Chapter 4 tested the metaphysical rivals: positions that contest the machinery of Time, Space, and Substance without proposing a rival ground beneath it. This chapter turns to rival ultimates — accounts that do propose one. Each names an ultimate offered as more fundamental than structure, asked to occupy the ground the tradition reserved for God.

The classical-theistic constructions are the most fully developed and take up most of the chapter, but they are engaged as one family of rival ultimates rather than as a category apart. Each is taken in its strongest available form and pressed on one question: can an ultimate be specified as prior to the structural conditions without merely relocating the roles those conditions play? The inquiry distinguishes three verdicts. Some candidates fail because their proposed grounding relation has no determinate content on the book's analysis. Some retain the structural roles under another vocabulary. Others remain coherent but carry a grounding or explanatory burden the chapter cannot close by contradiction. The bar is the strongest form the literature has yet produced; where a more powerful version exists or later emerges, the argument is answerable to it, not exempt from it.

The chapter works through three families of these, each gathered under its own cluster. The first are the theistic arguments that reach for a divine ground without presupposing structure: the cosmological and foundation arguments, the arguments from design and fine-tuning, the ontological and modal arguments, and the moral, pragmatic, and transcendental ones ([§5.1](<5.1 Theistic Arguments for a Divine Ground.md>)). The second are the doctrines of the divine nature built to keep that ground ultimate without regress, simple without composition, and independent of the structure it grounds: divine simplicity and the via negativa ([§5.2](<5.2 Doctrines of the Divine Nature.md>)). The third are the accounts of the ultimate that are not classically theistic but make the same bid against structure: Spinozist pantheism, Neoplatonism, process theology, Madhyamaka emptiness ([§5.3](<5.3 Non-Classical Ultimates.md>)). [§5.4](<5.4 What the Rival Ultimates Carried.md>) draws together what the engagements across these families reveal.

A note on scope: this chapter presses contemporary Christian-analytic theistic counter-constructions because that is where the literature has been most fully developed: Rasmussen, Plantinga, Pruss, Swinburne, Craig, Leftow, Stump, Dolezal. The structural pressures collected here are not in-house Christian difficulties. The same moves are made across the Islamic *falsafa* tradition (the medieval Arabic philosophical inheritance of Greek metaphysics): Avicenna's contingency argument, Al-Ghazali's *Tahāfut* (the *Incoherence of the Philosophers*) and the Kalām cosmological tradition the contemporary argument inherits. They are made too across the Jewish philosophical tradition (Maimonides on divine simplicity and negative theology). Where a parallel premodern development is doing the same conceptual work, it is registered in the relevant section. The argument is not against any one tradition but examines a structural pattern that recurs across traditions. It does not treat every use of divine, ultimate, or apophatic language as one undifferentiated target; each engagement is evaluated at the resolution and with the grounding commitments its own defenders specify.

A note on disaggregation: Aquinas's Five Ways are not answered in a single section because the structural analysis does not treat them as a single argument. Each Way targets a different structural condition: motion and efficient causation ([§6.7.2](<6.7.2 Causality.md>)), contingency (Chapters 2–3 and 4), degrees of perfection (§[§6.2](<6.2 Constitution.md>)–6.6), teleology (Chapter 7). Each is taken up where that condition is derived, so the Five Ways are met across the book rather than in one place.


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← [4.5 What the Rivals Carried](<4.5 What the Rivals Carried.md>) | [5.1 Theistic Arguments for a Divine Ground](<5.1 Theistic Arguments for a Divine Ground.md>) →
