Against Grounding Trinitarianism

Christian metaphysics advances a surprising thesis about the nature of fundamental reality: The fundamental level of reality is triune (in some sense).Certain Christian traditions maintain that there is a hierarchical structure within the Trinity, and recently it has been proposed that such relations should be explicated in terms of the notion of metaphysical ground.This paper is a systematic exploration of the viability of a ground-theoretic account of this conception of fundamental reality.We argue for two claims.First, the only adequate ground-theoretic accounts must involve laws of ground and must take them to play distinctive explanatory roles.Second, taking the laws of ground to play these distinctive explanatory roles raises a dilemma: Either fundamental reality isn't triune in the way demanded by the Christian account, or it makes poor predictions about the modal status of certain facts about the laws of ground.