as the S-, T-, and Φ-roles in their minimal forms: relational distinction, asymmetric grounding-order, and real bearing or identity-retention. This does not by itself prove that an atemporal Foundation instantiates clock-time, spatial extension, or causal persistence; it establishes that the Foundation is not wholly structureless.

Analogical predication is the classical theist's natural recourse at exactly this point: God grounds not univocally but analogically, so the floor is granted only in an eminent, non-creaturely mode. It changes nothing here. Either the analogical relation has determinate content, in which case it carries the ordering, distinction, and identity-retention the floor names, and a structured ground has been conceded under an analogical description; or it has none, in which case the relation specifies ∅ ([§2.7.1](<2.7.1 Null State (∅).md>)). There is no third term between structure and ∅ for the analogical move to occupy. The full pressure on the classical *via negativa* runs at [§5.2.2](<5.2.2 Via Negativa.md>) and [§5.4](<5.4 What the Rival Ultimates Carried.md>); the reply here needs only the floor, and the analogical move cannot slip it.

Reading the roles at this minimal level is not a retreat from the fuller T, S, and Φ the book defends elsewhere, nor an equivocation that proves a thin conclusion and asserts a thick one. The minimal reading fixes only the *floor* any grounding relation must meet (relational distinction, identity-retention, asymmetric ordering), and the reply needs only that floor: no candidate ground, however the theist refines it, drops beneath it. Whether the ground's temporality, extension, and substantiality also take their richer everyday *type* is a further question the reply here neither needs nor settles. The richer type-upgrade is secured only where the separate change-realizer arguments apply; an atemporal ground stands outside that conclusion by hypothesis, so the reply against it rests on the minimal role floor alone. That is enough: a ground that refuses even the floor — asymmetric ordering, relational distinction, identity-retention — specifies ∅ ([§2.7.1](<2.7.1 Null State (∅).md>)), while a ground that grants the floor has thereby conceded a structured ground, whatever it declines at the level of everyday type. There is no loophole by which a ground might satisfy the minimal conditions while escaping the roles themselves: that the floor (asymmetric ordering, relational distinction, identity-retention) simply *is* T, S, and Φ read at role level is fixed upstream, by the role-definitions of [§1.4](<1.4 Three Conditions.md>) and the Structural Requirement ([§2.4](<2.4 Structural Requirement.md>)), not asserted afresh here nor borrowed from [§5.4](<5.4 What the Rival Ultimates Carried.md>). Condition-Individuation ([§2.6.11](<2.6.11 No Fourth Condition.md>)) secures separately only that there is no fourth axis, and the remaining disagreement, whether a structured ground is aptly named God, is the one [§5.4](<5.4 What the Rival Ultimates Carried.md>) takes up.

The classical admission that God cannot make a square circle was always a concession that coherence binds the Foundation. The present argument names what coherence consists in: the description of what T, S, and Φ together require, read at the level of relational distinction, identity-retention, and asymmetric ordering rather than specifically causal-temporal production. A Foundation bound by coherence is a Foundation operating within structure, not outside it.

The abductive variant on these arguments reaches the same terminus by inference rather than demonstration: best-explanation reasoning rather than deductive PSR application, as in Koons(Koons, Robert C., 1997). The reply is parallel. A posit must be able to do the explanatory work attributed to it; doing that work requires determinate ordering, differentiation, and bearing at role-resolution. An abductively posited Foundation therefore carries structural commitments. Whether those commitments reduce the Foundation to the book's structure or remain features of a distinct personal ground is the live abductive comparison, not something the role-floor alone decides.

Two objections press at this site. The selection-among-possibilities challenge asks: if Nature is the necessary structural foundation, what selects which contingent configuration it realizes? The question is internal to Nature: which configuration obtains within the necessary structure, not a question about Nature itself. The modal PSR as applied to contingents within Nature ([§4.1.3](<4.1.3 Principle of Sufficient Reason.md>)) answers the explanatory pressure without an external intentional selector, while the absence of a coherent contrast class for Nature's non-instantiation ([§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>)) blocks projecting the question back onto the Conditions; the level-distinction at [§2.8.4](<2.8.4 Necessity Precedes Contingency.md>) fixes why, since contingency is a property of configurations within Nature, not of the necessary structural ground. The aggregation challenge asks: if T, S, and Φ are each necessary, why are they not three independent necessary foundations that aggregate to one, the structural form of monotheism? Because T∧S∧Φ is not a conjunction of three independently necessary grounds but one structural fact under three logical-categorical readings. The Triunity of Nature ([§2.6.9](<2.6.9 Triunity of Nature.md>)) and Condition-Individuation ([§2.6.11](<2.6.11 No Fourth Condition.md>)) establish that instantiation of any one Condition analytically requires the others, so there is no coherent specification of T, S, or Φ as a foundation prior to their conjunction. Rasmussen's aggregation move, which correctly collapses multiple independent necessary foundations to one, does not reach T∧S∧Φ, because the Triconditional identity forecloses the independence it requires.

*What converges.* Each of the three lines to Rasmussen's Foundation recovers the structure it set out to replace: the Argument from Limits mistakes the structural conditions for restrictions on a hypothetical limit-free existent and ends up describing ∅ under a greatness-theoretic heading; the Mind-Grounding Isomorphism attributes to the Foundation everything a mind does (entertaining truths, grounding reasons, sustaining explanatory relations), so the Foundation is already operating on the structural conditions it was meant to explain; and the direct PSR line has no purchase where the proposed contrast class is ∅, which fails before it has been described; the essence-prior gloss that survives carries a further explanatory burden rather than an answer, leaving a Foundation bound by coherence as a Foundation operating within structure.

Rasmussen is right that explanatory regress must terminate somewhere, and right about nearly everything the terminus must be. The one divergence is its identity: not a necessary being standing over the roles, but the roles themselves, which are necessary because nothing is a something without them. What classical theism has been pointing at under the name Foundation *is* what Chapter 1 and §2 have been proving under the name T ∧ S ∧ Φ. For neighboring contemporary positions in the same methodological cluster, the engagement runs at [§3.4](<3.4 Reality and Nature Are One.md>) and [§3.5](<3.5 What the Convergence Shows.md>) rather than here: Pruss and Rasmussen(Pruss, Alexander R., and Joshua L. Rasmussen, 2018), and Pizzi(Pizzi, David, 2025). The cluster reaches □∃x x; the five-domain convergence reaches □(T∧S∧Φ); the latter closes candidates the former leaves open. Pizzi(Pizzi, David, 2025) is the closest in formal method, and explicitly leaves the identity of the necessary existent open in his §7, a stop-point this argument crosses. Divine simplicity is taken up next, at [§5.2.1](<5.2.1 Divine Simplicity.md>): whether the necessary ground can be identical with its attributes in a way that exempts it from the structural conditions this section has established apply to any ground capable of the grounding work. Rasmussen's personalist last stage (the move from necessary foundation to intentional selector, and from intentional selector to personal being) is engaged directly at Chapter 6: [§6.4.1](<6.4.1 Awareness.md>) (Awareness), [§6.4.2](<6.4.2 Knowledge.md>) (Knowledge), and [§6.7.1](<6.7.1 Power.md>) (Power) test whether awareness, knowledge, and agency are genuine additions to the necessary structural ground or configurations it realizes. The lever Rasmussen would press hardest is the book's own Recursive-Depth → Phenomenal-Interiority arc (Chapter 8): the place where the framework most invites the personalist conclusion, since it is the book's own account of how interiority arises. That recursive structural depth gives rise to phenomenal interiority is not a concession that the ground is antecedently personal, but the explanation of how persons arise within the structure rather than standing over it. Two precision notes on scope govern the divergence. The book's necessity claim is *de dicto* with respect to the structural role (necessarily, any ground that discharges the modal-grounding function is T∧S∧Φ as a co-instantiated conjunction), not the *de re* claim that this particular token instantiation is necessarily this token. The modal-collapse risk (whether necessary identity collapses contingent configurations of Nature into necessities) is foreclosed by the level-distinction [§2.8.4](<2.8.4 Necessity Precedes Contingency.md>) establishes: necessity attaches to the Conditions, not to the configurations they permit to vary.


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← [5.1 Theistic Arguments for a Divine Ground](<5.1 Theistic Arguments for a Divine Ground.md>) | [5.1.2 Cosmological Argument](<5.1.2 Cosmological Argument.md>) →
