The Jurisdictional Independence Thesis: Analysis of Omittoism

Debates in the philosophy of religion are organised around whether a creator exists. Omittoism relocates a logically prior question: by what right would any being, whatever its power or origin, issue binding commands to autonomous agents? This paper reconstructs Omittoism as a formal and empirically testable research programme. We state its core as the Jurisdictional Independence Thesis (JIT) and decompose it into a grounding principle and an origin-exclusion principle; we classify fourteen candidate "legitimacy generators" and show, by considered-judgment cases and a superlative-parity argument, that none of creation, sustenance, power, knowledge or goodness suffices without a further bridge premise; we prove an ontological-invariance theorem and give a formal version of the Juridical Cleavage against Thomistic replies; we derive, in a Bayesian model of revelation, an explicit reliability threshold π * below which even a morally perfect commander lacks Razian authority, and illustrate it with global religiouscomposition data; we show by repeated-game analysis that jurisdictional sovereignty is compatible with sustained cooperation while exposing the limits of pure consent, which forces a repair of the framework's original third axiom; we prove that existential dependence does not entail normative subordination, resolve a jurisdictional Euthyphro trilemma, show that supremacy is not unlimited domain, and stress-test the framework on ten institutional and seven counterfactual cases after reconstructing the strongest theistic case; we assemble the results into a pro tanto Divine Jurisdiction Thesis; and we derive falsifiable predictions, with a simulation-based power analysis, and explicit defeat conditions. The surviving core of Omittoism is a non-entailment and burden-shifting result, not a refutation of divine authority; we specify exactly what would overturn it.