Where the Pressure Falls: Ten Conceptions of the Ultimate Ground, Compared

Conceptions of what is explanatorily last are defended and attacked in conventional pairs — theism against naturalism, panpsychism against physicalism — and are rarely compared as a field. This paper compares ten, each read from a single text in which a competent contemporary defender states it at its strongest, against seven questions argued to be those any such conception is obliged to answer: the existence of a concrete domain, its order, subjects, modality, value and norm, the distribution of suffering, and the distribution of epistemic access to the ultimate. Conceptions are ranked only by dominance — better on at least one question and no worse on any — so that every verdict survives any admissible weighting of the seven and every incomparability records that the difference turns on weights rather than on evidence. Of the ten, two are undominated: Tegmark's mathematical universe and Della Rocca's Spinozism, which share no subject matter but share a structure, each deriving its assessed coverage from a single principle. Undominated is a weaker standing than it sounds, and is not a claim that either is true or best: it means only that nothing in the field matches them everywhere and exceeds them somewhere, and the word covers two different cases — one of the two outranks eight of the nine others, while the other outranks two and is incomparable with seven. None of the four theistic conceptions in the field survives undominated. Being outranked here is a relation between what two conceptions reach, and three things follow from that and are meant strictly: this is not a finding that theism is false, since a conception may reach less than a rival and be true while the rival is false; it is not a finding that theism is improbable, since no probability is assigned to anything; and it is not a finding that holding a theistic conception is unreasonable, since what a person is entitled to believe turns on grounds the study does not weigh. Nor is theism displaced where a reader of the literature would expect. On a statement of the data that does not presuppose the point at issue, neither the distribution of suffering nor the distribution of belief generates a debit against any conception in the field, and every theistic conception is already outranked on the earlier questions alone. They are displaced earlier, over what the world is and how it hangs together. The paper reports what the result rests on, what would overturn it, and where the instrument used was never exercised.