 The next premise in the argument is (5), the principle that licenses the “transfer” of necessity from (3) to (6) via (4). Ockhamists and Dependence Theorists both allow that the necessity of the past, when applicable to past events, transfers to the future. Whether this transfer principle is valid depends on the modality being transferred and the modality effecting the transfer. Logical necessity, for example, is validly transferred by entailment: □p, □(p ⊃ q), ∴ □q. But some modalities, like non-accidentality (Slote 1982), are not closed under entailment. How about the necessity of the past? A much-discussed transfer principle, playing the same role in Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument that (5) plays in the argument for theological fatalism, is rule β (van Inwagen 1983). The necessity-operator featured in this principle is N, where Np is to be read, “p, and no one has, or ever had, any choice about whether p.” Rule β states that, given Np and N(p ⊃ q), it follows that Nq. Counterexamples to rule β were soon discovered, e.g., by McKay and Johnson (1996). But it was easy to amend the Consequence Argument to rest on Np, □(p ⊃ q), ∴ Nq, and this principle appears to have no counterexample. The parallel principle for theological fatalism is □tp, □(p ⊃ q), ∴ □tq, where □tp is to be read, “p is fixed, accidentally necessary, no longer avoidable, etc., relative to time t.” This principle, too, seems to have no counterexample.