Did God Have to Create? The Modal Collapse Argument

On the classical view God did not have to create, and the modal collapse argument is the claim that divine simplicity says He did. The argument runs in one line: a simple, necessary God is identical with His one act, so that act, and the world it produces, come out necessary. The answer runs in one line too. Necessity belongs to the act taken in itself; "the creating of this world" describes that act by its effect, and it is the effect that could have been otherwise. What follows sets out the argument in steps, the two standing answers to it, and six forms of the objection, each answered in turn.

Key takeaways

• Modal collapse is the loss of contingency: the condition in which every true statement is necessarily true, so that nothing could have been otherwise.
• The modal collapse argument against divine simplicity, pressed hardest by R. T. Mullins, says a necessary God who is identical with His one act makes that act, and the world, necessary.
• Tomaszewski has shown that a common form of the modal collapse argument is invalid, because it carries necessity across a description of the act by its effect.
• Frame-Indexed Classical Theism (FICT) keeps strict simplicity, which Mullins's neo-classical theism gives up, and grounds the Thomist reply of necessity by supposition by placing the contingency in the created term of Aquinas's mixed relation.
• Nothing in God distinguishes the world where He creates from the world where He does not, and that is what free creation means.

What is the modal collapse argument?

The modal collapse argument is the claim that divine simplicity makes the world necessary: if God is identical with His one act and God is necessary, then the act is necessary, and so is what it creates. The argument takes its name from modal logic, where modal collapse is the condition in which every true statement is necessarily true, and vice versa: there are no contingent truths. Wikipedia's entry notes that the term also turns up in critiques of ontological arguments, Gödel's among them. Only the theological use concerns us here.

The theological argument moves in five steps:

1. God exists necessarily.
2. On divine simplicity, God is identical with His one act.
3. So that act exists necessarily.
4. That act is the act of creating this world.
5. So this world exists necessarily, and nothing could have been otherwise.

R. T. Mullins gave the argument its leading contemporary statement in "Simply Impossible: A Case Against Divine Simplicity" (Journal of Reformed Theology, 2013) and in The End of the Timeless God (Oxford, 2016), and he restated it with Shannon Byrd in 2022. The steps are short and each looks secure. That is the source of the argument's force.

What is at stake is larger than a puzzle in logic. Mullins presses the point further: a God whose one act is the creating of this world must create in order to be who He is, which inverts aseity itself, and the doctrines of grace, contingency and evil suffer downstream.

The position argued here is stated in one place; read the statement.

Why does divine simplicity seem to force modal collapse?

Simplicity seems to force modal collapse because it removes the gap where contingency usually lives. On divine simplicity, God has no parts of any kind, and His attributes and His act are identical with His essence.

A composite God would have room to escape. He could have a necessary nature and a contingent decree as two components, the one fixed and the other free, and the necessity of the first would not touch the second. A simple God has no such seam. If His decree to create is not a component He might have lacked, then it seems the necessity of His being becomes the necessity of His decree, and the necessity of the decree becomes the necessity of the world.

The classical theist cannot escape by making simplicity smaller. Aseity is standardly taken to entail it, and that argument from aseity runs in its own place. Nor can the identity be softened. Volume Four of the Many Beings books grants this premise at full strength: the laws of identity are exempt from the index it applies elsewhere, so God is His act univocally, or not at all. Whatever answer is given, it has to keep the identity intact and find the contingency somewhere else.

Volume Four holds the chapter on simplicity and the objections to it; see what it covers.

Did God have to create? Two standing answers

Both established answers say no, and each pays a price for what it keeps.

Give up strict simplicity. Mullins and the neo-classical theists conclude that simplicity cannot be held together with divine freedom. In The End of the Timeless God he argues that timelessness, strong immutability, impassibility and simplicity stand or fall as a package, so that a decisive strike on one brings down the rest. With Byrd he has argued that the recent replies to the argument misunderstand or misstate it. The answer is clean: God is free because God is not simple. The price is the classical package, and with it the account of aseity that grounded simplicity in the first place.

Keep simplicity: necessity by supposition. The Thomist tradition answers from Aquinas. In the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 19, a. 3) he holds that God wills His own goodness necessarily, but wills other things not by absolute necessity. Their willing is "necessary by supposition, for supposing that He wills a thing, then He is unable not to will it, as His will cannot change."

Contemporary defenders have sharpened the reply. Tomaszewski argued in Analysis (2019) that a common form of the argument is "famously invalid," with no clear repair that does not beg the question. Schmid and Pedersen and Lilley have defended simplicity against it as well. The price is the critics' rejoinder: one simple act seems to have room for only one modal status, so the tradition still owes an account of where the contingency lives.

Kraay's entry on divine freedom in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2025) notes that modal collapse threatens the model of divine freedom that requires alternate possibilities, and leaves standing the models on which freedom is the absence of constraint or ultimate sourcehood.

Volume One lays FICT's foundations and costs nothing; get your free copy.

The objections, answered

The argument has come back in several forms, in the literature and in objections pressed against the Many Beings books themselves. Each is given below with its source, its strongest statement, and its answer. The same move recurs underneath them, and so the same answer does too, applied where each form aims.

If God is His act, isn't creation as necessary as God?

No. The inference is valid only if necessity passes through the description "the creating of this world." It does not. That phrase picks out God's one act by way of its effect, and a description of that kind carries no necessity through a modal context.

The objection at full strength comes from Mullins (2013, 2016). A simple, atemporal God's single eternal act is identical with His necessary being. If that one act creates this world, the world is co-necessary with God, and there is no standpoint from which a timeless, simple God could have willed otherwise. Its strongest surviving form is a dilemma: the act is necessary, so either its effects are necessary, or the link between a necessary act and a contingent effect is left unexplained.

Frame-Indexed Classical Theism is a research program in analytic theology that resolves classical theological dilemmas by diagnosing them as artifacts of a single formal error. God's frame is atemporal, simple and a se; ours is sequential, composite and contingent, and God's frame is the ground of ours: it contains and sustains the finite frame, not the reverse. Predicates whose content involves time, modality, agency or value are said of God and of us analogically and never univocally, and treating such a term as if it meant the same thing on both sides is the Many Beings Fallacy. Here FICT agrees with Mullins, and with Aquinas, that the identity is strict and cannot be softened. It parts from Mullins's neo-classical theism on the other point, holding with the Thomist tradition that the world is contingent.

The answer, from Book 4's chapter on simplicity, has three moves. First, necessity attaches to the act itself, taken in itself. Second, "the act of creating this world" reaches that act through its creature-side terminus; it names the one act through what the act sustains, and descriptions of that kind do not carry necessity through a modal context. That is the formal point Tomaszewski made: from the necessity of God and the identity of God with His act it follows that the act is necessary, not that the act as the creating of this world is. Third, across possible worlds, the difference between God creating this world and God creating another is a difference in the created term, the same place where the book locates every relational change. Everything varies in relation to God; God varies in relation to nothing.

So the objection's second horn is answered: the link is explained, and the explanation is the relation's direction. The modal collapse argument is the Many Beings Fallacy in modal dress. It reads the necessity of an absolute item through a creature-indexed description. The identity premise stays at full strength; what gets indexed is the description riding on it.

The chapter this answer comes from is in Volume Four.

Doesn't one simple act have room for only one modality?

It has room for one, and it has one: the act is necessary. "Contingent" is not a second status in the act. It belongs to the created effect by which the act is described.

The objection is the critics' reply to necessity by supposition, and it is how Mullins reads the doctrine. On simplicity there is nothing in God but God, so there is no second item in God to carry a contingent status beside the necessary one, and he denies that a truly simple God has room even for merely relational predicates. Pressed against the Many Beings books, the objection gains an edge. Their Anti-Collapse Lemma blocks necessity from flowing down into creaturely acts. But that says nothing about whether God's willing this history rather than another is itself free.

The scope point is granted outright. The Anti-Collapse Lemma is a result about creatures: from God's eternal fixity, nothing follows about the necessity of a creature's act. It is the old distinction between the necessity of the consequence and the necessity of the consequent, and it is the right tool for creaturely freedom. It is the wrong tool for the decree, and it is not the tool used there.

Taken in itself, the act carries one modal status, necessity. The decree, named by what it creates, is free, and its contingency sits in the created term. Aquinas's "necessary by supposition" fits this reading without being its engine: what is necessary is the act; what could have been otherwise is the created term by which "He wills this world" describes it. The critics are right that one act cannot bear two modal statuses. It does not have to, and without that premise modal collapse does not follow. Relational predicates such as Creator are still truly said of God, with God the standing term of the relation.

For creaturely freedom argued from the ground up, Volume One is free.

What distinguishes the eternity in which God creates from the one in which He does not?

Nothing in God, and that is the doctrine of free creation, not a gap in it. The difference is wholly on the created side.

The question is Mullins's, pressed against the classical escape that the act is eternal while only its effect is temporal. If there is nothing in God but God, what distinguishes the eternity in which God has created from the eternity in which He has not? Kraay's map of divine freedom sharpens it. If nothing in God differs between the two cases, what bears God's freedom? Is the difference not brute?

Book 4 answers from the direction of the relation. Creation is the derived term of an asymmetric relation: God grounds and is grounded by nothing, which is aseity seen from the side of creation. To demand an intrinsic divine difference for every creaturely difference is to demand that God vary with His world. That demand is the mutualism classical theism exists to refuse. Paul closes Romans 11 with the doxology that says so:

"For from him and through him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever! Amen." (Romans 11:36, NIV)

From Him and through Him, and not the reverse.

The demand for a bearer misfires for a further reason. It asks God's freedom to have the structure a creature's freedom has: a state inside the agent that could have been otherwise. That is the univocal reading Book 4 diagnoses. On the Stanford Encyclopedia's own map, freedom as ultimate sourcehood and as absence of constraint survives without it. God is the sole source of the world, and nothing constrains Him to it. A difference grounded by God and located wholly in the creature has an explanation, and the explanation is creation. FICT does not give up "could have been otherwise." It places it in the created term.

Eternity and creation are the subject of Volume Three.

If our prayers make a difference to God's eternal act, does a simple God have contingent properties?

No intrinsic ones. What varies with the prayer is the created fact that God's one act knows and answers, not the act itself; the relation is real in the creature and notional in God.

Alvin Plantinga's Does God Have a Nature? (1980) is the classic critique of simplicity's identity thesis, and the objection draws on it: a simple God identical with His attributes can have no contingent properties, yet God knows truths that could have been otherwise. Pressed against the Many Beings books, it uses their own pair of claims. God is one simple act identical with His being. And without a given prayer, what God eternally does in answer would have been otherwise. Put the two together and the act seems to vary with the world. Mullins's collapse returns by the back door.

Book 4's chapter on prayer answers with a precise counterfactual. Without the prayer, the contingent fact that partly makes true what God eternally knows would have been otherwise, and with it the answer given at its coordinate. The one act by which He knows and sustains remains what it is. The creature's act fixes which content His omniscience holds; it does not fix what God is. This is how the counterfactual weight of prayer and the simplicity of God stand together: the variation belongs to the content, which is creature-side, and the act is untouched.

The prayer is a real secondary cause. Had the believer not asked, the world would have differed at that point, and the answer with it. God would not have differed.

Volume One is yours free, and it starts where these questions start.

If God's knowledge follows our choices, can it do any providential work?

Yes, because providence did not rest on the knowing. What secures the promise is the sustaining, not the seeing.

William Hasker put the objection classically in God, Time, and Knowledge (1989) and again in the Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society in a 2009 article. Knowledge grounded in the event it knows, he argues, comes too late in the explanatory order to be used to bring that event about or to prevent it. So simple foreknowledge is providentially useless. John Sanders argued in Faith and Philosophy (1997) that simple foreknowledge offers no more providential control than the open view does. Pressed against the Many Beings books: if the creature's choice grounds the truth that God knows, God is a perfect spectator, and a God who only tracks the future cannot promise it.

Two rivals answer by changing the knowledge. Molinism fills the gap Hasker finds with middle knowledge, God's knowledge of what free creatures would do in any circumstance. Its price, as Book 4 describes the middle-knowledge picture, is a decree that must work around the creature's free choice as a fixed fact, as if that freedom were a rival power limiting what God may decree. Open theism accepts the gap and gives up exhaustive foreknowledge; its price is a God responding brilliantly to a future He is discovering.

FICT answers by changing where providence lives. On Book 4's account, God does not read a settled future off the world and then undertake to guarantee it. He eternally wills to sustain that future whole, permitting what He does not author, with the creature's free choices and prayers woven in as real causes. His knowing is one with that sustaining: He knows the future as the One who holds it in being. The free choice fixes which content His one act comprehends, not the act itself. Hasker is right that knowledge standing downstream of events could not steer them. God's is not that kind of knowledge.

FICT seen from the side of providence is set out on the FICT page.

Isn't refusing an unindexed "could have" just a dodge?

No. The rule is the same in both places: frame-sensitive modal claims, such as "could have sinned," are made inside a frame, and not about metaphysical possibility simpliciter. The same discipline is what diagnoses the modal collapse argument.

The objection is one of consistency, pressed against the books themselves. They decline to say, without an index, whether the incarnate Son could have sinned, yet they affirm that the glorified saints keep a live creaturely freedom. Is the discipline switched on only when it is convenient?

Both claims are indexed. In the human frame, Christ's temptations were genuinely open and His obedience was won, not staged. In the Person, the one acting is God, and the divine nature admits no sin. Book 4 puts it in a sentence: peccable in the frame He assumed, impeccable in the Person He is. The saints' freedom is likewise a claim made within the creaturely frame. What the books refuse is the step the modal collapse argument takes: a frame-native modal claim read univocally into unindexed metaphysics. The conclusion aligns with the impeccabilist mainline, Shedd and, more recently, Oliver Crisp.

Volume Four's Christology chapter is on the volume's page.

So why did God create the world?

Not from need. God wills His own goodness necessarily and wills the world freely, as ordered to that goodness, and creation answers no lack in Him.

The ministry pages that answer this question say that God created for His glory and not out of need, and they are right. What they do not say is why "not out of need" survives the modal collapse argument. A God completed by His world would be composite, and He would vary with it. That is the picture the asymmetric answer refuses. Because the difference between creating and not creating lies wholly in the created term, creation adds nothing to God, and so it cannot have been done to supply something God lacked.

Aquinas gives the order: God's own goodness is willed necessarily, and other things as ordered to it. The world is a gift ordered to that goodness, which is why it could have gone unmade without loss to Him.

Scripture puts creation's cause in the will of God:

"You are worthy, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you created all things, and by your will they were created and have their being." (Revelation 4:11, NIV)

The verse names His will as the cause and names no need. Paul names God as the one who "works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will" (Ephesians 1:11, NIV). The attribute that makes "not from need" true is aseity: a being that exists of itself has nothing to gain.

Volume One, free on Kindle, carries the argument from its axioms.

How the positions compare

Each position keeps something worth keeping. The table sets out what each says, where it puts the contingency, and what it costs.

Frequently asked questions

What is modal collapse in simple terms?

Modal collapse is what happens when everything true becomes necessarily true, so that nothing could have been otherwise. In theology the phrase names an argument against divine simplicity: if God is identical with His one act and God is necessary, then the act is necessary, and so is the world it creates. The loss would reach both God's freedom in creating and the creature's freedom in choosing.

Could God have not created the world?

Yes, on the classical view. The Thomist reply holds that God wills His own goodness necessarily and wills other things only by necessity of supposition, while Mullins's neo-classical theism keeps God's freedom by giving up simplicity. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism keeps simplicity and adds where the contingency lies: the difference between God creating and God not creating is a difference in the created term, not in God. Supposing He wills the world, He cannot fail to will it; His goodness did not require the supposition.

Does divine simplicity lead to modal collapse?

Mullins's neo-classical theism says that it does, which is why it gives up simplicity. Tomaszewski has shown that a common form of the argument is invalid. Frame-Indexed Classical Theism agrees with Mullins that simplicity means God is His act without qualification, and agrees with the Thomists that the world is contingent. The divine simplicity modal collapse debate turns on whether necessity passes through the description "the creating of this world."

Is the modal collapse argument valid?

Tomaszewski argued in Analysis that a common version is invalid, because it passes necessity through a description of the act by its effect. Mullins and Byrd replied in 2022 that recent responses misunderstand or misstate the argument, so the exchange continues. Schmid and Pedersen and Lilley have written on the defenders' side. The classical answer defended here uses the invalidity result and adds an account of where the contingency lies.

Does modal collapse destroy human free will?

No. The Anti-Collapse Lemma, a result about creatures only, holds that God's eternal fixity transfers no necessity to creaturely acts: a settled decree is not a forced choice, which is the old distinction between the necessity of the consequence and the necessity of the consequent. The freedom of God's own decree is a separate question, answered by locating the contingency in the created term. How creaturely freedom sits beside foreknowledge is argued in the Molinism debate.

Where to go from here

The modal collapse argument does not show that God had to create. It shows that the word "creating" was carrying the contingency all along. Read it as a description of God's one act by its effect, and the necessity stays with the act while the world stays free. Let necessity pass through that description, and the world goes necessary with Him.

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