Before we can see Sijuwade's reformulated argument, we need one piece of philosophical machinery: a distinction, made precise by the logician Saul Kripke, between two questions that are easy to blur together.
A priori/a posteriori is not the same question as necessary/contingent
A priori and a posteriori are about how you know something. A statement is knowable a priori if you can know it is true independent of experience — through reasoning alone. It is knowable a posteriori if you need to go and check the world to find out.
Necessary and contingent are about what kind of truth something is. A necessary truth could not have been otherwise, in any possible circumstance. A contingent truth could have gone the other way — the world could have been different.
It is tempting to assume these line up neatly — a priori truths are necessary, a posteriori truths are contingent — but Kripke showed this is false. There are truths that are both necessary and only knowable a posteriori. His standard example: "Saul Kripke is a human being." Assuming it's true, it could not have been otherwise — Kripke could not have turned out to be, say, a robot wearing a human disguise; being human, if he has it at all, is essential to him, not an accident he happens to carry. So the statement is necessary. And yet you cannot know it by pure reasoning. You have to look — an empirical investigation. So it is also a posteriori.
How this works: essential properties discovered empirically
The trick is separating the statement into two parts:
- A necessary a priori conditional, knowable by reasoning alone: if Saul Kripke exists, then he is essentially human (a rabbit or a robot could never have been him — his humanity is not a costume, it is what makes him the individual he is).
- A contingent a posteriori fact, knowable only by looking: Saul Kripke does, in fact, exist.
Put those two together with ordinary logic (if P then Q; P; therefore Q) and you get a conclusion that inherits necessity from the first premise and empirical grounding from the second: necessarily, Saul Kripke is human — and you only know this because you went and checked that he exists at all.
Kripke's own way of putting the underlying idea: there are two kinds of possibility to keep separate. A situation can be epistemically possible — coherently imaginable, nothing in pure logic rules it out — while still being metaphysically impossible — genuinely incapable of being how reality actually is. You can coherently imagine a world where Kripke turned out to be a robot. That doesn't make it a real possibility. Empirical evidence is precisely what lets us rule out the epistemically-possible-but-metaphysically-impossible scenarios and find out which world-state we are actually in.
Why this matters for the Trinity
Here is the move Sijuwade makes: instead of resting the Love Argument on an a priori claim about what love essentially is (which is exactly the point the Intuition Objection attacks), he reformulates the argument's key premise using this same two-part structure:
- A necessary a priori conditional: if there is a God, and if love has been revealed as a specific kind of thing (not "love as Swinburne intuits it," but love as a documented, examinable revelation), then necessarily this God generates two other divine persons.
- A contingent a posteriori fact: there is, in fact, a God, and love has, in fact, been revealed in exactly that way.
The conclusion — necessarily, God generates two other divine persons — is then a necessary a posteriori truth in exactly Kripke's sense: it could not have been otherwise, and we only know it by empirical investigation into what God and love actually are, not by simply intuiting what perfect love ought to feel like.
This is the whole point of the reformulation. It doesn't ask you to trust a philosopher's sense of what mutual, unselfish love must involve. It asks you to examine two specific, checkable claims — that God exists, and that a particular revelation about the nature of love has, in fact, been given. The next study works through what that empirical checking actually finds.
Why it matters
This distinction is useful well beyond this one argument. A great deal of theological disagreement collapses two separate questions — "is this true?" and "how would I know it?" — into one. Kripke's tools are a reminder that something can be utterly necessary, built into the fabric of what a thing is, while still only becoming known to us the hard way, through revelation and investigation rather than armchair reasoning alone. That is arguably a very biblical shape for knowledge to take — the God who could be reasoned toward is still, in the end, the God who has to be revealed.