The Floor Beneath the Floor
Why the best secular case for self-sustaining existence still can’t explain what holds it up
There’s a move in contemporary philosophy of religion that, frankly, deserves more credit than it usually gets from theists. It comes from philosopher Joseph Schmid, and it goes like this: maybe things just keep existing on their own. No divine sustainer required. Objects persist unless something knocks them out of existence. Call it existential inertia.
Schmid (together with co-author Daniel Linford) has built what is probably the most careful version of this idea ever published. Their book, Existential Inertia and Classical Theistic Proofs, takes on seven classical arguments for God’s existence and argues that existential inertia undercuts all of them. The work is precise, technically sophisticated, and (this part matters) genuinely engages the strongest theistic responses available.
Most of the theistic replies so far have come from Thomists: scholars working within the Aristotelian tradition of act and potency, essence and esse, real distinction and composition. These are serious thinkers making serious arguments. Ed Feser, Gaven Kerr, Joseph Boczar, Tyler McNabb. But Schmid has a clean counter to all of them: “You’re arguing from your metaphysical framework. I don’t share it. The burden is on you to show me why I should.”
And he’s right. If the only reason to reject existential inertia is that Thomistic metaphysics says so, then anyone who isn’t already a Thomist can walk away. That’s not a flaw in the Thomistic arguments, exactly. But it is a limitation.
So I tried a different approach. One that doesn’t rely on Thomism at all.
The question I pressed is simple: what is Schmid assuming when he formulates existential inertia?
Take his formal statement of the thesis. He says it’s necessarily true that concrete objects persist in existence without requiring a sustaining cause. Unpack that and three things fall out immediately.
First, he’s using a necessity operator. He’s claiming this holds in all possible worlds. That means necessity is a real modal category with genuine authority over what can be the case.
Second, he’s asserting identity across time. The object at t₁ is the same object at t₂. That’s the law of identity doing real work across temporal intervals.
Third, he’s invoking excluded middle on persistence. At any moment, an object either exists or doesn’t. There’s no third option.
These aren’t decorative. They’re load-bearing. Remove any one of them and the thesis can’t even be stated, let alone defended. And they correspond precisely to the three fundamental laws of logic: identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle (what I call the L₃ in my formal work).
Here’s where it gets interesting. Schmid never asks what grounds the L₃. He never asks why these laws hold invariantly across the very temporal intervals in which his inertial objects are supposedly persisting on their own. He just takes them for granted and asks the persistence question.
But the grounding question is prior to the persistence question. You can’t even ask whether objects persist without presupposing that identity holds across time. You can’t formulate a necessary truth without presupposing that necessity is a genuine feature of reality. You can’t argue for existential inertia using deduction without presupposing that valid inference is necessarily truth-preserving. Every step of Schmid’s reasoning rides on a structure he never examines.
Now, someone could say: “Logical laws are trivially satisfied. They’re background conditions. They don’t need grounding.”
This is where my work in Logic Realism Theory becomes relevant. The L₃ isn’t inert background. Treated as a boundary condition on what can be physically instantiated, it generates substantive structural consequences. It derives the Born rule (through Gleason’s theorem via vehicle-invariance). It selects complex Hilbert space over real alternatives, a prediction that was experimentally confirmed by Renou et al. in Nature in 2021. It constrains the Tsirelson bound on quantum correlations.
If L₃ were just a passive truism, it couldn’t derive anything. The fact that it does real structural work in physics means it’s an active boundary condition. And active boundary conditions need grounding.
Schmid’s strongest move here is his no-change account: persistence involves no change, what involves no change requires no cause, so persistence requires no cause. Clean and elegant. But notice what it assumes: that an object’s identity is maintained across the temporal interval without anything maintaining it. If L₃ is an active constraint (separating what can be instantiated from the vastly larger space of what can merely be represented), then the continued L₃-admissibility of a persisting object is an ongoing state of affairs, not a free given. The question isn’t whether anything changed. The question is whether something is being enforced.
Schmid’s deepest metaphysical account treats existential inertia as a primitive necessity, analogous to mathematical truths. But this is where the Necessity Argument (developed at length in my monograph) closes the escape route.
If EIT is necessarily true, then reality includes at least one non-contingent metaphysical feature: the necessary persistence of temporal concrete objects without external sustenance. That feature doesn’t supervene on contingent physical facts. It holds in all possible worlds. It constrains what can be the case.
What grounds it?
“It’s primitive” is a label for the refusal to answer, not an answer. And the refusal is self-undermining. Arguing for primitivism about necessity using inference rules whose reliability you take to be necessary already manifests the very structure you’re declaring needs no ground. The defense of the position relies on resources the position refuses to account for.
I want to be clear about what this argument does and doesn’t do.
It doesn’t replace the Thomistic responses. A Thomist who finds the grounding question compelling can plug in esse as the answer: God as ipsum esse subsistens grounds logical necessity because the L₃ reflects the rational structure of the divine nature. The argument gives Thomistic replies a prior tier to occupy.
It doesn’t require you to accept any particular theology. The Necessity Argument is strictly negative: it shows what naturalism cannot do (ground the necessity it presupposes), not what positive account must replace it.
And it doesn’t claim Schmid’s work is sloppy or dishonest. It’s neither. It’s a careful, rigorous philosophical project that operates entirely downstream of a question it never asks.
That’s the point. Existential inertia isn’t resting on bedrock. It’s resting on a floor. And nobody’s checked what holds the floor up.
The full paper, “Existential Inertia and the Grounding Problem for Logical Necessity: A Response to Schmid and Linford from Logic Realism,” is available on Zenodo: DOI 10.5281/zenodo.18733002
It draws on two prior works:
Logic Realism Theory: Physical Foundations from Logical Constraints (position paper)
The Necessity Argument Against Naturalism (monograph)