The Trans-Existential Grounding Framework (TEG)

The argument, in three steps

1. Existence cannot ground itself

Whatever is one way and not another must have an account. That is the one premise: there are no brute facts. Everything in existence has properties, so an account from inside needs an account too. An endless chain of accounts, taken whole, just is. So every chain ends at a fork: a brute fact, or a ground outside existence. The premise closes the first.

2. Three roads to the same fork

Three separate starting points reach the same fork:

1. Property Regress: go ever deeper into the basic properties of existence, and you arrive at something without properties. The other ends, a chain that runs forever or one that stops for no reason, are brute facts. What you arrive at does not exist in the sense used here, since to exist is to have properties. It is real all the same.
2. Exhaustive Why: ask why, again and again, like children do. Every answer inside existence is one way and not another, so the asking ends only in something that needs no further why.
3. Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, the road that is proved: a consistent system containing arithmetic cannot prove its own consistency. A stronger one can, and then its own is open. The ladder never ends.

Doubt that Gödel applies to the world, and two roads remain. Deny the premise, and all three fall.

Anything existing has properties. There is something that creates these properties. Something that has no properties, something that grounds existence. We call this Pure Potential.

3. The ground must choose

A ground that creates must create without restrictions. There are three ways to create: by rule, by chance, or by choice. If it was creating by some rule, then the rule would be a property. If the creating was random or by chance, then it would not create existence as we know it. We see constants steady across billions of years. Therefore the third option must be true, that it is created by choice.