Oppy's work develops the comparative-total-theories framework (assess metaphysical positions by their total cost in ontological commitments, explanatory loss, and tension against background commitments) and applies it to necessary-being arguments (Rasmussen, Pruss, Plantinga-style ontological) as competitors to naturalism. The verdict, on Oppy's accounting, is that the necessary-being family pays a higher total cost than the naturalist alternative because the necessary-being hypothesis adds a being beyond Nature, whereas the naturalist makes Nature itself the terminus. The present argument relocates the necessity to Nature itself: T∧S∧Φ are necessary, and the question whether anything *further* is necessary (a particular being, a divine reality, a non-natural foundation) is taken up at length in Chapters 5 and 6 (the Theistic Counter-Constructions cluster). Oppy's comparative framework is the natural discipline for that question. The present argument's contribution is not a rival total theory but the structural specification naturalism's necessary terminus requires: the Conditions read along three Triconditional axes. Where Oppy's *naturalism* is articulated against the necessary-being alternatives, the present argument supplies what naturalism's necessary terminus consists in.

A further observation, which Oppy's own method surfaces: the comparison-of-total-theories framework itself requires stability — stable logical relations, inferential standards, and criteria by which one theory can be priced against another. Initial-state naturalism posits Nature as modally contingent, its structural character unrequired; but a modally contingent inferential framework is one that might have been otherwise, in which case the comparison would yield a different result. The comparison market is not neutral ground. Coherently pricing initial-state naturalism against the Necessity of Nature already runs on the kind of structural necessity the present argument posits: T∧S∧Φ are the conditions under which logical and inferential relations have a domain to operate on. This is not the claim that logical necessity and structural necessity are identical; they are distinct. It is the claim that the stability of the comparison framework depends on the structural conditions being instantiated, and that those conditions are what T∧S∧Φ name. Initial-state naturalism can be entertained as a theoretical rival; it cannot be coherently priced except from within instantiated structural conditions — the very items whose necessity the present argument derives.


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← [2.9.2 Modal Limits](<2.9.2 Modal Limits.md>) | [2.9.4 Contemporary Necessitarianism](<2.9.4 Contemporary Necessitarianism.md>) →
