Everything the tradition most wants to say about God is active: God knows, acts, creates, sustains, answers, and loves. Everything it wants God to *be* is withdrawn from the conditions those acts require — outside time, outside space, made of nothing.

This chapter holds those two claims against each other, one attribute at a time. Can a subject placed beyond Time, Space, and Substance still bear what the tradition needs it to bear? The chapter tests that question attribute by attribute, distinguishing a contradiction from a relocation, an explanatory cost, and a residual metaphysical burden. What becomes of the greatness the tradition reached for is the question the title names.

The classical theist tradition credited God with certain structures: identity, necessity, eternity, presence, awareness, knowledge, power, agency, sovereignty, relation, description, love. Each was named at its perfect form (omniscience, omnipotence, immutable knowledge, *creatio ex nihilo*, simplicity, perfect love, ineffable revelation) and held to be the elevated form of what creatures merely participate in.

This chapter reverses the placement. The reversal is structural, attribute by attribute. Awareness is real, but it requires an inside, and the conditions for an inside live in Nature, not in ∅. Agency is real, but it requires transition, and transition requires Time. Knowledge is real, but it requires a position from which to hold a cognitive state. Necessity, eternity, presence, power, identity, sovereignty, relation, description: the same in each case. The structures the tradition tried to give God *are* the structures Nature necessarily instantiates.

The chapter focuses on the Christian-Scholastic synthesis because that is where the doctrinal bundle (simplicity, atemporality, aseity, *creatio ex nihilo*, meticulous providence) is most fully assembled and most demanding to defend. The pressures collected here are not, however, in-house Christian difficulties. The same structural difficulty arises wherever the same conceptual moves are made: Maimonides's negative theology in the *Guide for the Perplexed* (Maimonides, Moses, (c. 1190) 1963); (Kenneth Seeskin, 2000); (Josef Stern, 2013), Avicenna's distinction between necessary and possible existence in the *Kitab al-Shifa* (Avicenna, (c. 1020) 2005); (Jon McGinnis, 2010); (Peter Adamson, 2013), Al-Ghazali's occasionalist account of causation in the *Incoherence of the Philosophers* (al-Ghazālī, c. 1095); (Richard M. Frank, 1992); (Frank Griffel, 2009), and the parallel Vedantic identification of Brahman as the unconditioned ground of conditioning (Śaṅkara, (c. 800)); (Eliot Deutsch, 1969). The Christian tradition is the one this chapter engages in detail. The inversion's reach is the family of doctrines that places the structural conditions of T, S, and Φ inside a being defined as standing outside them.

The chapter engages three families of theistic position.

*The classical position.* God is atemporal, aspatial, immaterial, simple, *actus purus*, immutable, impassible, and the necessary ground of created reality. Aseity is preserved as a feature of the divine being. Substantive modal predication applies to God: God necessarily exists, necessarily knows, necessarily loves. The position is best represented in the Christian-Scholastic synthesis (Aquinas, Anselm, Boethius) and its contemporary defenders (Dolezal, Feser, Stump, Leftow on selected points).

The classical position is the chapter's primary target. Two further commitments depart from it, each defined by a different response to the no-way-possible argument ([§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>)):

*Commitment A.* God grounds modal structure rather than fitting within it. The substantive predication *is possible* does not apply to God, since God is proposed as the source of possibility rather than one of its instances. Theistic activism (Thomas V. Morris and Christopher Menzel, 1986); (Pruss, A. R., 2011); (Leftow, Brian, 2012) is the most developed version; presuppositionalism (Cornelius Van Til, 1955); (Greg L. Bahnsen, 1998) and Cartesian voluntarism (René Descartes, 1630); (Harry G. Frankfurt, 1977) are variants. The position trades the no-way-possible argument ([§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>)) for the task of supplying a determinate grounding relation and explaining what remains of *necessarily exists* once substantive modal predication has been refused. Sections [§4.1.10](<4.1.10 The Source of Possibility.md>), [§5.1.8](<5.1.8 Modal-Grounding Argument.md>), and [§5.1.10](<5.1.10 Moral Argument.md>) show that no candidate already specified within the modal domain can ground that domain from outside; an essence-prior or transcendent ground remains a further metaphysical posit whose credentials this chapter tests through its active predicates.

*Commitment B (modest theism).* God can do all possible things but does not source possibility itself; possibility is external. Simplicity, *actus purus*, and immutability are dropped or weakened, so that God is a possibility-respecting agent rather than the ground of modal structure. Process theology (Charles Hartshorne, 1948); (John B. Cobb Jr. and David Ray Griffin, 1976); (Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, 1988); (Thomas Jay Oord, 2015), open theism (Clark H. Pinnock, Richard Rice, John Sanders, William Hasker and David Basinger, 1994); (William Hasker, 1989), and the temporal-theism wing (Nicholas Wolterstorff, 1975); (Alan G. Padgett, 1992); (Mullins, R. T., 2016); (Craig, William Lane, 2001) on selected points sit in this region. Process theology's dipolar panentheism is the structurally most ambitious member of this group, and it is not merely classical theism with attributes subtracted: Hartshorne's God pairs an abstract pole that is necessary and immutable with a concrete pole that actualizes contingently. That reframing is engaged on its own terms rather than only as a member of Commitment B: the abstract/concrete pole-relation is pressed at [§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>) (Q5, Q8) and closed at [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>), where the directed crossing between the poles is shown to run within T, S, and Φ. The position survives the no-way-possible argument by surrendering the doctrinal claim that God has no alternative way to be. Its consequence is that any restriction on divine nature carves a proper subset out of the space of possibilities (divine power is constrained at the level of *which* possibilities God can do), and this consequence runs as the moral-domain instance at [§6.9.1](<6.9.1 Benevolence.md>).

Each subsequent transfer specifies which position it targets. Some run against all three; some against Commitment A only; some against Commitment B only. The chapter does not assume one and ignore the others. All three are positions on a personal God. The non-personal alternative (a Neoplatonic One from which the modal structure emanates, neither a ground that stands over it nor an instance that stands within it) is engaged separately, at [§5.3.2](<5.3.2 Neoplatonism.md>) and again at [§6.2.2](<6.2.2 Unity.md>).

Each transfer tests a bilateral pressure. The chapter asks whether a predicate can apply to a wholly structureless subject and whether a structural relation can reach a subject defined outside every relation. Where a doctrine removes every differentiating feature and every determinate relation, the structural account diagnoses an ∅-like failure of specification. Where it retains active predicates or real relations, it reinstates at least the relevant structural roles. The bilateral form clarifies the pressure; it does not substitute for a separate argument about every possible essence-prior or apophatic ground.

The attribute-by-attribute form can be misread as a cumulative case in which twenty-three independent arguments each add an increment. It is not that: the transfers are applications of two master results. The first is the simplicity/differentiation dilemma developed at [§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>): strict simplicity must explain how one undifferentiated reality grounds differentiated identity and predication. Every *static* attribute (simple, necessary, eternal, holy, perfect) therefore carries a determinate-content burden; it does not follow merely from predicative plurality that God has spatial parts. This is why [§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>) is both the first transfer and the hinge of the rest: once simplicity no longer holds the attributes together as a single act, they come apart and can be taken one at a time. The dilemma is itself an application of the Way–Possibility Convertibility ([§3.2](<3.2 Triconditional Necessity Positive Account.md>)), pressed to its theological edge at [§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>): to be anything at all is to be some way rather than another, and a way decomposes without remainder into direction (T), difference (S), and link (Φ). The second master result is the directed-relation analysis ([§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>)): to ground, donate, sustain, or know requires determinate relata, asymmetric order, and a bearer of the relation. These are thin role-level requirements. Whether they entail metric Space, temporal succession, or physical Substance must be argued in each active-attribute case rather than assumed by the metaphor of crossing. Read from the agent's side, the directed-crossing result takes a plainer form. Every active predicate names a capacity (to begin, sustain, or interact) and its exercise requires determinate relational content. Thomistic pure actuality forecloses passive potency, not active power as such. The chapter must therefore press the relation between an unchanged fully actual cause and contingent effects, rather than infer that pure act has no causal capacity. Several attributes fall to both. The convergence is real but not additive: the chapter exhibits two results across twenty-three predicates, not twenty-three proofs of twenty-three things. The concentration is stated explicitly at [§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>), which shows that the chapter's theorem of record (the Trilemma Closure) is independent of it and stands whatever becomes of the individual reductions.

That concentration locates the one place an opponent can press. Both master results share a central pressure point. The escape from the first is that *way*-talk of God is merely analogical or apophatic, or that perfections are present only by eminent containment; the escape from the second is that the divine relation is real on the creature's side but merely conceptual on God's. The chapter argues that a terminus bearing no feature that discriminates it from ∅ faces an ∅-like specification problem ([§2.7](<2.7 Nothing to Consider.md>); [§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>)). Against an opponent who grants real divine predicates and relations, the structural burden bites directly. Against an apophatic, analogical, or mixed-relation exit, the residual issue is whether the proposed semantics or metaphysics can make those predicates and relations determinate without reintroducing the role-level structure. The honest claim is not that every exit has already been contradicted, but that the discernibility and grounding burden remains active at the chapter's single hinge.

The twenty-three transfers sort by which master result carries them. On the static side, where the simplicity/differentiation dilemma does the work, four groups: *constitution* (simplicity, unity, infinity, perfection), *aseity and modal standing* (necessity, eternity, immutability, impassibility), *cognition* (awareness, knowledge), and *intrinsic value* (holiness, beatitude). On the active side, where the directed-crossing analysis closes them, three groups: *agency* (power, causality, interaction, sovereignty), *reach and contact* (presence, relatability, describability, revelation), and *moral act* (benevolence, righteousness). Life stands between the two, billed as a constitutive perfection but inverting as the self-activity of Substance in time, so that it lands among the active attributes by its own argument. One static-type predicate crosses the same seam: impassibility is static in type yet does its work on the active arm, the lone predicate whose inversion runs in the 'nature cannot act on God' direction rather than the 'God cannot have the structure' direction. These two crossings, life and impassibility, are distinct from the [§6.2.1](<6.2.1 Simplicity.md>) hinge: simplicity hinges the chapter by releasing the attributes to be taken one at a time, whereas life and impassibility mark where the two master results meet.

What governs the transfers is Modal Pressure ([§2.6.10](<2.6.10 Triconditional Identity.md>)), the necessity-propagation rule introduced earlier in the argument. The necessity-propagation form has Anselmian antecedents: Hartshorne (Charles Hartshorne, 1965) recovers the modal-ontological structure; Plantinga (Plantinga, A., 1974) formalizes it in S5. Once necessity is admitted anywhere in a classical attribute (necessary existence, necessary creation, necessary knowledge, necessary goodness), Modal Pressure requires every real entailment of that attribute to be treated with the same modal seriousness. The interlocutor who posits a necessary creator cannot stop the inference at necessary creation but contingent extension, or at necessary extension but contingent laws, or at any intermediate position the tradition has reached for. Modal Pressure marks that stopping point as ad hoc unless the entailment itself is denied. It follows the attribute's actual commitments, and what those commitments require, as Chapter 2 established, is T, S, and Φ. The same engine presses the book to mark its own stopping point rather than help itself to one: the structural frame T∧S∧Φ is necessary, while the particular modes that fill it (this cosmos, these constants) remain contingent, the type necessary and the token not. That restricted-PSR stopping point, and the asymmetry it rests on, are taken up directly at [§7.7](<7.7 Cosmic History.md>). The transfers that follow do not refute the attributes from outside. They trace each attribute to the structural conditions it requires. *The modal-ontological argument is handled directly at [§5.1.7](<5.1.7 Modal Ontological Argument.md>), where Modal Pressure's necessity-propagation structure meets Plantinga's.*

Each transfer mirrors a section of Chapter 8. What Chapter 6 takes off the wrong subject, Chapter 8 finds inside the right one. The book reads the same structure twice: Chapter 6 in the predicates the tradition assigns to God, Chapter 8 in the self-modeling life that actually bears them.

The chapter arrives at a disciplined coordinate. A God defined within possibility is subject to the structural and grounding conditions the chapter identifies. A God placed beyond possibility must supply a metaphysics of how its predicates and relations are determinately contentful without belonging to the modal domain. The chapter argues that strict classical formulations face an ∅-like specification problem when every differentiating feature and active relation is withdrawn; it does not simply identify every doctrine of *actus purus* with ∅ by stipulation. The active and predicative work the doctrine retains is where the structural burden lands.


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← [5.4 What the Rival Ultimates Carried](<5.4 What the Rival Ultimates Carried.md>) | [6.1 Greatness](<6.1 Greatness.md>) →
