P1. If creation meticulously reveals God, God’s character logically prefers the actual world.
P2. If God’s character logically prefers the actual world, the actual world is the only possible world.
P3. Creation meticulously reveals God.
C. The actual world is the only possible world.

Tyler disagrees or has in the past, at least, disagreed with P3.

“Meticulously” here is doing the work of pinpointing unique content in every created fact. So no fact can change or not exist – what have you – without the content of the revelation being different. A different creation is a different revelation.

Ex. God is the God of the number of hairs on Isaac’s head. For this to be meticulous revelation means that the specific number of hairs is uniquely important. Let’s say it’s 100,042. This means, on meticulous revelation, God is the God of Isaac’s 100,042 hairs, no more, no less.

And to deny meticulous revelation is just to say that some facts are mute. They are just instances of a general/principle revelation, like that God is the God of Isaac’s hairs, but not of the specific number.

TLDR: meticulous revelation means every fact can be made a divine predicate.

This premise is easy enough to defend. There’s multiple problems, but one is that there’s no forthcoming means to differentiate sound and mute facts, those things in creation that count as uniquely God characterizing and those that do not.

We want to say, for example, that God cannot create a world where rape is a celebrated victory over sin. Why not? Because such a scenario is excluded by God’s character. But according to what criterion are the numbers of hairs on Isaac’s head any different? Why isn’t that fact also determined by God’s character?

It’s arbitrary.

I see no way of reasonably denying P2. It just means that logical possibility is constrained by God’s character. Given that God’s character constrains possibility to the actual world, non-actual world’s are ruled out.

God can’t create the impossible because “impossible” here is a short-term way of saying, “something inconsistent with God.”

P1 is controversial though. There are two ways I’ve seen it challenged. One way is to argue from the non-exhaustive nature of creation. The other way is to argue against a compatibilist understanding of revelation.

The latter is easier to address. To simplify, P1 is built on the general principle that what things do they are. More specifically, we learn what something is by experiencing its effects. We are designed and ordained to learn who people are by experiencing their communicative acts. The first Person who did this spoke to the first man, archetyping that rule.

(Since Nick might read this and ask 20 questions: This is not because a Platonic univocity grades reality into cause-and-effect noetic results – the CER. This is because God was already a communicated Trinity who creates the imago dei to reflect this in the everyday exchange of speech acts.)

As Calvinists, this idea is intimately related to determinism. If people can refrain from doing whatever they have done, given the same person in the same state of affairs leading up to the choice, then they can effectively communicate a different person without it being a false representation. But that’s a contradiction in adjecto.

The same applies to God. God Himself has designed to play our language game – the ontic, epistemic, lingual, et al, rules of communicating for our universe. He made them and He stepped into them and uses them to make Himself known. So if God can communicate, “I hate rape,” all the while being quite open to it, then we have divine communication breakdown. As a result, we would have cosmic communication breakdown.

It’s always the same. Having a nervous breakdown. Drives you insane.

Anyway, that objection only really works if you reject compatibilism.

And that doesn’t work.

The last objection – to my knowledge – the one that’s more persuasive, is to say that God can make other worlds because those worlds correspond to content about God’s character unshared in this one.

If this necessitarianism were only philosophically inclined, this would be a head-scratcher. How do you show that – to use an analogy – that the actual world only shares 50% of God’s character, and the rest of the possible worlds cover the rest?

Or, if it makes us cringe less at the question of violating simplicity there, how do we know this is false: since God is not exhausted by creation, what if possible worlds are worlds compatible with what is not present in the actual world? Or, what if alternative creations would reveal the same content in such a radically different way or mode that it constitutes different content for our purposes here?

Three responses. There are probably more.

First, the Christian objector will already have to concede that some entailments of God’s character are possible-world-non-negotiables. They are necessary. Their absence or negation constitutes inconsistency with God’s character. Lying, murder, rape, Jesus not rising from the grave – the list goes on for facts too essential to Christianity to lose. Furthermore, a great majority of Christians already believe logical and mathematical matters are logically necessary in the grand scheme.

So the objection really turns out to be a confused misfire at P1. It’s really an objection to P3.

Second, Scripture enlists creation as a meticulous unit of revelation. Everything reveals God – down to the microscopic details. Psalm 19 is a classic case. Creation makes the God known.

Now, what is a “world?” What are we talking about with possible/actual worlds? A complete consistent state of affairs? Whatever your flavor of cashing this out, the problem is going to be that possible worlds require some kind of independence or division from actual worlds. If they are divisible, they are complete independently, then an alternative to the actual world is just a world characterized by the absence of the actual world’s facts.

So a possible world that is not the actual world is a hypothetical creation characterizable as unlike this creation. But this creation characterizes God. So the hypothetical would be unlike God.

Third and finally, Ephesians 1 teaches that Christ is the center of the universe. The Son is cohering principle, and His creational work comes to fruition in His incarnational mission. He is the protagonist and the thesis of the story.

Paul speaks of the mystery – the secret of the universe, the thing “all this” is about – is Christ, who brings into a final vision of completeness the story of reality. (The verse can be more thoroughly exegeted, but this suffices for my point.) Paul’s point is that Christ is pivotal to creation such that Christ is the end that motivates the means. Christ, His Person and work, is the reason things are the way the are, ultimately, from Isaac’s hairs to the spatial distance between you and your computer, and even all the evil that has ever taken place. It is all for him, through him, to him.

And Christ is the perfect image of God, as Paul writes in Colossians. This is double entendre. Christ is the perfect man, read: imago dei. Christ is also God incarnate. Truly man, truly God, heaven and earth united in one Mediator. So Christ is the most essential unit of possibility. If there is anything that must obtain for a world to be possible, it is the Incarnation and all it includes.

But we just saw in Ephesians 1 that it indirectly includes everything. The reality of God walking among men as a man to save them is the reality that entails everything else in the universe – hence, protagonist, thesis, pivotal, etc.

Now you can reason in either direction. You cannot have a world with Isaac having one less hair. Why not? Because ultimately, Jesus Christ is the reason why God determined Isaac to grow that number of hairs. Its eschatological finality is Christ glorifying God. Change one fact in the universe and you change Jesus. Impossible.

Same follows the other way. You cannot have a world without Christ. A world without Christ is a world without final, perfect revelation of God and without final, perfect glorification of God. But if every possible world has Jesus, then every possible world has all the other facts Jesus entails. As we just saw, that’s everything.

Jesus, Son of the Father, Mediator of the Triune God, is a necessary and sufficient condition for the completeness of actuality. Without Him, the universe ceases to exist. With Him, only this universe exists.

The objection I didn’t mention is just unbelief. I don’t think it’s all that important because you don’t need to prove necessitarianism to prove Christianity. I don’t think we should prefer anything less than a thoroughly consistent Christianity evangelized, and so a Calvinist one. But that doesn’t mean we need to defend all manner of nuanced doctrine to support the Gospel.

For me, then, this is an in-house debate. I don’t think it’s worth discussing with unbelievers in most cases.