The Naturalist Trilemma: Necessity, Rationality, and Reliability
Abstract
Metaphysical naturalism faces a trilemma concerning the preconditions of rational thought. The naturalist who wishes to reason must account for three things: the necessary truths that valid inference presupposes, the entry of logical grounds into the causal order as reasons for belief, and the reliability of cognitive faculties shaped by natural selection. Each challenge generates a distinct argument: the Necessity Argument Against Naturalism (NAAN), the Argument from Reason (AFR), and the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). These are not independent objections but a cumulative, ordered challenge. NAAN functions as a gate: until the naturalist accounts for necessity, she cannot proceed to the further questions. AFR is intermediate: granting validity, it asks how reasons can be causes. EAAN is downstream: granting both, it asks whether evolution provides grounds for confidence. The naturalist cannot escape by answering one challenge; she must answer all three coherently within a naturalist framework. This paper argues that patchwork responses fail because pressure relieved at one point reappears at another, and that the “brute necessity” escape is no escape at all. Mind-first metaphysics resolves the trilemma by grounding necessity, rationality, and reliability in a single explanatory principle.
Keywords: naturalism, necessity, argument from reason, evolutionary argument against naturalism, self-defeat, philosophy of mind
1. Introduction
The naturalist wishes to reason her way to naturalism. She observes the success of natural science, notes the absence of compelling evidence for supernatural entities, and concludes that physical reality is all there is. The reasoning seems straightforward.
But reasoning has preconditions. Valid inference presupposes necessary truth: if the premises are true, the conclusion mustbe true. Rational belief presupposes that logical grounds can function as causes: we believe the conclusion because it follows from the premises. Trustworthy cognition presupposes reliability: our faculties must track truth, not merely produce survival-enhancing outputs.
Each precondition generates a challenge for naturalism. Each challenge has been developed into a distinct philosophical argument. What has not been sufficiently recognized is that these arguments form a unified trilemma: a three-part challenge with cumulative and ordered force.
The three challenges are:
Necessity: What grounds the necessary truths that valid inference presupposes? This generates the Necessity Argument (NAAN).
Rationality: How do logical grounds enter the causal order as reasons for belief? This generates the Argument from Reason (AFR).
Reliability: Why trust that evolved faculties track truth rather than mere survival? This generates the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN).
The trilemma is not a rhetorical flourish. It identifies three genuinely distinct problems that the naturalist must solve simultaneously. And the solutions must cohere: an escape from one challenge that creates pressure on another is no escape at all.
2. The First Gate: Necessity
2.1 The Problem
Valid deductive inference is necessarily truth-preserving. The “necessarily” is not optional. Deductive validity is not “this always works so far” but “this cannot fail if the premises are true.” If the relation between premises and conclusion were merely contingent (true in this universe, perhaps false in others), then validity would be a local regularity rather than a logical constraint. We could not distinguish valid from invalid arguments; we could only note which inferences happen to preserve truth around here.
Necessary truth is therefore not a philosopher’s luxury. It is the precondition of reasoning as such. Any serious use of deduction presupposes genuine necessity: some ways things cannot be, full stop. Without it, there is no difference between following an argument and being caused to utter its conclusion.
This is why NAAN functions as a gate rather than merely a horn. A gate is something you must pass through before proceeding. Until the naturalist can get from her ontology to real, grounded necessity, she does not have what “valid inference” claims to be. The further questions (AFR, EAAN) cannot even arise until this one is settled.
2.2 The Naturalist Bind
A clarification on terms: by “metaphysical naturalism” I mean the thesis that reality is exhaustively constituted by contingent physical facts. No non-contingent features of being exist. This is stronger than a vague commitment to “following science” or “rejecting the supernatural.” It is a specific ontological claim: the distribution of matter and energy in spacetime is the ultimate ground of everything else, and that distribution is thoroughly contingent.
This strong reading is the target because it is the reading that generates the conflict with necessity. Softer versions of naturalism that admit non-contingent features (abstract objects, modal structures, necessary laws) have already crossed the gate, whatever they call themselves.
On this construal, necessary truths do not supervene on contingent arrangements. The law of non-contradiction does not depend on how particles happen to be configured; it constrains what configurations are possible.
The naturalist appears to have three options:
Option 1: Deny that logical truths are necessary. They are just very general contingent regularities. Cost: self-defeat. The denial must be offered as true. If it is necessarily true, it refutes itself. If it is contingently true, it fails to exclude necessary truths and provides no reason to accept it.
Option 2: Accept necessary truths as brute facts. They exist, but there is no explanation for them; they just are.
Option 3: Ground necessary truths in abstract objects or modal structures. Numbers, propositions, and possible-world structures exist and are the truthmakers for necessary claims.
Options 2 and 3 require closer examination, because they represent the sophisticated naturalist’s likely retreat.
2.3 The Brute Necessity Illusion
Option 2 is popular because it seems to preserve naturalism while acknowledging logical constraint. The naturalist says: “Yes, logical laws hold necessarily. But that’s just a brute fact. There is no further explanation.”
This move fails because “brute necessity” is not a third category between contingent and necessary. It is necessity under a pseudonym.
A fact that (i) has no dependence on contingent arrangements and (ii) could not have been otherwise is a necessary, non-contingent fact. Calling it “brute” does not change its modal status; it only indicates a refusal to explain it. The naturalist who invokes brute necessity has smuggled in exactly what her ontology was supposed to exclude.
The dialectic exposes itself:
Naturalist: “All facts supervene on contingent physical arrangements.”
Challenge: “What about logical necessity?”
Naturalist: “That’s brute. It has no further explanation.”
Reply: “A fact that cannot be otherwise and does not depend on contingent arrangements is a necessary, non-contingent fact. You have admitted necessary non-contingent reality while calling it something else.”
“Brute” is not an escape from necessity; it is a refusal to explain necessity while still helping yourself to it. The naturalist who takes this exit has crossed the gate. She has admitted that reality contains non-contingent features. She just will not say so.
This matters because bruteness at the level of logic is uniquely corrosive. Brute facts about contingent matters (why this particle rather than that one?) are philosophically tolerable. Brute facts about the conditions of intelligibility are not. If the impossibility of contradiction is “just how it is” with no further ground, then the most fundamental norms of thought are arbitrary. Reason becomes grounded in nothing. The naturalist who accepts brute logical necessity has not explained logic; she has declared it inexplicable while continuing to use it.
2.4 The Abstract Grounding Escape
Option 3 attempts to ground necessity in abstract objects or modal structures: a realm of numbers, propositions, possible-world structures, or logical forms that exists independently and serves as the truthmaker for necessary claims.
This option has more philosophical substance, but it abandons naturalism. If non-physical, non-contingent entities are real and explanatorily basic, then physical reality is not all there is. The naturalist who takes this route has conceded the central point: she now affirms a realm of necessary being that transcends the contingent physical order.
She may call herself a “liberal naturalist” or a “modal naturalist,” but the label obscures the concession. The original thesis was that physical reality exhausts what exists. That thesis is now abandoned.
2.5 Crossing the Gate
Once NAAN is on the table, the naturalist faces a forced choice:
Either deny that deduction really involves necessity (and so abandon the very tool used to argue), or
Reject contingency-only metaphysics and admit necessary non-contingent reality to ground logic.
There is no third option. “Brute necessity” collapses into the second. The naturalist who wishes to reason has already crossed the gate; the only question is whether she admits it.
Crossing the gate means affirming: there exists something about reality that is not merely contingently the case, but mustbe the case. This is the ontological home for genuine necessity.
At that point, a further question arises: what kind of necessary non-contingent reality can actually ground the logic we use?
2.6 Beyond the Gate: Impersonal vs. Personal Necessity
Once necessity is admitted, two broad options present themselves.
Option A: Impersonal necessary structure. The necessary non-contingent base is impersonal: a realm of abstract logical or mathematical facts, a necessary modal framework, a structure of possible worlds. Logic is “just how” that necessary structure is. Our inferences are correct when they match it.
Option B: Personal rational necessity. The necessary non-contingent base is personal and rational: a necessarily existing mind whose nature is Logos. Logic flows from that mind’s rational nature. Contradictions are impossible because they conflict with what perfect reason is like.
Option A can contain logical relations, but it struggles to explain three things:
Why those relations obtain. An impersonal structure does not do anything; it just is. There is no “because.”
Why they have normative authority. Why should our reasoning conform to this structure? What makes it binding rather than merely descriptive?
Why finite thinkers exist who can grasp them. The structure is silent on why there should be minds at all, let alone minds that mirror its relations.
Option A relocates bruteness rather than eliminating it. “There just is this necessary structure” is no more explanatory than “logic is just brute.”
Option B, by contrast, offers a unified explanation:
Existence of logic: Logical laws express divine reason. They obtain because God’s nature is rational.
Normativity of logic: Logical laws are binding because they express the character of the ultimate rational authority over reality.
Accessibility of logic: The same mind that grounds logic creates a world ordered by that rationality and designs finite knowers in its image to recognize and track that order.
On this view, necessary non-contingency does more than passively contain logical facts; it explains why they obtain, why they bind, and why we can know them.
The choice beyond the gate is not forced by NAAN alone. One could accept impersonal necessary structure and stop there. But the explanatory advantages of Option B become relevant when the full trilemma is in view. As the following sections will show, only a necessarily rational mind can simultaneously account for the existence of logical relations (NAAN), the entry of reasons into the causal order (AFR), and the reliability of our cognitive faculties (EAAN). The choice made at the gate reverberates through everything downstream.
3. The Second Challenge: Rationality
3.1 The Problem
Grant, for the sake of argument, that necessary truths exist and that valid inference is possible. A further question arises: how do logical grounds function as causes of belief?
When I believe the conclusion of a valid argument because it follows from premises I accept, my belief has two aspects. It is a psychological event (a brain state with causal antecedents and effects). It is also a rational commitment (held for reasons, subject to logical assessment). The question is how these aspects relate.
3.2 The Naturalist Bind
C.S. Lewis identified the problem with characteristic clarity. He distinguished cause-effect relations (one brain state producing another) from ground-consequent relations (one proposition entailing another). Neural events have causes. Valid inferences have grounds. “Even if grounds do exist, what exactly have they got to do with the actual occurrence of the belief as a psychological event?” (Lewis 1960, p. 25).
The naturalist must either reduce grounds to causes or accept that something other than physical causation is operative in rational thought. The first option makes validity illusory: if my belief that Q is fully explained by neural events with no remainder, then the fact that Q follows from P is explanatorily idle. I would have believed Q regardless of whether the inference was valid. The second option admits that rational causation is irreducible to physical causation, which strains the naturalist framework.
Victor Reppert has developed this line of argument extensively, showing that naturalism faces a dilemma: either mental states are not causally efficacious (epiphenomenalism), or they are causally efficacious but not in virtue of their rational properties (which makes their rationality irrelevant to explanation). Neither option preserves the picture of ourselves as believers whose beliefs are held for reasons (Reppert 2003, 2009).
The Argument from Reason does not depend on the Necessity Argument’s conclusions, but it presupposes them. If there were no necessary truths, there would be no ground-consequent relations to worry about. The AFR asks: granting that such relations exist, how can they enter the causal order? The naturalist who crosses the first gate by accepting necessary truths immediately faces the second challenge.
4. The Third Challenge: Reliability
4.1 The Problem
Grant, for the sake of argument, that necessary truths exist and that logical grounds can function as causes of belief. A further question arises: are our cognitive faculties reliable? Do they produce true beliefs, or merely useful ones?
This question might seem empirical. We test our beliefs against evidence, correct errors, and converge on truth over time. But the skeptical challenge runs deeper: what reason do we have to trust the faculties doing the testing?
4.2 The Naturalist Bind
Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism presses this challenge. If naturalism is true, our cognitive faculties are products of natural selection. Selection favors traits that enhance reproductive success. It does not directly favor truth.
The connection between true belief and adaptive behavior is looser than often assumed. The belief “tigers are dangerous” and the belief “tigers are sacred beings requiring propitiation by flight” may produce identical behavior. Natural selection cannot distinguish them. More generally, for any adaptive behavior, multiple belief-desire combinations could produce it, only some of which involve true beliefs.
Plantinga argues that P(R|N&E), the probability that our cognitive faculties are reliable given naturalism and evolution, is either low or inscrutable. If so, the naturalist has a defeater for any belief produced by those faculties, including the belief in naturalism itself. The position is self-undermining: it removes the epistemic ground on which it stands (Plantinga 1993, ch. 12; 2011, chs. 10-12).
The EAAN has been contested. Fitelson and Sober (2007) challenge Plantinga’s probability assessments. The debate continues. But notice the dialectical structure: the EAAN presupposes that valid inference exists and that grounds can function as causes. It then asks whether, given the evolutionary origin of our faculties, we have reason to trust the outputs. The naturalist who answers the first two challenges still faces the third.
One common response appeals to the empirical success of science: our faculties must be reliable because they have produced successful theories. But this is circular under the defeater hypothesis. If EAAN supplies a defeater for trusting our faculties, we cannot use those same faculties to vindicate themselves. The success of science is judged by faculties whose reliability is precisely what is in question.
5. The Logical Order
The three arguments form a dependency hierarchy.
NAAN is foundational. Without necessary truth, there is no deductive validity. Without deductive validity, there are no ground-consequent relations to distinguish from cause-effect relations. Without such relations, the AFR cannot even be formulated. And without validity, there is no “reliability” to assess: reliability is fidelity to truth, and truth in inference presupposes necessary connection. This is why NAAN functions as a gate: you cannot proceed until you have passed through.
AFR is intermediate. It grants the apparatus of valid inference (thus presupposing NAAN’s domain) and asks how that apparatus can be causally operative in a physical world. It does not yet ask whether the faculties employing that apparatus are trustworthy; it asks how reasons can be causes at all.
EAAN is downstream. It grants both validity and rational causation (thus presupposing NAAN and AFR) and asks whether the specific mechanism of natural selection provides grounds for confidence in the outputs. It is a challenge about origins, not about the existence of rational norms.
This ordering matters. A naturalist who focuses on rebutting the EAAN while ignoring the AFR and NAAN has not addressed the deeper problems. Even if Plantinga’s probability arguments were successfully countered, Lewis’s challenge about rational causation would remain. And even if that challenge were met, the question of what grounds necessary truth would persist.
The trilemma is cumulative. Each challenge must be addressed, and the solutions must cohere.
6. Why Patchwork Fails
The naturalist might attempt piecemeal responses: one move for necessity, another for rationality, another for reliability. The problem is that these moves tend to create pressure elsewhere.
Example 1: Modal realism for necessity. The naturalist might adopt David Lewis’s modal realism, treating possible worlds as concrete existing universes. This grounds necessary truths in the structure of all worlds. But modal realism inflates ontology dramatically and raises its own questions about how we have epistemic access to other worlds. More importantly, concrete possible worlds are still contingent existents; why is their structure necessary rather than otherwise? The problem recurs.
Example 2: Non-reductive physicalism for rationality. The naturalist might claim that mental properties are real but supervene on physical properties without being reducible to them. This preserves the causal efficacy of mental states. But supervenient properties inherit their causal powers from their base properties. If the base is purely physical, the rational properties are epiphenomenal after all: they don’t add causal power. If they do add causal power, we have abandoned the thesis that the physical is causally closed.
Example 3: Reliabilism for reliability. The naturalist might argue that reliable processes produce knowledge regardless of whether we can justify their reliability in a non-circular way. But this response does not address the EAAN’s core challenge: whether evolutionary origins give us reason to think our processes are reliable. Reliabilism says reliability is sufficient for knowledge; it does not establish that we have reliability.
Example 4: Necessity supervenes on the physical. A sophisticated naturalist might claim that necessary truths supervene on the complete physical-plus-structural facts; modality is a high-level feature of the world’s structure. But if the base is wholly contingent, any supervenient feature is also contingent in being. That yields at best: “given this world’s structure, these inferences always hold.” It does not yield: “they could not fail in any possible situation.” Supervenience on a contingent base produces sophisticated regularity, not strict necessity.
The pattern is consistent. Local fixes either fail to solve the local problem or create pressure on the other challenges. The trilemma resists patchwork resolution.
6.1 Why Sophistication Doesn’t Help
The technical apparatus of contemporary philosophy of modality can obscure a simple point. There are only two options:
Contingency all the way down. Logic is regularity or convention. No necessity, no validity, no binding inference. This is coherent but self-defeating.
Necessity admitted. Non-contingent reality is real. The naturalist has crossed the gate, whatever she calls herself afterward.
Every sophisticated intermediate position oscillates between these options without settling on either. “Modal naturalism” sounds like a third way; it is not. “Brute necessity” sounds like accepting necessity without metaphysical cost; it does not. “Supervenience-based modality” sounds like grounding necessity in the physical; it cannot. “Deflationary accounts” sound like avoiding the question; they presuppose what they deny.
Consider what each move claims and what it actually delivers. Brute necessity claims necessity without explanation; it delivers necessity admitted under a pseudonym. Modal naturalism claims necessity within naturalism; it delivers non-contingent reality, which means it is no longer naturalism. Supervenience claims necessity grounded in the physical; it delivers contingent regularity, not necessity. Deflationary modality claims necessity is just talk; it is self-refuting, since the claim itself presupposes the exclusion of impossible states.
Each move either fails to deliver necessity (and so loses validity) or delivers necessity (and so abandons naturalism). The sophistication is real. The escape is not.
The taxonomy here is deliberately coarse-grained. The point is not to deny finer modal distinctions (metaphysical vs. logical necessity, global vs. local supervenience, various grades of deflationism). It is to insist that at the level of being itself, there are only two live stances: contingency-only or contingency-plus-necessity. The technical refinements matter for other purposes; they do not open a third option on this question.
The same dilemma applies to any position that claims to ground necessity in some feature of the natural world: dispositional essences, Aristotelian forms, emergent structures, or any other candidate. Ask of the proposed ground: is it contingent or necessary? If contingent, it cannot yield necessity; the most it produces is regularity within this world. If necessary, then you have admitted non-contingent reality, and the question becomes what grounds that. The gate cannot be circumvented by relabeling what lies beyond it.
This matters because piecemeal evaluation, the standard mode of journal literature, tends to miss the incoherence. A referee asks: “Is modal naturalism a defensible position on modality?” Perhaps, considered in isolation. But the relevant question is: “Does this position cohere with naturalism while grounding the necessity that valid inference requires?” That question demands holding the whole picture in view. The trilemma framing forces exactly that.
The naturalist may respond with further technical refinements. But refinement within an incoherent framework is not progress. It is epicycles. The orbit still does not close. At some point, the question must be faced directly: which side of the gate are you on?
Sophisticated evasion is still evasion. The trilemma does not ask the naturalist to engage with every nuance of contemporary modal metaphysics. It asks her to answer a binary question: contingency only, or necessity admitted? Everything else is delay.
7. The Mind-First Resolution
Mind-first metaphysics resolves the trilemma by answering all three challenges from a single principle: rational mind is ontologically fundamental.
Necessity: If a rational mind grounds reality, necessary truths are features of that mind’s rational nature. The laws of logic are not cosmic accidents; they reflect the structure of the Logos. Necessity is grounded, not brute; non-physical, not contingent on material arrangements. The impossibility of contradiction follows from what perfect reason is like.
Rationality: If minds are fundamental rather than derivative, the relation between grounds and causes is not a mystery to be solved but a feature of basic reality. Reasons can be causes because causation in the relevant sense (personal agency, rational action) is the paradigm case, not an anomaly requiring reduction.
Reliability: If our cognitive faculties are designed by a rational mind that intends us to know truth, their reliability is not an accident of selection pressure but a feature of their origin. We can trust our faculties because they were made by one who values truth and made us to grasp it.
The resolution is unified. A single ontological commitment (mind is fundamental) generates solutions to all three challenges without creating pressure elsewhere. This is the mark of a good explanation: it unifies diverse phenomena under a common principle.
8. Objections and Replies
8.1 “This assumes theism”
The argument does not assume theism; it concludes that mind-first metaphysics best resolves the trilemma. Theism is one form of mind-first metaphysics. Others exist: panpsychism, Russellian monism, absolute idealism. These share the crucial commitment that mind is not derivative from mindless matter. They differ on the nature and extent of fundamental mind.
The trilemma challenges strict physicalist naturalism. Any mind-first view escapes the trilemma’s force. The choice among mind-first alternatives is a further question, though the explanatory advantages noted in Section 2.6 favor a personal rational mind over impersonal structure.
8.2 “Every view has brute facts; naturalism is not uniquely bad”
All worldviews have explanatory termini. The question is where bruteness lands.
Brute facts about contingent matters (why this particle configuration rather than another?) are philosophically tolerable. Brute facts about the conditions of intelligibility are not. If the impossibility of contradiction is “just how it is” with no further ground, then the most fundamental norms of thought are arbitrary. Reason becomes grounded in nothing.
More fundamentally, as argued in Section 2.3, “brute necessity” is not really brute at all. A fact that holds without dependence and could not have been otherwise is a necessary fact. Calling it “brute” indicates a refusal to explain it, not an escape from necessity. The naturalist who takes this route has admitted non-contingent reality; she has merely declined to say what grounds it.
On the theistic alternative, logical necessity is grounded in the nature of a necessary rational mind. The impossibility of contradiction follows from what perfect reason is like. This is an explanatory origin for logic, not a naked terminus.
8.3 “Necessity is just about our practices, not metaphysics”
A deflationary naturalist might claim that “must,” “cannot,” and “necessary” only codify our reasoning norms and linguistic practices; they don’t require heavyweight metaphysical necessity.
To deny metaphysical necessity in a meaningful way, however, you must still exclude some states of affairs as impossible (e.g., “it cannot be both true and false that necessity exists”). That act of exclusion already presupposes a real, though perhaps thin, sense of impossibility. If the denial does not exclude anything, it fails to function as a denial; it becomes contentless.
Even attempts to deflate necessity end up relying on the very modal structure they profess to avoid.
8.4 “Impersonal necessary structure is enough; a mind adds unnecessary baggage”
Once you admit necessary non-contingent structure, why posit a mind? A realm of necessary logical or mathematical facts seems sufficient.
An impersonal structure can say what logical relations there are. It cannot say why they obtain, why they have authority, or why finite minds should exist that track them. It relocates the brute-fact problem: “there just is this necessary structure, and that’s that.”
A necessary rational mind gives a unified explanation of the existence of logical laws (they express divine reason), their normativity (they come from the ultimate rational authority), and our rationality (we are created in that image). Given that the gate has already forced some necessary non-contingent ground, the personal option has greater explanatory power with respect to logic and our use of it.
8.5 “You’re assuming a strong Principle of Sufficient Reason”
NAAN does rely on a methodological norm: explanation should not terminate arbitrarily, especially not at the principles that make explanation possible.
This is not a demand that every fact have an explanation. It is a demand that logic not be where explanation gives out. If someone relaxes the norm exactly at logic (”there is no reason why logic holds”), she concedes that the conditions of intelligibility are groundless. At that point, there is no deeper justification for trusting reason over non-reason.
The choice is stark: either accept a norm strong enough to demand a ground for logical necessity, or accept that your commitment to logic is, at bottom, unsupported. NAAN urges that the former is more consistent with how we actually treat reasoning. We do not shrug at the question “why is contradiction impossible?” We expect an answer.
8.6 “Naturalists have responses to each argument”
They do. The literature is extensive. But the trilemma framing shifts the burden. It is not enough to have a response to each challenge; the responses must cohere within a naturalist framework, and they must not create pressure elsewhere.
The objection also misses the cumulative force. Even if each response has, say, a 50% chance of success, the probability of all three succeeding jointly is 12.5%. The trilemma’s power lies in its combined demands.
8.7 “The EAAN has been refuted”
Perhaps. The EAAN is the most contested of the three arguments. But even granting its refutation, the trilemma retains two challenges. The naturalist must still account for necessity and rationality. Plantinga’s argument is downstream; its fate does not affect the foundational problems.
9. Conclusion
The naturalist who wishes to reason faces a trilemma. She must account for the necessary truths that valid inference presupposes (NAAN). She must explain how logical grounds can function as causes of belief (AFR). She must justify confidence in the reliability of evolved cognitive faculties (EAAN).
These challenges are not independent. They form a cumulative, ordered structure. NAAN functions as a gate; AFR presupposes it; EAAN presupposes both. The naturalist cannot escape by answering one challenge while ignoring the others. And patchwork responses fail: local fixes create pressure elsewhere. The “brute necessity” escape is no escape at all; it is necessity admitted under a different name.
Mind-first metaphysics resolves the trilemma. If rational mind is fundamental, necessary truths are grounded in its nature, reasons can be causes without mystery, and reliability follows from design. One principle answers all three challenges.
The naturalist may resist this conclusion. She may continue to seek a coherent, unified response that preserves her core commitments. The trilemma does not render that project impossible; it renders it difficult. And difficulty is itself a datum. When one position requires multiple independent escapes from converging challenges, and another answers those challenges from a single principle, the explanatory advantage lies with the latter.
The burden has shifted. The naturalist must now explain not just how she answers each challenge, but how her answers cohere, and why we should prefer her fragmented response to a unified alternative.
References
Fitelson, B. & Sober, E. (2007). “Plantinga’s Probability Arguments Against Evolutionary Naturalism.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 79(2):115-129.
Lewis, C.S. (1960). Miracles: A Preliminary Study, 2nd ed. London: Geoffrey Bles.
Longmire, J. (2026). The Necessity Argument Against Naturalism: Deduction, Necessity, and the Incoherence of Contingency-Only Metaphysics. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18294260
Plantinga, A. (1993). Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press.
Plantinga, A. (2011). Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
Reppert, V. (2003). C.S. Lewis’s Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
Reppert, V. (2009). “The Argument from Reason.” In W.L. Craig & J.P. Moreland (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, pp. 344-390. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
About the Author
James (JD) Longmire is a Northrop Grumman Fellow conducting unaffiliated research in philosophy of religion and apologetics. He operates oddXian.com with the tagline “Challenge the Consensus: Working out the harmony of God’s Word and God’s World.” His work synthesizes presuppositional and classical approaches to Christian apologetics, emphasizing the grounding problem for naturalism and the explanatory power of mind-first metaphysics.
ORCID: 0009-0009-1383-7698 Correspondence: jdlongmire@outlook.com
Thanks for this, brillant analysis. Trilemma absolutely needs a coherent answer.