Start where the theist starts, and grant the whole construction before pressing it. Perfect-being theology builds God by taking each property that makes a thing great (knowledge, power, goodness, presence, life) and pressing it to its ceiling: not much knowledge but *all* of it, not great power but power over everything, not merely good but without defect. God, on this measure, is that than which no greater can be conceived (Anselm, *Proslogion* (Anselm of Canterbury, (1078) 1998), II), every great-making property held to the maximal degree at once, the maxima taken to compose into a single being who has them all together and has them of necessity. That is the measure the tradition sets, in its own terms, and this chapter takes it exactly as given and runs it.

The decisive move, made before any single attribute is named, is to treat these maxima as a *starting ground*: possessed complete and from the outset, as pure actuality, with nothing in the being left unrealized. A maximum with no unrealized passive potency is the classical doctrine of pure actuality, not nothing by definition. Knowledge, power, and goodness are properties or capacities whose exercises have determinate content. The pressure is whether one immutable act can ground contingent, differentiated knowing and action — not whether the grammar of the predicates already refutes the doctrine.

This is the inversion the book is named for, taken at its root. The tradition seeks greatness by *subtracting* the conditions of being (atemporal, aspatial, immaterial) and arrives at ∅ ([§2.7.1](<2.7.1 Null State (∅).md>)); the same maximization run the other way, toward the fullest instantiation of those conditions rather than their negation, is what the political argument later develops and crystallizes as the Maximal Greatness result (§9). What the tradition placed in the evacuation of structure, this book relocates in its plenitude. Greatness so relocated changes category: it is not a completed actuality (possessed whole at the start or reached as a final state) but a self-maintaining standing, held open only in its own exercise, and so achievable, losable, and deepenable rather than finished; what a subsistence does at its fullest reach, not a perfection it is awarded.

> [!definition]
> **Greatness** · *Definition*
>
> The gradable dimension along which any subsistence stands: the great-making properties (knowledge, power, goodness, presence, life) held to a degree, admitting of more and less, so that one subsistence may stand higher on a given property than another. Stated neutrally, the maxima are *maximum possible* degrees, the most of a property that could actually be held, whether by a single individual or by a subsistent collective (there is a most knowledge that humankind could come to hold), not stipulated absolutes. Its ceiling, where every property stands at the maximal degree compatible with the rest, is what the tradition calls *maximal greatness*, developed in Plantinga's modal form at [§5.1.7](<5.1.7 Modal Ontological Argument.md>) (maximal excellence in every possible world).

The classical God is defined by three denials: outside time, outside space, not made of anything. The structural difficulty arises when such a God is also said to act, be present, affect the world, know, create, or sustain. Those predicates require determinate relations and therefore at least the role-level floor of directed order, relational non-identity, and real bearing. The chapter does not infer creaturely clock-time, metric extension, or material composition merely from these roles; it asks how a classical account makes its active predicates intelligible while withdrawing the roles they appear to require.

To act at one moment rather than another is to be in Time. To be present here rather than there is to be in Space. To affect the physical world is to exercise Substance. The theist who describes God as responding to prayer, directing influence, knowing what is currently the case, or creating at a moment has already committed to a God that instantiates the structural roles, not because the argument forces this conclusion from outside but because the theist's own descriptions of divine activity presuppose it from within.

The classical God is defined by the negation of creaturely temporal succession, spatial extension, and material composition. Atemporality negates Time, and with it Asymmetry, Transitivity, and Directionality; strip one and the others collapse with it. Aspatial existence negates Space, and with it Extension, Exclusivity, and Traversability. Immateriality negates Substance, and with it Distinctness, Substantiality, and Persistence. Classical theologians treat these as denials of creaturely modes, not necessarily as denials of every thin ordering, differentiation, or bearing role. The argument shows where positive divine predicates reintroduce such roles rather than defining that conclusion into the negative attributes. By the convergence / co-instantiation result ([§2.6.5](<2.6.5 Mutual Containment.md>)), lacking any one entails lacking all three; by the Modal Identity ([§2.6.6](<2.6.6 Modal Identity.md>)), the instantiation of T, S, and Φ is analytically equivalent to the possibility of Change. A being instantiating none of the roles is equivalent to ∅ ([§2.7.1](<2.7.1 Null State (∅).md>)): not a state in which nothing happens but not a coherent state at all.

> [!theorem]
> **Supernatural Preclusion** · **T8** · *Theorem 8 — preview; stated and proved at [§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>)*
>
> The classical theist's atemporal, aspatial, immaterial God — the being defined by the joint absence of T, S, and Φ — faces a specification burden. If the doctrine removes every differentiating feature and every determinate relation while retaining active divine predicates, the result is ∅-like: the predicates no longer state what they need to state. If it retains determinate grounding, cognition, or action relations, it reinstates the role-level structure it sought to deny. This section fixes the scope of the Trilemma Closure at [§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>): the theorem tests classical theism as a package of aseity, active predicates, and structural withdrawal across fundamental ontologies; it does not treat an unarticulated essence-prior posit as refuted merely by naming it. ([§2.6.5](<2.6.5 Mutual Containment.md>), [§2.6.6](<2.6.6 Modal Identity.md>), [§2.8.6](<2.8.6 Exclusivity of Nature.md>); statement and proof [§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>))

The structural diagnosis that drives the result attaches not at the level of *way* simpliciter but at the level of *possible*. The classical commitments are simplicity, *actus purus* (pure actuality: a being with no unrealized potential, nothing in it waiting to be made actual), and immutability. They converge on a single doctrinal claim: God has no alternative way to be; and a being with no alternative way to be is not a possible modal subject. The formal demonstration is carried at the chapter's close, where two lines reach ¬◇(classical theism intact): the no-way-possible argument takes the quickest road, on the assumption that God is a modal subject, and the Trilemma Closure at [§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>) (No Exit) reaches the same verdict without that assumption, by exhausting the theist's three responses. The present section states the result and fixes the framework-invariance and embedded-deity scope that closure draws on.

This is the chapter's foundational move at the level of the conjunction. What runs next, one attribute at a time, is the inversion at the level of the predicate. Take any classical attribute (creation, will, goodness, providence, revelation) and unpack what the predicate requires. A temporal creative episode requires succession; a directed reaching relation requires distinct terms; knowing requires a knower and determinate content. Classical accounts may construe creation and knowledge as one timeless act, leaving a relation and contingency burden rather than conceding succession in God. Each unpacking points back at Nature. The predicates are not waiting for the classical definition to land on them. They already contain the structure the classical definition denies. The inversion is internal to each attribute: the word the tradition reached for to say something contentful about God is already the word Nature permits.

The inversion runs farthest at the predicate that does not merely operate within the structure but purports to install it. *Create* requires a succession across which creation occurs and, before that, requires that whatever does the creating already instance the structure the creating is supposed to install. Whatever brings about possibility must already be possible, and what is already possible is already inside the structure that makes possibility a fact. It is not possible to create possibility. The constraint binds at two layers: at the level of the act, the act would have to perform what it claims to produce; at the level of the target, possibility is necessary ([§3.2.5](<3. Convergence.md>); *Intermediate Necessity*, [§2.3](<2.3 Necessary Possibility of Change.md>)), and what is necessary cannot have been contingent on a maker. Neither line can be repaired without sacrificing the other (see [§1.3](<1.3 Change.md>), where the constraint is registered against any candidate ground for the roles).

The theist who maintains the classical attributes alongside divine action faces a serious coherence burden: the account must explain how an immutable, non-spatial, immaterial subject bears determinate causal relations without importing creaturely modes. That is not yet a contradiction until the proposed analogical or timeless account is assessed. The apologetic that most relies on divine action (miracles, revelation, answered prayer, creation) is the apologetic that puts the classical attributes it invokes under the most direct strain. Every miracle is an event in Time, Space, and Substance. The classical attributes and the active God of religious practice stand in a well-known tension that requires a worked account of timeless action, relation, and responsive practice (Mullins, R. T., 2016).

*Framework invariance.* The preclusion holds across every fundamental ontology on offer, not naturalism alone.

Under physicalism, the structural roles are instantiated by physical fields and spacetime geometry; a being defined by the negation of physical structure is defined by the negation of what it was supposed to create.

Under idealism, the fundamental medium is mental, and the roles survive the relocation intact: any experience that unfolds requires succession (T), any experience that differentiates requires extension (S), and any experience that persists requires a substrate of continuity (Φ). Berkeley's God must perceive, and perception is a T/S/Φ event; the idealist renames Nature without eliminating the roles.

Under the Kantian transcendental framework, Time and Space are forms of intuition any cognitive act presupposes, and Strawson's reconstruction (*The Bounds of Sense* (P. F. Strawson, 1966); engaged in the Cartesian / transcendental change-witness treatment at [§2.4](<2.4 Structural Requirement.md>)) establishes that succession, coexistence, and persistence are conditions of self-conscious experience. The modal argument extends the Kant–Strawson line from the conditions of any possible experience to the conditions of any possible ground of experience.

Under panpsychism, the roles are instantiated twice (once in the physical exterior, once in the experiential interior) since proto-experiential combination requires a relational manifold, a succession, and a persistence medium all over again. The preclusion is not relaxed under the richer ontology. It is doubled.

Under ontic structural realism (Ladyman, J., and D. Ross, with D. Spurrett and J. Collier, 2007), structure is fundamental and what physicalism treats as bearers are nodes in the structural relations; the relocation does not remove the roles, since any structure must be individuable from another (S), must persist as the relation it is (Φ), and admits succession wherever it is dynamic (T); and where the structure is purely static, the static structure just is Nature under another name. This is where the henological worry presses hardest: if the roles are three, what makes them one ground rather than three coordinate relations — and must their unity not derive from a prior unity, the One beyond being from which structure emanates? The triad needs no such source, because it is not an aggregate. By the Triconditional Identity ([§2.6.10](<2.6.10 Triconditional Identity.md>)) Time, Space, and Substance are one Nature read three ways, not three ingredients awaiting an external unifier, so the unity a henological One is summoned to supply is already internal to the structural ground; and that One, placed beyond being and so beyond T, S, and Φ, is by the Modal Identity ([§2.6.6](<2.6.6 Modal Identity.md>)) equivalent to ∅ ([§2.7.1](<2.7.1 Null State (∅).md>)) and grounds nothing. The unity-priority reading is engaged on its own terms as a rival ultimate at [§5.3.2](<5.3.2 Neoplatonism.md>).

Under Russellian monism, the intrinsic categorical base of physical structure is phenomenal; the dual aspect specifies the first-person perspective on T, S, and Φ rather than escaping them.

Under analytic idealism (Kastrup, *The Idea of the World* (Bernardo Kastrup, 2019)), the cosmic mental field whose dissociated alters constitute individual minds is itself structured: dissociation requires distinguishable contents (S), persistence of the field across the dissociations (Φ), and temporal differentiation between the alters' arising and dissolution (T). The relocation does not eliminate the roles; it specifies them at the cosmic-mental level rather than the physical level.

Each framework locates T, S, and Φ in its own register. None of these frameworks removes the structural difficulty for the classical God.

*The embedded-deity concession.* The argument does not rule out every conceivable theology. Process theism, open theism, and some forms of panentheism posit a temporally embedded deity with genuine causal power operating within the structure; such a being instantiates T, S, and Φ and therefore does not collapse into ∅. Hartshorne's dipolar theism warrants naming as a distinct sub-position within this family: God's abstract pole (the necessary, eternal, essential nature) is held to be atemporal and immutable, while the concrete pole (God's actual, contingent states of experience and response) is held to be temporal, cumulative, and genuinely affected by creaturely events (*The Divine Relativity* (Charles Hartshorne, 1948); *Man's Vision of God* (Charles Hartshorne, 1941)). The abstract/concrete bifurcation is designed precisely to retain classical honors at the level of essence while accepting temporal embedding at the level of actuality. Whether a single subject can coherently sustain both poles under the structural constraints the chapter develops (and in particular whether the abstract pole, if genuinely atemporal and immutable, can stand in the act-relations the concrete pole requires) is the live question the relevant attribute sections (§[§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>), 6.3.2, 6.3.3, 6.3.4, 6.7.2, 6.7.4, 6.9.1) carry. What the argument does establish is that any such being incurs an aseity burden: its existing *from itself*, dependent on nothing outside itself for its being (Latin *a se*, 'from itself'); in classical theism the root divine attribute, the source of God's independence and necessity.

> [!corollary]
> **Aseity Forfeiture** · **R15** · *Result of T5*
>
> Any being that instantiates temporal, relational, and active roles escapes the ∅-like specification problem but incurs an aseity burden. A being embedded in structural conditions cannot straightforwardly be their independent ground; it must either be a configuration within Nature or articulate a revised account of aseity and dependence. The chapter records that cost rather than treating every revised theology as contradictory. An embedded deity cannot simply retain the classical project's claim to ground T, S, and Φ while depending on the roles required for its own action. Follows from the Triconditional Identity ([§2.6.10](<2.6.10 Triconditional Identity.md>)) and the structural analysis developed across this chapter.

Structure is ontologically prior to any being embedded within it, not temporally prior in the sense of preceding it in a sequence, but constitutively prior in the sense that it is the precondition of the embedded being's existence rather than the reverse.

If God is real, God is part of Reality; if God is part of Reality, God is inside structure, and a God redefined to instantiate the structural conditions is not the classical target but a configuration within Nature, subject to the same structural constraints as any other. The Spinozist or panentheist relabeling (the necessary structure is God rather than Nature) does not alter the result. It establishes, at most, that what is ultimate is necessary, all-encompassing, and explanatorily basic. The God of theism is supposed to be personal, agential, provident, and in some sense capable of care; the structure, as the argument establishes, is the necessary condition of all possible occupancy and exchange, not thereby a person, not thereby a center of concern, not thereby an object of worship. Re-labeling structure as God changes the word while conceding the substance. What survives is not classical theism repaired but theology thinned into a metaphysical honorific for Nature.

*The eternalist reply.* The answer aimed most directly at the temporal horn does not deny God's timelessness but reconciles it with real relations to time. Stump and Kretzmann ((Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981); developed in Stump's *Aquinas* (Stump, Eleonore, 2003)) posit *ET-simultaneity*, an eternal-temporal simultaneity on which God's single unextended eternal act is simultaneous, in the mode proper to eternity, with every temporal moment at once, so that God acts, knows, and answers without succession by standing in a simultaneity relation to each time from the standing present of eternity; Leftow (*Time and Eternity* (Leftow, Brian, 1991)) develops a kindred account on which temporal events are present within an eternal reference frame. The reply grants that acting requires a relation to time and claims to secure the relation without placing God in time. It relocates the difficulty rather than escaping it. A simultaneity relation is still a relation: it requires relata distinct from one another (S), it persists as the relation it is (Φ), and where a single act is simultaneous with a succession of moments the ordering of those moments is exactly what the act must answer to (T). An eternal present that genuinely stands in the ET-relation bears determinate relational roles and must explain their compatibility with simplicity and aseity. An eternal present that stands in no relation to temporal events cannot perform the explanatory work for which ET-simultaneity was introduced. And the deeper line does not wait on the temporal question at all: grant a coherent atemporal standing-present, and the eternal act is still one act with no alternative, actus purus with nothing unrealized, so its subject has no alternative way to be and is not a possible modal subject to begin with. ET-simultaneity, even if it worked, would show only how a timeless God might relate to time; it supplies none of the modal room the being lacks, answering the temporal horn while leaving the no-way-possible horn untouched.

*The subsistent-being reply.* The most resourceful classical answer refuses the framing the result rests on. On the Thomist account God is not a being among beings, one more item that either has or lacks the structural roles, but *ipsum esse subsistens*: the subsistent act of being itself, that by which everything else is, of which created time, space, and substance are analogical participations rather than constituents (Aquinas, *Summa Theologiae* (Aquinas, Thomas, (1265–1274) 1947), I.4.2; the analogy of being at I.13.5; pressed in the contemporary literature by Stump). On this reading the argument equivocates: to show that *a being* defined by the negation of T, S, and Φ collapses into ∅ is not yet to touch *Being Itself*, which is not defined by negating the roles but is said to stand beneath them as their ground, and to which "lacks succession," "lacks distinction," and "lacks a bearer" apply only in the deficient, creaturely sense the analogy was built to displace. This is the deepest version of the reply, and it cannot be dismissed as mere relabeling. Analogical predication is not free; it requires a *ratio* the analogates share, and the chapter has already fixed what that *ratio* would have to be: a *way to be* ([§3.2.5](<3. Convergence.md>)). Either the subsistent act of being grounds T, S, and Φ by standing in some real relation to them: sustaining, knowing, or causing. On that horn, it exercises succession, distinction, and bearing, and thereby instantiates Time, Space, and Substance in type rather than merely at the level of the bare roles (the role-to-type upgrade is earned at [§3.5.3](<3. Convergence.md>), on the realizer biconditionals whose anti-Finean necessity is discharged at [§4.1.10](<4.1.10 The Source of Possibility.md>)). It escapes ∅ only by forfeiting the aseity the doctrine exists to secure (Aseity Forfeiture, above). Or it stands in no such relation, exercises no act, and is the subsistent act of being with no way to be. That is not the plenitude of being opposed to nothing; it is the exact content the Co-instantiation Result ([§2.6.5](<2.6.5 Mutual Containment.md>)) and the Modal Identity ([§2.6.6](<2.6.6 Modal Identity.md>)) identify with ∅, precluded by Exclusivity of Nature ([§2.8.6](<2.8.6 Exclusivity of Nature.md>)). The analogy cannot span the gap, because there is no way-to-be on the far side for it to reach; "Being Itself" purged of T, S, and Φ does not name a higher mode of the roles but the very absence the no-way-possible argument already closes (the analogical-predication escape is met at [§5.2.1](<5.2.1 Divine Simplicity.md>)). *Ipsum esse subsistens* is therefore not an exception to the preclusion but its sharpest instance: the one candidate that most explicitly tries to be wholly real while standing outside every condition of being a possible subject at all.

> [!info]
> **Natural worry.** The sharpest reply: God isn't a being that *lacks* time, space, and substance—God is *Being Itself*, the ground beneath them, so saying he 'lacks succession' misfires like asking what a color weighs. The answer turns on one demand: words about God earn real content only if they track something on God's side. So ask whether Being Itself stands in any real relation to the world—sustaining, knowing, causing. If it does, it exercises succession, distinction, and persistence, and so instantiates the very structure it was meant to stand above. If it doesn't, it connects to nothing and is indistinguishable from nothing at all. There's no third place to stand.

The preclusion is not a contingent fact about how the argument defines its terms; it is a necessary consequence, established at the level of the conditions of Change (Chapter 2), of what any possible medium must be. The framework survey above is eliminative confirmation, not the ground of the result, and the ground is exhaustive in a way no survey could be. The Chapter 2 derivation does not enumerate the fundamental ontologies on offer and eliminate them one by one; it derives T, S, and Φ from the conditions of Change as such, from what it is for anything to be possible rather than ∅ ([§2.6.5](<2.6.5 Mutual Containment.md>), [§2.6.6](<2.6.6 Modal Identity.md>), [§2.8.6](<2.8.6 Exclusivity of Nature.md>)). A genuinely novel fourth ontology is therefore not an unsurveyed gap in a list but an already-decided case: whatever it nominated as fundamental would still have to make room for the possibility of Change, and to make room for the possibility of Change is to instantiate the three roles. The survey illustrates the result for the live contenders; the derivation secures it for any contender there could be.

Perfect-being theology functions as the methodological engine producing the attributes the chapter examines (Thomas V. Morris, 1991); (Mark C. Murphy, 2017); the chapter examines the produced attributes rather than the engine. Whether the maxima compose coherently into a single being is taken up at [§6.2.4](<6.2.4 Perfection.md>) (Is God Perfect?) and the cumulative case closes at [§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>) (Does God Exist?). Swinburne's theistic personalism (God as everlasting rather than timeless, simple in a methodological rather than ontological sense, personal in the agent-causal sense) is the leading analytic alternative to classical theism and does not map cleanly onto either the classical or the embedded-deity options as characterized above: it rejects strict atemporality and strong Thomistic simplicity while retaining aseity, necessity, and omnipotence (*The Coherence of Theism* (Richard Swinburne, 1977); *The Existence of God* (Richard Swinburne, 1979); (Richard Swinburne, 2004)). Its everlasting God is temporally embedded enough to instantiate T and, by Co-instantiation ([§2.6.5](<2.6.5 Mutual Containment.md>)), the rest, so the Aseity Forfeiture result reaches it as well: the aseity it claims to keep is exactly what the result places in question. The chapter tests theistic personalism alongside classical theism at each attribute and includes it in the three-horn disjunction at [§6.10](<6.10 No Exit.md>).


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← [6. Relocating Greatness](<6. Relocating Greatness.md>) | [6.2 Constitution](<6.2 Constitution.md>) →
