Necessary Existence Without Modal Axioms

The modern arguments for a necessary being pay in advance. Pruss and Rasmussen pay with the modal system S5 and a causal principle. Leibniz and his heirs pay with a principle of sufficient reason. Leftow pays with a theory of modality grounded in God. Their critics pay too: Oppy with a brute or necessary natural state, the metaphysical nihilist with a modal theory on which an empty world is possible, Maitzen with the dissolution of the question. An eliminative chain of 137 resolutions reaches what the debate calls a necessary being from one observation, that non-being requires being (R.1), with no modal axiom, no principle of sufficient reason, no explanatory principle, and no theory of modality. What “nothing” designates cannot be (R.2), so being has no alternative. Possibility cannot be limited (R.4). Being comes into being by neither necessity nor randomness, and the survivor, choice, loses its “not” and is Will (R.10, R.11). Will is neither externally justified nor without basis (R.12): the two horns the debate has argued between, sufficient reason and brute fact, both empty. The first actualisation from unlimited possibility is necessarily full (R.42), which answers the naturalist’s necessary initial state and says what the modest arguments leave unsaid. The chain has no notion of necessity. What the debate calls necessary existence is, on the chain, what remains when every alternative requires what cannot be. The chain: Anything Willing Is, DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19538257.