Baylor Theologian Thomas Ward has published and promoted a nice little book on an obscure niche of metaphysical theology called Divine Ideas. Ordinarily I wouldn’t waste a minute on this (because usually intersectarian debate is my idea of wasted lifespan). But I’ve been hired to give my analytical take on it. And so I shall. But to honor even that I must explain why all of this is ridiculous.

Here is Ward’s description of his book’s thesis:

This [book] defends a version of the classical theory of divine ideas: the containment exemplarist theory of divine ideas. The classical theory holds that God has ideas of all possible creatures, that these ideas partially explain why God’s creation of the world is a rational and free personal action, and that God does not depend on anything external to himself for having the ideas he has. The containment exemplarist version of the classical theory holds that God’s own nature is the exemplar of all possible creatures, and therefore that God’s ideas of possible creatures are in some sense ideas of himself. Containment exemplarism offers a monotheism fit for metaphysics, insofar as it is coherent, simple, and explanatorily powerful; and offers a metaphysics fit for monotheism, insofar as it leaves God truly worthy of the unconditional worship which Christians, along with Jews and Muslims, aspire to offer to God.

I’m sure you totally understood that. Or, rather, didn’t. Because this is like a convoluted effort to count how many angels can dance on a frozen pea rolling on a pinhead, by first working out whether “angel” means a small magenta birdlike entity made of prions or a quasi-metaphysical Geisterfürsten contained within the Platonic socio-essence in the eye of an Iberian newt in a witch’s cauldron (provided she is a witch from Essex and not York). It would be more worthwhile debating which species of swallow carried coconuts to King Arthur.

Gods are metaphysically impossible. And even if they were possible, they’re absurdly improbable. And even if the absurdly improbable could happen, we don’t have one. The world simply doesn’t have these things. So there’s no use in arguing over whether they have a visual prefrontal cortex or not. But lo. Here we go.

Why This Is a Thing

Ward’s book is concisely and clearly written and is a model for how to compose a treatise in exploratory philosophy. He also interviews well (and I watched some, to make sure I was getting his book right, on Parker’s Pensées, with a host who always asks good questions: see “Creative Divine Ideas” and “Can We Hold Divine Ideas and Divine Simplicity Together?”). In his book Ward begins with a brief history of the idea of divine ideas up to the late Roman era, which all seems reasonable to me—I can’t wholly vouch for it, as that hasn’t been a focus of mine (I know enough to confirm it only in outline); a classicist specializing in ancient philosophy or theology might have more to say on the matter (and then perhaps a medievalist, as throughout the book Ward introduces ideas from the Middle Ages, but that is clearly Ward’s area of expertise). But students of religion will be delighted to see Ward agrees with mainstream narratives that Hebrew and Christian theology are heavily indebted to the philosophies and theologies of their pagan neighbors and predecessors, and in many ways merely an evolution of them. Ward also simply takes it as given that the Old Testament evinces an originally polytheistic Judaism that later “redacted” its way into a semblance of monotheism.

But Ward then steers off the subject of history to instead try and propose an actual mechanical metaphysics of a first-cause-style God. We won’t get any mathematical equations. But what he is doing here is rather like trying to work out how Harry Potter’s magic works, after taking as your starting assumption that Harry Potter and his magic are actually real and the “official” books constitute an accurate account of it. And I do mean actual. It can be fun to elucidate how proposing a single counterfactual development in human history—like, say, the discovery of affordable antigravity technology during the tail end of the Apollo program in the 1970s—would entirely explain why the world looks and works the way it does in Bladerunner by the year 2019, rather than the way we saw it actually did. But usually anyone who argues that isn’t being all that serious. They are not proposing that there is an actual parallel universe where, indeed, that is exactly what has happened, and we can know this merely by virtue of how well we’ve explained it.

In any event, Ward is careful to point out that his conception of God and its presumed existence is taken as a theoretical given—he is not aiming to defend it, or explain it beyond what is needed to do what he actually intends to do, which is explain how such a God would have thought up the world so as to create it. The traditional God he starts with is his “Apollo-era antigravity discovery.” The rest is his working out of all the ways that that would have changed global economic history so as to leave human civilization looking exactly like Bladerunner depicts it in 2019, complete with why there are flourishing space colonies, the Atari corporation still exists, flying cars are normal, and replicants are a thing. Ward’s process is more constrained than that, of course, because his theory posits that nothing exists at point “go” other than his God. So the problem he is aiming to sort out is, “How can God think about things that have never even existed yet, so as to choose which things to create?” But it’s a similar process: start with a theory (discovering antigrav tech in 1975) and an end-state (the world as depicted in Bladerunner 2019); then reason out how to get from one to the other. The process doesn’t require any of this to be real—just analytically coherent.

Ward gives us a spoiler (p. 5; note I am using the kindle edition, so page numbers are approximate). “My own view,” he confides to us, “is the Scriptural view that God is light (1 Jn. 1:5), so that what God is thinking about when he thinks about light before created light is himself,” but he admits that will take a lot to unpack—the rest of the book in fact. Of course, you might be raising an eyebrow already. 1 John 1:5 says “God is light; in him there is no darkness at all.” So how can darkness exist if God is not also darkness? It won’t do to just say darkness is the absence of light—because that still means darkness can exist, that there is such a thing as the absence of light, and that still has to be explained. Could God not think about darkness before it exists? Then how could he know how to choose to make outer space dark? On Ward’s view, God would have no idea what that would look like until after he did it—which is the problem Ward was supposed to be solving.

But the real analytical problem here is that we aren’t actually talking about light—which is the emission of vibrating bosons called photons—but the mental qualia of the color “white” that our brains generate to represent a differential presence of bosons striking our eyes (or even just a memory or imagining of that). “God is qualia” is kind of problematic as a metaphysical assertion. Worse, Ward seems to be confusing the two things: explaining qualia is not explaining bosons (or vice versa). That a balanced distribution of bosons striking the cone cells of our eyes should be represented in our computed perceptual model by the experience of what we call “white” is fairly arbitrary. It could have been green. Or void of any color at all—for example, the differential presence of bosons could be modeled with a tactile model instead. Moreover, our perception of black is not linked to absolute photon count, but relative photon count. Nothing in the real world is actually black. Even black holes. Blackness is just a perceptual convenience our brains invent, and not in any way entirely consistent to any underlying physics; so, too, whiteness. How is “God is whiteness” going to explain any of this? Much less “God is a spectral boson with singular integer spin”?

My point is not that these things can’t have explanations, but rather that we’ve already started out lost in a confusion. It’s not likely that we are going to make much progress by Ward’s chosen route here. This is why I find theology to be as useless a branch of philosophy as astrology would be as a branch of astronomy. If we are choosing to ignore everything we already empirically know about what “light” is, we are never going to come up with a successful explanation of why it exists—much less by just sitting in an armchair using a fallible embodied human mind to think our way to how a flawless disembodied alien mind would have worked it out. Particle physics and the neuroscience of vision have the only real prospect of getting to the actual explanation of why “light” exists in either sense of the term. And my money is on “it’s logically impossible for it not to” vis-a-vis qualia (there is no other way it can be like to be a particular computer model than how it actually is) and “it’s statistically impossible for it not to exist” vis-a-vis physics. But of course, that’s not going to appeal to a Wardsian theist.

Nevertheless, this is where Ward is: trying to work out a theory of how a God as he’s defined it can think of things that don’t exist yet, and thus have been able to choose one set of things to bring into existence rather than another. If “God does not discover what light is when it comes into existence” (p. 3) then he must have had some conception of what light “is” so as to have chosen it to exist in the first place. You can say I have similar conceptual questions to answer (such as why we experience a uniform color field as white and not something else—like some other color or even some entirely different domain of representation, or even nothing at all). But I think he’s on completely the wrong track with his approach. Which is why I find exercises like his pointless. It’s rather like trying to work out how phlogiston works, centuries after it was proved not to exist. That’s simply not what fire is, so why bother studying it? Why not just, you know, study the actual physics of fire?

Anyway, here we go.

The Problem as Ward Sees It

Ward’s first point is analytically correct: if God is a person, then he must be able to think in ways relevantly similar to people (pp. 5–7). In fact, this could actually afford him a stronger case than he makes for what he wants to prove therefrom, since it is not really a problem he has to overcome that we form thoughts based on accumulated experience. We are still doing it via computation (a given input, entails a given output), and that does not require “accumulated experience.” That is simply how our brains do it because of the limitations of blind evolution: it is far easier to get to, and then gestate and birth, brains that onload all their data afterward. Meanwhile, color knowledge is inborn and requires no external contact with the world to “experience.” We do not learn colors. They are hardwired in. But that, too, is a happenstance of evolution.

If we instead built a computer that could reason its way to these neural structures, and thus (for example) teach itself to experience color, or what a lion or a beholder looks like, or music sounds like, and so on, it could do so without any external stimuli. Because we have learned that experience (and hence knowledge) is simply a physical function of a specific computation in the brain. Any “brain” performing the same computation will have the same experience and thus knowledge. It’s just that blind evolution can’t make one of those. But if we are starting with “antigrav tech in 1975,” ergo “a disembodied mind with all possible computational abilities, including a processor flop-rate of zero,” then obviously that thing could instantly reason out every possible thing there could be to experience—and thus know, and thus create (and, of course, choose not to create). So if Ward better understood neurophysics, and its relation to computer science, he could have gotten to his conclusion more scientifically than he did. We don’t have to armchair our way to this.

Of course, the problem is at his premise. Disembodied computers can no more run computations than disembodied hearts can pump blood. There is a reason I cannot live inside a blueprint of my house. A concept is not a thing. But here I’m just going with Ward’s own hypothesis: if the mind he thinks exists did exist, and really did have the abilities he imagines it to (regardless of why or how that’s even possible), then it could solve every computational problem without any external stimuli. And we can show that every logically possible thing can be computed (given infinite computations). Hence every actual thing is just the realization of a potential, and every potential thing can be computationally modeled from scratch. Which really leaves nothing more for his book to explain. Ward could have sorted his problem out in seven pages rather than seventy. But, King Arthur’s coconuts. The witch is from Essex. On we go.

Of course Ward wants to discard Platonic Forms theory here. And thank goodness. Because that was the dumbest idea since using cudgeling to cure epilepsy. A perfectly sensible Aristotelianism will get you there. Plato can go stuff it. Ward’s motive may be peculiar (God is somehow diminished, apparently, if we have to posit that Abstract Objects magically exist independently of God) but the result is still correct (you can have all logically possible things be computable without anything existing but the computer). There are problems here that aren’t fatal to his purpose. Ward is soft on insisting God be timeless and spaceless, for example. Though he wants God to be both, and that is not as tenable as he thinks, he could dispense with it and still rescue the rest of his book—albeit not to the satisfaction of his Godfearing peers, who would harrumph at spacetime being more existentially fundamental than God. But that’s all distraction. Ward is more interested in something else here.

Since “abstract objects” really is just another word for “all logically possible properties” and not in fact a collection of “objects” in any ontological sense, Ward’s worry about Platonism (or what he expands into a broader nemesis that he calls “abstractionism,” pp. 8–9) is really unfounded from the start. He wants God to be so “sovereign” that nothing controls or limits him—therefore he can’t have there be “abstract objects” constraining God. But I must remind him that he has to allow logic to constrain his God. Because his God cannot think what is logically impossible to think, or make what is logically impossible to make; and God is not the “decider” of what shall be logically possible or impossible (and see The Ontology of Logic for why he never could be). So there is something more sovereign than God; it just isn’t anything Ward should have to worry about. That God must obey logic is no great defeat. But somehow Ward never gets around to addressing whether God is bound by logic or not—even though it’s the obvious solve for his own worries about Magical Abstract Entities that inexplicably just exist for no reason.

Nevertheless, within the box Ward has trapped himself in, it is a relief to him I am sure to find that God does not need to consult an otherworldly plane of ‘abstracta particles’ (which must have no rest mass and א/𝜋 spin, I guess?) in order to know or experience things. (“Oh crap! If God did not make all that, where did it come from!? Whither God’s sovereignty!?”) But we already could have figured that from straight logic: a computer that can compute all logically possible things does not need to consult that otherworldly plane, either (which obviously doesn’t exist anyway). And that’s pretty much already how Ward is defining his God. So we’re kind of spinning wheels here. Pages of discourse proving the witch is not from York—when we don’t need the witch.

How Ward Proposes to Solve It

Ward now steers back to his thesis, that all concepts are “contained” within God. Which is just as true of spacetime: every point of spacetime possesses the property of potentially realizing any logically possible thing (especially if every possible thing is, or is the logically necessary outcome of, some geometric arrangement of spacetime). The universe, as-is, contains all possibilities. This includes alternative physics, which simply require some reshaping of spacetime to suit. One dimension can be twisted into two, and two into three, and thence into a thousand or whatever one needs; and likewise whatever property of spacetime manifests the fundamental universal constants can be tuned to some other value; and so on. Anything physically impossible in this universe can be made possible again by changing some property of spacetime; and spacetime has the potential to possess any logically possible property.

Spacetime is thus omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent (just as I pointed out originally to Edward Feser): spacetime possesses all powers (just no intelligence to select when or how to use them); spacetime possesses all knowledge, by containing within itself all logical possibilities as potential outcomes (just no awareness of this so as to do anything with it); and spacetime is everywhere (you can’t go anywhere and not be in it). It’s also omnibenevolent in the only sense theists can ever get their God to be: it possesses all possible goods, and makes all goods possible; and just as well evils—so spacetime, like God, is also omnimalevolent. It just isn’t intelligent or conscious, so as to select only the good and de-select all the bad. In other words, spacetime contains everything (including every potential thing), but it’s still just spacetime. It knows nothing in the cognitive sense, and wants nothing in the moral sense. It’s not a person. It’s just a thing.

But of relevance to Ward is the fact that he could conceptually get the same result for his Godmind: a computer capable of computing all logically possible things in an instant would then contain all possible ideas—before realizing them in any way. And unlike spacetime, this computer could be cognitively aware and have moral drives. It won’t necessarily have these, though, so it is hard to explain why it would. Contrary to Richard Swinburne’s famous handwaving, knowing all things would not cause you to care about any of it, much less in any particular way. I do think it is possible to get a mind that already (for some reason) cares about only one thing—the truth—to care about (and thus “install”) a specific set of moral drives (see The Objective Value Cascade). But caring about the truth has to be selected—it will always be a contingent property, not a necessary one. This is why there are legitimate fears of a true general AI, which are widely explored in modern fiction (and philosophy: see, for example, my discussions in Will AI Be Our Moses? and How Not to Live in Zardoz).

In other words, Swinburne’s God might know all true moral propositions—but have no reason to care about them. Without a pre-programmed care for the truth, knowing all things does not even logically entail being rational, in the required sense of “thinking about” all those known things. A computer programmed only to compute all possible things will simply store the outputs—and sit there, doing nothing about it, because it has no drives or motivations to. Those have to be programmed in. And that entails they are always going to be contingent and not necessary properties of any omniscient or omnipotent being. This, however, gets back to the problem that Ward’s God is nonsensical and doesn’t exist. But he set that aside. And so shall we. The matter at hand is to reason from “within” the bizarre fictional story Ward has woven about his God existing. We have to go on assuming (counterfactually, and implausibly) that the Bladerunner world really exists somewhere, and thus we still have to work out how it got that way and our world didn’t.

And in that counterfactual context, Ward misses the obviously much easier solution to his problem (computationalism) and develops instead an even more bizarre thing about God than all the bizarre things his God as defined is already saddled with: in respect to how Ward thinks God thought up lions so as to create them, “I think God is the Lion, whereas” certain abstractionists “think the place of the Lion is the eternal abstract realm, to which God goes for instruction about leonine nature.” Like Feser, Ward has fallen into the rabbit-hole of a false dichotomy: that these are the only two options. Either Platonic Forms really exist, or God is a strange alien entity with strange alien properties. There is at least a third option: that God is a computer; and that, quite simply, abstracta are Aristotelian, not Platonic. Which is vastly less bizarre. Computationalism is empirically established and self-evidently coherent (it’s just that cosmic omnicomputers are not probable–which is why We Are Probably Not in a Simulation); likewise Aristotle’s theory of abstracta (which is probably the actual explanation of everything); likewise logical necessity (and the ensuing inability of God to defy that, dispensing with the need for God to have caused it; of course, it also dispenses with the need for God). So why do we need this barely intelligible notion that “God is a lion”?

Christianity: Old and Weird

Ward’s solution builds on yet more unnecessary strange beliefs. For example, he says “If abstractionism is true, then I cannot see how God, if there is something deserving of that name or description, is worthy of [our kind of] devotion” (p. 10). This is completely unintelligible outside of his weirdly convoluted belief system. In the real world, there is no logical sense to saying “If Platonic Forms exist apart from God, then God is not worthy of our devotion.” That’s no different than saying “If God is constrained to only think or do what is logically possible to think or do, then God is not worthy of our devotion.” It makes no sense of the very concept of worth. Of course, I don’t think God is worthy of any devotion because if he exists he is necessarily evil, and he does literally nothing for anyone. To be worthy of devotion requires being at least a person, thing, or ideal that reliably ensures a greater good. It will not matter by what technical machinery someone does that by (whether making use of Platonic Forms or psionic ectoplasm or reasoning). What warrants devotion is the outcome produced, not the means by which it is produced (so long as the means do not themselves undermine the outcome, but there is no way they should do so here).

In short, Ward’s antiquated belief system is so weird that he has argued himself into having to solve problems that don’t even exist. He really, really, really needs the witch to be from Essex. Which ironically explains something about modern theism generally: as Ward here illustrates, Christians have completely whackadoo ideas about what “deserves” devotion, such that it is something completely pointless (like not having to use ectoplasm to heal the sick), rather than the only thing that actually can earn devotion (like, say, healing the sick—or better yet, never choosing to create disease in the first place). This goes a long way to explaining why Christians can still believe a total devotion to God is warranted even though he is the author of all horror and disaster. Groveling before the creator of cancer and tsunamis and rape is basically joining a Cthulhu cult. It’s not justifiable. It’s not admirable. It’s not even moral. But here we are. Christianity is a paranoid conspiracy theory. Ward is simply trying to work out whether Cthulhu murders the innocent by demonic or paranatural magic, because it is terribly important to Cthulhu’s sovereignty that it be only paranatural magic.

This travesty is only compounded by failures of logic, such as Ward believing that if “God is God by divinity, or because he exemplifies divinity,” then “God has an explanation which is something other than himself,” and therefore “God is not the ultimate explanation of things” but “Properties and other abstract objects are” (p. 11). This is a non sequitur. It makes no more sense than saying that “if God exists because he is logically necessary, then God has an explanation which is something other than himself, and worse, logical necessity is then actually the ultimate explanation of things.” Apart from this being self-evidently nonsense, it confuses different concepts of “explanation.” Unless all of creation is logically necessary (or otherwise inevitable) without God (though it might be), then only God can be the ultimate explanation of it. Saying “but even more fundamentally, logic ensures that God exists and has the powers and motives to do that, so really, logic did it” is to mistake what it is that we are supposed to be explaining. Logic cannot choose what exists. So it cannot explain what exists. If Platonic Forms exist independently of God, and God makes use of that fact to know what the options are and decide what to create, he is still the ultimate explanation of what exists. The Platonic Forms are just the instrumental means by which he effected that outcome. An instrument of an outcome can never be its ultimate cause—by definition, it is always a subordinate cause. It is literally just instrumental. It is not what deserves praise for the outcome.

Ward is also worried that if Platonic Forms exist, then it means God did not create everything, and so God is diminished to that extent. He’s not “as” awesome as Ward wants him to be—he’s 0.0000000000001% less awesome than that, and we can’t have that, can we? But even this isn’t really the case. If Platonic Forms existed apart from God, they must as necessarily exist as he does. So God couldn’t even in principle be elevated to the status of having created them. So there is nothing to panic about. God remains as awesome as it is logically possible to be. Which makes this like Ward worrying that “omnipotence” requires that God be able to create a stone too heavy for him to lift, and panicking at that revelation, rather than figuring out that you can just exclude logically impossible things from God’s repertoire of omnipotence.

Indeed, someone could even say that God created the entire world of Platonic Forms, by some computational device (much as the Tao is said to have done), in order to then consult it, and thus get even all that fractional awesomeness back. Ward rejects this idea for reasons that can only again be described as strange. Apart from ignoring computationalism altogether (as I already noted), he says weird things like that you should believe in angels instead (pp. 15–16; and he waxes happily about angels around minute 1:10 in his “Creative Divine Ideas” interview, too; no word on whether he believes in demons), and then claims his view is simpler (setting aside the angels), but he never explains how it gains any simplicity, since it doesn’t matter to the complexity of abstracta where they are or how they materialize; and for all we know God can’t do what Ward wants instead, and that’s why he has to create (or rely on) Platonic Forms. Or so a fan of Platonic Forms could easily argue (like, say, Philo of Alexandria).

In short, this is just all counting how many angels can dance on a pea rolling on the head of a pin. It’s an eyerolling waste of time; and all because of a bizarre, convoluted delusion. This is why I don’t consider analyzing works like this to be a worthwhile activity for a philosopher. Theology is bollocks. For example, it simply is not true that “the ultimate principle of goodness, the Good itself, is obviously more admirable or venerable than anything which is good in a derivative way” (p. 12). The idea of a heart cannot pump blood. So it is not more admirable and venerable than an actual heart. Analogously, the idea of being a good person is not more admirable and venerable than actually being a good person. Ward’s axiology does not make sense here. And yet he is driven to it by his convoluted and weird beliefs about a magical alien monster. Ward would be making more sense if he was arguing exactly the other way around, and cautioning against what he calls “idolatry” (worshiping the Platonic Form of the divine rather than the actual divinity) by making exactly my point: that it would be an error to worship the idea of a thing over the thing itself (unless, of course, the thing itself doesn’t exist—but that’s not where Ward is at).

Even if someone tried to argue that an ideal is always more perfect than its imperfect instantiations (which was the premise Plato originally argued from), that wouldn’t apply to Ward’s God, who is a perfect instantiation of the ideal. That is precisely the hypothesis being stipulated. So Ward’s paranoia here is groundless. It’s just all the worse that it shouldn’t even exist—devotion is earned by the outcomes, not the instruments. Freaking out over the instruments is just nuts. And this is already several epicycles of nonsense in. As I said from the start: Platonic Forms theory is illogical and unevidenced anyway, and isn’t needed to explain how a hypothetical God could know all possible things. You can get there with logic and computationalism. No need to spend several pages freaking out over a non-existent threat of people worshipping Platonic Forms and thus inaugurating a strange new heretical polytheism and thereby blaspheming God (and yes, Ward is actually worried about that; which is kind of like worrying that lizard people secretly rule the world).

I Don’t Think That’s How Evidence Works.

It’s of course all the worse that Ward is not doing anything empirically here. Really, the only way to know how God’s mind works is to gather evidence of it; not work out what you are comfortable believing about that, and then concluding you’ve discovered how God’s mind works. That’s a completely dysfunctional epistemology. And we get this in full view when Ward switches to moral facts (which, being weird, he calls “the moral law,” betraying commitment to a very antiquated understanding of the subject compared to moral philosophy today, and even the underlying sciences).

First Ward relates the analogy of Murphy’s Cat (p. 13): if you have a cat, and milk you put out vanishes every morning, you will already have a good idea where it went. There are problems with this that I am not sure Ward is aware of. For example, he seems to be confusing prior probability with likelihoods here, and is thus over-trusting that a stray cat or opossum didn’t get in and snake his cat’s milk, or that he forgot this time to fill the bowl last night. We don’t rule those out because they can’t be true, but because their being true is not a big enough deal to devote resources to ruling out until we get more evidence of them. But I’ll assume Ward didn’t mean to deny this and that he is just over-simplifying the matter to be brief. Where Ward really goes off the rails is in his very next sentence:

Murphy’s view is that when it comes to morality, God is the cat. If you believe in God, then it is strange—wrongheaded, even—to go on trying to theorize about the source of moral norms in a way which leaves God out of the picture, just as it would be wrongheaded to leave your cat out of the picture when trying to determine how the milk disappeared

This is a non sequitur. I can’t even fathom where he thinks the analogy is here. He seems to think that because we want God to explain as many things as possible, therefore he does explain as many things as possible (non sequitur); and since God explains as many things as possible, therefore he explains moral facts (non sequitur). This isn’t how evidence works. Moral facts are not a bowl of milk and God is not our cat. Lots of things we know have other explanations (like logical necessity and human choices), and moral facts look a lot more like those very things (moral facts are facts about human choices, and appear to follow some framework of logical necessity).

Perhaps part of the problem is a confusion over what “moral facts” means. I mean the set of all true imperative propositions (to be pleonastic, I mean the set of all true imperative propositions that supersede all other imperative propositions, but as that leaves the former as the only true imperatives, the expanded phrasing is illuminating but formally redundant). Ward means whatever he means by “the moral law.” If he means “thou shalt not eat shrimp or pick up sticks on Saturday” then, yes, he is describing a completely arbitrary, made-up, weirdo morality, which doesn’t look so much like something logically necessary—but does look a lot like something humans fabricated for the same dumb reasons humans made up faeries and demonic possession and leeching as a medical procedure. But if he means something more like “you ought to behave in coherence with the virtues of compassion, courage, reasonableness, and honesty,” then we’re back to the logically necessary outcomes of human nature, which God could not change by dictate. These are not things God can “choose” to be moral or not (compare The Moral Bankruptcy of Divine Command Theory with The Real Basis of a Moral World and The Objective Value Cascade).

For example, once God chose to allow humans to feel pain and die (and have sexual organs and mental disorders and a dependency on a diversified protein diet and every other choice he is supposed to have made), the ensuing moral facts are an inevitable outcome of that. For example, “murder” would no longer be immoral if God selected our physiology to be such that killing someone was pleasurable to them and caused them to rise from the dead three days later cured of all ailments (including age). Perhaps we’d have an etiquette around not causing inconvenience this way, but then we’d be at the level of minor offenses, not murder, and even those offenses would arise only in certain circumstances. Most killing would be moral, even admirable or obligatory.

Moral facts are logically entailed by human needs; and human needs are entailed by their physical design; and how to realize or thwart those needs is entailed by their world’s physical design. God no more chooses these outcomes than he chooses Pythagoras’s Theorem to be true. God can choose to realize different moral facts by choosing to realize a different physics (such as making death a good rather than an evil), just as he can choose to shape a world such that a right triangle can never physically occur in it. But Pythagoras’s Theorem would still be true. Arrange things to produce a flat right triangle, and it will obey that law. Likewise, choose a world in which death is a boon, and it remains true that murder would be evil if death was not a boon. God has little room to move here. Apart from the logical necessity of which moral facts obtain for which physics, there is no choice for God to make.

The most God could do is work out what is the best overall moral system to manifest, and then realize the necessary physics—but it does not follow that there won’t be countless commensurately “best” moral and thus physical systems (the choice among which will ultimately be arbitrary), and even if it turned out there was only one best system, it is still not God deciding this. His only role is in choosing to realize it. He hasn’t. But our concern here is with Ward’s worry that God be the “origin” of moral facts. But there isn’t any way to get him to be, in any meaningful sense here. Logical necessity will always constrain God’s choice. And there is no way to make this go away with bad analogies about bowls of milk. The evidence establishes moral facts derive entirely from the nature of people and the world. God can’t even in principle have anything to do with that, other than choosing to make a better world than ours—which we observe he didn’t. Empirically, when we observe the actual history of moral reasoning, God is not the cat; we are.

Rails Jumped and Off the Cliff We Go

And then we are hurtling so far from anything resembling reality it’s hard to know what comment is even left to make. For example, Ward says the only alternatives to his “God is a lion” view are that “God just has ideas, either because it is simply a brute fact that God is stocked with the ideas he has, or because God just thinks up his ideas, spontaneously, inexplicably, mentally untethered from anything God knows just by knowing himself” (p. 17; cf. pp. 38–40). As I’ve already established, this is a false lemma (which are very popular with theists—indeed, arguably, all the world’s theism today depends on at least one of these). Obviously it would beg the question if we simply said God just “had” all possible ideas for no reason. And obviously it is hardly better to suppose God just randomly thinks up ideas, as that would leave out some logically possible ideas, negating his omniscience. But if God ran a program called “omniscience” which simply calculated all logically possible ideas from pure reason, he would be stocked with all possible ideas. Done and dusted. He doesn’t need to “be a lion.” He can just rationally compute every logically possible thing.

But we’ve left those rails and are instead on our way down the cliff of nonsense. The internal logic is clean—for example, when Ward entertains the counter-hypothesis that God “just thinks up” ideas, he does not mean rationally working them out, but literally just arbitrarily, randomly, making stuff up. Everything he then goes on about for several pages then makes sense (pp. 18–20). But externally, all logic has failed him here: by leaving out the counter-hypothesis that God thinks up ideas by rational computation—that in fact what he is “thinking up” is every logically possible thing—Ward has gone down the wrong fork of the road, and in result won’t even be capable of discovering the truth of the matter (even if there were any). Because none of his arguments work against this alternative theory.

And, of course, by thus siloing his working hypothesis (rather than first empirically confirming that hypothesis is even true), Ward already left the rails of any proper search for the truth. For example, he complains that God surely must be perfectly rational, and therefore we can reject any theory of God’s mind that imagines him doing irrational things—but since he sneaks this assertion in as a component of his complex hypothesis, before confirming that it is even true, we’ve kind of hidden the problem that God might, in reality, be irrational. After all, how could we tell? The universe and its order seems bonkers as far as any moral evaluation is concerned; it’s better built to produce black holes than life, it’s really hard for us to survive in, and it’s capricious to the point of insanity. What is cancer even for? Or a penis for that matter? Who thinks that up? Not a rational person I would suspect.

“Well, you need penises to procreate.” Um. No. You don’t. Almost all existing life does not use a penis to procreate; and there are vastly more efficient ways to procreate than even currently exist in nature. Maybe the Thomas Wards of the world need to google the gamer word “spawn.” Likewise, “you can’t have reproduction without cancer” is also false. Do we need black holes? No. And so on. The point being, if God does exist, the evidence even more strongly suggests He’s nuts than that the empty bowl of milk proves Murphy’s cat drank it. So why aren’t we exploring the possibility that God is irrational? Ward has no good reason not to. By contrast, pagan theologians derived their theology from evidence, not the other way around. Galen, for example, concluded that if there are fetal deformities in one out of every thousand births, then that must be the limit of God’s powers. He didn’t try to explain the observation away in order to preserve an emotionally preferable belief that God’s power cannot be that limited. This is the difference between legitimate and bogus epistemologies.

Forgetting things like this gets Ward into the weeds a lot. For example, when he tries to dismiss something similar to computationalism (pp. 21–22), he incorrectly argues that it would entail God begins in a state of non-omniscience and then becomes omniscient, and God has to always be omniscient. There is no reason why God “has to always be omniscient.” That’s just a dumb idea Ward is inexplicably stuck on for wholly contingent historical reasons, a product of the complex drunkard’s walk of Christian theologizing over thousands of years (most of while tending to threaten or kill people who didn’t “do it right”). Ward can ditch precious arbitrary doctrines he isn’t emotionally attached to (like divine simplicity, pp. 30-36). But evidently not ones he is attached to (hence, he is stuck saying that “religious devotion should lead us to make God the ultimate explanation,” and that’s just that, p. 32).

But apart from that, Ward’s concern isn’t even true. In the model he is discussing, there is no time (literally none) when God isn’t omniscient. The whole point is that God, being omnipotent, will work everything out in zero time. It’s like that quantum computer that instantly knows everything (it has completed all computations) the instant we turn it on. That computer is never in a state of both being on (the equivalent to “God existing”) and not knowing everything (the equivalent to “God being omniscient”). So there is never a non-omniscient God. Yet still God knows everything by having worked it out. What’s the problem here?

And yet Ward still goes off on this kind of model on the false belief that it requires God to have been at some point not omniscient. Which is just weird. It’s like going on about how the witch can’t be from York because she has to have black hair and everyone in York is blonde, and then someone points out that that’s not true—and all he can do is stare at them in confusion. And then someone points out that there isn’t any reason for him to insist she not be from York anyway, or that she not be blonde for that matter—that his hypothesis is unnecessarily complex and his commitment to its elements is rationally inexplicable. And all he can do is fill a bowl with milk and go on about Murphy’s cat, while a possum skitters over behind him and drinks the milk. This is the kind of philosophy we’re dealing with here. And this is typical for theology.

The Containment Exemplarist Theory of Divine Ideas

So, that is how we get a wrecked tank at the bottom of the cliff called “containment exemplarism.” God has to contain all ideas within himself—for some reason (it is never really explained why he has to do this, beyond Ward’s feelings about it) and in some way (cue handwaving). Though it’s never really explained how this is any different from ideas just existing apart from God—since Ward’s God does not have a volume (so he can’t “contain” things in any generally intelligible sense anyway). Nor does God even have, in Ward’s preferred telling, a location—nor does any location exist to be separate from God in before God creates one. So what even would it mean to say that Platonic Forms exist “apart” from God at that prior first moment of existence? That would be a semantically meaningless statement.

So we have two fatal problems here. We don’t know why we are supposed to care whether God “contains” his ideas or not. Reasons have been given, but none of them are based on evidence, nor required by logic. They seem mostly to just be circular (we are supposed to just entertain one and only one convoluted model of God for no stated reason) or emotional (Ward just doesn’t feel good about alternatives)—never rational. And we don’t have any intelligible notion yet of how God “contains” his ideas. I think computationalism would get us to one. They are then thoughts “in” God’s mind, and thus “contained” within his mind in that particular sense. But Ward has run from that like a skittering possum. He thus ends up instead at this bizarre view called “exemplarism.”

Okay. Exemplarism. This is the idea that “God’s ideas of creatures are, in some sense or other, ideas of himself,” so when we ask “Where does God get his ideas?” the answer is supposed to be “God somehow knows creatures when he knows himself” (p. 22). If you think this sounds like a deepity from Deepak Chopra, you’re not far wrong. Ward argues there are two forms of exemplarism: imitative exemplarism and containment exemplarism. He doesn’t like imitative exemplarism (pp. 22–26); and I have to concur:

• First, imitationism wouldn’t work for the obvious reason that, as Ward puts it, “an imitation—unless it is an exact duplicate—will have some features which are similar to the thing which it imitates, as well as some features which are dissimilar” (p. 23), but how can something have “dissimilar” features if everything is exemplified in God? Nothing can be dissimilar to God, other than by exclusion or degree; otherwise there are ideas not contained in God, and we have failed to explain how God thought of them so as to create instantiations of them.
• Second, imitationism requires God to already have ideas about the things being imitated before having ideas about what imitates them. It’s like what Ward elsewhere calls the “nonsense” that “God, before making himself able to make himself, makes himself” (p. 17), or what I have called the nonsense of God working out a time or place for him to exist before he exists.

So, yeah, this wouldn’t work—it’s just bonkers that we live in a world where anyone would have tried to make it work, outside speculative scifi. This is what theology does to you.

As an aside, I am delighted to see Ward reject the idea that God lacks parts, and he gives a pretty good explanation of why that’s impossible, which atheists might find useful (pp. 26–30; for example, this will enrage fellow Catholic theologian Edward Feser). This supplements my points to the same conclusion in The Argument from Specified Complexity against Supernaturalism. There is also some good trashing of Protestant theologian Alvin Platinga after that, although on a matter of bonkers sectarianism akin to dropping acid (pp. 31–33), deriving from medieval essentialism, which is scientifically false to begin with (see Thomism: The Bogus Science). And Ward’s contrasting position is literally gibberish. But imitative exemplarism is still illogical. So he got that right at least.

So what’s left?

Finding All Things in God

“I think we can offer a good explanation of what God’s ideas of creatures are about: they are about God” (p. 40). And yes, “I really am saying that God is the archetypal lion, the archetypal eagle, the archetypal human, and that he is these things because there is included in what it is to be God the ultimate reality of being a lion, being an eagle, being a human,” and “as far as” this “theory is concerned, it is even fine to say that God is human, just as it is fine to say that God is the Human” (p. 41). Once again, cue the New-Age Bullshit Generator. Ward’s elaboration goes on with barely intelligible gobbledygook (like “in God there is an exemplar-image structure: the exemplar which is God is imaged in God’s perfect thinking about himself,” p. 42), most of which concerns him allaying arcane fears his theological peers might raise against what he is saying. But the challenge for us is to figure out exactly what he is saying. Because, as-is, what he is saying is nuts.

In his interviews Ward comes up with other examples like God is a mustache, and God is mud. But let’s think this through. Quite a lot is entailed by Ward’s position that raises a hefty eyebrow. God is a vagina. Indeed, God is the Vagina. God is a poop. Indeed, God is the Poop. And so on. God is a box of toddlers’ toys. God is a sandwich that tastes slightly off. God is a lovely marathon of sex. God is a parasitic worm. God is a delicious mushroom. God is radiation poisoning. God is cancer. God is Coca-Cola and Pepsi. God is also urine. God is hatred. God is racism. God is reparations for slavery. God is a Chia-pet. God is a concentration camp. God is rot. God is a perfectly-cooked steak dinner. God is halitosis. God is chaos. God is an armpit. God is ambivalence. God is schadenfreude. God is fuzzy. God is kleptocracy. God is fluorine. God is an apple. God is an apple with an arrow through it. God is an apple with caramel on it. God is also an apple with caramel and peanuts on it. God is the gene for psychopathy. God is homosexuality—in fact, God is the Homosexual. God is E. coli. God is the flagellum of the E. coli bacterium. God is a bite mark. God is a top quark. God is one third of an electric charge. God is a barely visible star sort of to the north of Orion’s nebula as viewed from Earth. And now using a random word generator: God is cancel culture; God is a chemical extract; God is attention; God is a Russian spy; God is average; God is absorption; God is the morning news. You get the idea.

God also has to be things he didn’t create, since Ward’s theory requires all ideas must be contained within God, even the ones he chose not to implement. So God is a bloodsucking vampire. God is an alien horror. God is Voldemort. God is a two headed Voldemort flesh-fused with Sauron via a teleporter accident at a Starfleet laboratory. God is the Will Riker clone that resulted from a transporter accident on Nervala IV. God is an entire universe shaped like a penis and balls. God is a murderous doll with a penchant for painting on canvas with applebutter. God is a runaway paperclip factory that has consumed the Earth. God is every other conceivable god, and a pantheon of gods.

God is also an orgasmarchy—a government I just made up in which leaders are elected by votes of the governed that are weighted by relative number of consensual orgasms a citizen has given. God is also a kittenarchy—a government I just made up in which the world is governed by the augural observation of the behaviors of kittens. God is a pollhark—a twelve-winged feathered bird I just made up that is constructed entirely of heavy metals and living cheese, and that is the size of Jupiter, but immune to heat, and thus lives inside our sun while telepathically fixing sporting events on Earth to fatten its bitcoin account, which it will never spend because it is inherently designed so as to simply want a fatter bitcoin account as an ultimate end in itself and not for any other purpose.

You can see how ridiculous this is getting.

Ward never really gets around to making sense of this. For example, he says he isn’t sure about whether “God is a centaur” or just “God is a horse” and “God is a man” and so God can then “construct” a centaur by mixing them up (pp. 43–44), but this is a problem all the way down. First of all, a horse is a mixture just like the centaur—of, say, limbs and organs, more basic components shared with other animals predating horses. And limbs and organs are a mixture—of, say, tissues (muscle, liver, skin, nerve, etc.). And tissues are mixtures of molecules; molecules, of atoms; and atoms, of fundamental particles. Everything is a centaur. Secondly, that a centaur is possible is what the idea of a centaur is. In other words, if God has to “be” a horse to think of a horse, then he has to be a centaur, too—otherwise, centaurs would have to be impossible, and not something God could realize.

This is why Plato didn’t settle on Forms as irreducibles. A chair is reducible to, say, planks of wood; but you still need an idea of a chair to have it be possible to arrange planks of wood into a chair (and he would say there therefore has to be an ideal chair that all actual chairs are imperfect imitations of, merely for chairs to exist at all). That’s silly—that we only need the parts and can then assemble them (in our mind, and then in reality) is computationalism, which is obviously correct. But Ward’s theory is rejecting that for a kind of divine Platonism. But that entails the completed ideas must pre-exist for God to think of them. God can’t only have ideas of the parts. So there has to be a “form” (an abstraction) for centaurs as surely as for horses and humans, and for all the same reasons. We would today say, more scientifically, that you need the possibility or potential for there to be a chair (or a horse, or a human, or a centaur), but it’s the same thing. You can’t break something into its parts and just have the parts. You have to have the possibility of their assembly—because that is what almost all abstractions are. (On this theory of abstractions, see “Abstract Objects,” section III.5.4 in my book Sense and Goodness without God.)

That’s why Ward’s theory requires God to be a pollhark. You can’t subtract parts of the essence of a pollhark—that which, by which, it is a pollhark—and still have the possibility (the idea) of a pollhark. This is obviously solved by reality already—we don’t need Ward’s God (nor would any real God need Ward’s God). All logically possible things are innate in all things. Everywhere there could be a pollhark exists a potential pollhark, as an innate property of the very space itself. This is a logically necessary fact and thus requires no God to make it so. This is more obvious when you think of geometry: once we have a plane of space we do not need some extra special magical thing for there to “possibly” be triangles in that plane. It’s not like if we have a plane, and then flipped a switch that “turned off” all abstract objects, that some weird invisible force would prevent our hand from drawing a triangle there—much less prevent there already being a triangle there (as all the points of every possible triangle exist there automatically—our hand simply hasn’t traced them yet). That’s simply logically impossible.

But whatever. Ward has fallen off the cliff of realty and is stuck in the bizarrosphere that is his peculiar God’s mind. But even in that weird space, his God has to be a pollhark, indeed God must be the Ultimate Pollhark! That’s the consequence of his own theory.

God also has to be the Ultimate Poop, the Ultimate Homosexual, the Ultimate Disease. And everything else.

God Is a Lion…ish?

Ward’s favorite example is “God is a lion” (and yes, probably because of C.S. Lewis: p. 46). This is kind of funny because it illustrates his cultural emotionalism—lions are “associated” with admirable things like power and majesty, whereas poop…well, it’s harder to explain how God is poop, right? Or, again, a pollhark. Or a kleptocracy. And so on. “There is a leonine aspect of God” (p. 46), “It was God’s good pleasure to make a world in which this archetype would be imaged” (p. 47), “we need to say that the symmetrical resemblance of divine and creaturely features really is exact similarity” (p. 48). And he means this quite literally: he is claiming “exact similarity” between God and everything else, like lions (p. 52).

Ward never expands on this. The rest of the book is void of any further articulation of his thesis. He never explains how God is a lion. Does God have a stomach? A snout? Fur? Fangs? Whiskers? Is God yellow? In his interviews he’ll list things like “lions are fierce,” but that just exemplifies ferocity; this is not an abstraction particular to lions. You can’t go from “ferocity” to “yellow furry snouted mammal with whiskers.” Likewise, how “is” God a mustache? Or mud? What divine quality explains the distinctive properties that we abstract as “muddiness”? Or “mustaches”? Or “lions.” We never get to hear. Nor do we hear why God then decided to get to these results in such bizarrely roundabout ways—for example, why all this mucking about with quark-gluon interactions; why not just make mud?

Instead, Ward follows that declaration with a bunch of ‘it’s a mystery that we can’t understand’ nonsense (e.g., pp. 52–54), which is just a stock Christian way of avoiding saying that, really, they have no explanation. He essentially admits this in minute 55 of his “Creative Divine Ideas” interview:

Can we give an explanation of why ‘lion content’ is part of the divine essence, is partially constituted divine essence? No. We can’t give an explanation of that. But then we’ve stopped at the right kind of spot: the buck stops with God. Yeah, we really have stopped with god, instead of [something else, like an eternal uncreated realm of Platonic Forms].

In other words, Ward doesn’t really know how it could be the case that God is a lion—or a mustache, or mud (or poop or diseases or vaginas or homosexuals or pollharks). He actually has no theory. Instead, he has started with a desire (“I want all things to stop with God”) and simply handwaved into existence a way to get there (“I’ll just insist ‘lions’ are an aspect of God”). He has never worked out how this could even be possible. What does it mean to say God is a lion? Hell if he knows. No one can know. “It’s a mystery.” Cue eyeroll.

And Then What?

Instead of giving any explanation of how his theory actually works or could even be possible, Ward instead follows with a bunch of complaining about various theological views he doesn’t like, which are just more dancing angels (pp. 54–57), including a bunch of pushing square pegs into round holes—like getting God to have total free will despite logic and motives limiting what he would ever do (something no reality-based philosopher would ever need do), or twisting up some kind of modal ontology that fits his convoluted ideas about God (another something no reality-based philosopher would ever need do), including more browbeating against Plantinga, which I could get behind, except that Ward doesn’t offer us anything more intelligible than Plantinga does.

Then Ward goes on about the Problem of Evil (pp. 58–60), but instead of attempting any fix for that, he simply sells the boat, declaring he won’t even “attempt to justify the ways of God to men insofar as those ways include the permission of horrific evils” (p. 59). Rather, Ward is only interested in how this fact might undermine his entire convoluted theory about God being a lion, because, um, if “every creaturely reality has its exactly similar exemplar in God, then God is evil, or at least contains evil,” because, after all, “some creaturely realities are evil” and yet “no being worthy to be worshipped as God is or contains evil.” Again, he has the methodology backwards (what Ward wants to worship cannot dictate what kind of God exists—God may simply be evil; or have no moral valence at all, like the Tao). But that’s just theology’s game.

Anyway, instead of offering any real defense of his theory against this objection, Ward just punts, to the usual “my basic response is to embrace the old metaphysics of evil as the mere privation of good,” without explaining how that can even work here (p. 59). Which is a problem. Because it seems to me that this doesn’t work in any possible fashion here.

• First, God is choosing when and how and even fully whether there can even be the privation of good, and how much and of what kind. That choice is on him. Human decisions can be sort of disconnected from God with Ward’s incoherent libertarian idea of free will, such that ‘humans’ are creating things with their actions that God did not—but God is the one that empowered them to do that. He built and handed them all the tools, and designed everything to be breakable and exploitable, like a parent who leaves a bunch of toddlers in a room with exposed electrical wires, a floor covered in broken glass, and an open fire. So even human evil cannot be removed from the choices of God. The very possibility of them is not the privation of good—it was an active and creative choice made by God. Ward’s theory simply fails to explain and thus predict this, and as such, his hypothesis has been falsified.
• But the real problem for Ward is not human evils anyway, but all the other stuff. Cancer. Ebola. Tsunamis. Gunpowder. Nuclear fission. Volcanos. Mudslides. Flash floods. Natural wildfires. Pain. Flesh that can be crippled or killed. Pregnant women eaten by wolves. Toddlers drowning in buckets. The absence of any moral governance of the world—which can again only be attributed to a choice made by God. As with everything else: God chose all those things to exist and be available to effect evil. And he did not have to (1 Corinthians 15:21–58). God decided the laws of physics. So he decided that guns would shoot bullets and not flowers, that lava would burn people alive, that bacteria and toxins and viruses would torment and kill people, that predators and parasites would painfully murder them. God had far better alternatives (see Ten Ways the World Would Be Different If God Existed and How Not to Live in Zardoz). He could have written a better book. He could be kind and helpful and honest right here and now, but chooses instead to be callous, indifferent, and silent. Those are God’s choices. They cannot be dismissed as ‘the mere privation of God’. It’s simpler to just admit there is no God.

And it is that second point that is an analytical catastrophe for Ward’s theory. If God is a lion, God must also be a disease. If God is a cloud, God must also be a tornado. If God is heat, God must also be a forest fire. If God is a continental plate, God must also be the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. If God is an ocean, God must also be the 2004 Indonesian tsunami. If God is a volcano, God must also be the 79 A.D. eruption of Vesuvius. If God is metal, God must also be a knife and a bullet. If God is nuclear fission, God must also be a nuclear bomb and its fallout. If God is a nervous system, God must also be horrific pain. If God is a molecular bond, God must be the rope that binds a torture victim, holding them in place to be victimized, making God the torturer’s accomplice. Ward’s theory of divine ideas simply cannot escape making God all these evil things, because they are chosen creations of his, not the ‘absence’ of his choice or presence.

I am embarrassed to see Ward try the usual, shameful, semantic trick here of saying, “I do not think there are any real evils” (p. 59), but that statement cannot be true unless you adopt such a perverse definition of ‘evil’ as to have said nothing of substance, and which simply evades rather than answers the objection. Indeed, in minute 1:02 of the “Creative Divine Ideas” interview Ward literally says, “of course a virus can be bad for us, but something’s being bad for us doesn’t make it bad.” Um. Pro tip: of course that makes it bad; that is what “bad” literally means. But how you choose to use words is irrelevant to the objection anyway. If child cancer and tsunamis and holding down torture victims are things created and continually facilitated by God (and they are), on Ward’s theory, God is those things. Whether you call them ‘evil’ or ‘bad’ is mere semantics—and disingenuous semantics at that. Because these are literally what every English speaking person means by bad things, by evils. That’s the function of the word. It is a catch-all synonym of malignancy, of all unjustifiable suffering and harm. This is why the problem Ward faces isn’t some obscure semantical technicality of what the word “evil” means. It’s the problem of God and Horrendous Suffering.

And it isn’t just natural evils that God positively created and maintains, it is also unpoliced crime—God helps no one, and allows everything. He effects no justice on Earth. He abandons the drowning to the sea. He looks away from children being raped by his own priests while maintaining all the atomic bonds and metabolisms and anatomies and other physics that enable it. God holds every rape victim down. And never reports the crime. He’s a mafia boss dodging every subpoena. He’s the madman murdering millions of children with his deliberately engineered weapons of mass destruction. And he left no instructions for vaccine development with his terrestrial henchmen. He murders them too, and their kids. Because, fuck them, I guess? It’s hard to think of anything anyone could describe that is more evil than this. Yet what Ward is saying is that a child-killing biowarfare madman is literally, essentially, what god is.

The irony is that, even within the internal logic of Ward’s sick rape- and murder-apologetics here, what he is saying still diminishes his God. Because it means humans can create things God could not. Humans have powers God lacks. God therefore does not contain all things and does not have all powers. In fact, this means humans can think up ideas before God ever did. As Ward says, “Whatever evil” God “did not know from his own sinfulness, he knows, in abundance, from hearing the confessions of many sinners” (pp. 59–60). That means humans can think of things God cannot, and before he could ever have. Which is a point I have explored before, when noting that either God Maximally Enjoys Getting Gangbanged or humans have knowledge God lacks and therefore God is not omniscient. I’m sure Ward would reckon that as some sort of godless sin, but that doesn’t escape the point I am making.

Whether we call these kinds of things sins or evils or not, all the things Ward wants to dismiss as sins or evils that God can only learn of by proxy (hearing sinners “confess” to them—and, one also has to suppose, telepathically sharing their corresponding experiences?) are not just powers humans have over God, but knowledge that humans have over God. Which means God cannot have planned ahead to avoid them, because (according to Ward) he could not even conceive of them before he created anything, or indeed before even humans existed. Which means God cannot have made the best choice of world design, because he lacked the requisite knowledge to avoid unnecessary evils. This is fatal to Ward’s conception. It destroys everything he insists he needs to believe about his God. And it casts into serious doubt his entire hypothesis about divine ideas. His theory leaves God a cognitive cripple.

And that’s it. Ward rounds out the book with some musings on various obscure theories of no relevance to reality (like whether God is compatible with water possibly not being H2O, pp. 60–61, or with the existence of human art, pp. 61–62), and with a stock “Praise God” epilogue (pp. 62–64).

Conclusion

This is all sincere and jovial stuff. Ward is a nice guy. He really believes what he is saying. And he is genuinely introspective and humble. He’d be great company over drinks. But he’s just wildly wrong about too many things. Like the very best of men who nevertheless is convinced he is the reincarnation of Napoleon’s maid. How do you respond to that? I can only offer my honest take. And so here we are.

Ward’s entire project is based on assumptions that are already nonsense before he has even begun. Not just that his convoluted and improbable God exists, or that reasoning backwards is a reliable method, but so much else, like his objection to “pantheistic” solutions to his stated problem that “if this world is god then there is no god worthy of unconditional worship” because of nature’s “foibles” (p. 48). I touched on this weird idea of worth before. But it bears repeating that, first, this is methodologically invalid—you can’t start with what you want to be the case and argue to it; to know what is true you have to start with the evidence and argue from it. If God is Nature, then God is Nature. And maybe, as a matter of fact, God isn’t worthy of “unconditional” devotion (which I assume means “non-transactional” devotion). You can’t “wish” facts away (or into existence) with feelings about what “would be worthy of worship” or what you “would want to worship.” But even more importantly, there is no difference between nature having “foibles” and Ward’s concept of God as maker and thus chooser of exactly all those same foibles. What difference is there between embodying foibles and causing them that should change any opinion of worth? Well, none. Ward’s concept of “worth” is simply not justifiable by any axiological logic.

Ward’s conception of worthiness is also divorced from all real-world assignments of worth. No one decides what to value, or whom to deem worthy of devotion, for example, based on such a distinction as this. Even Ward understands this point, contradicting himself when he insists we cannot separate being (hence embodying) good from doing good when defining God (p. 37). They are the same thing in every sense relevant. Oops. I guess God cannot cause foibles without embodying them after all! Every defect of nature can only stem from some corresponding defect in God. Otherwise they would not exist. And if Ward tries to use his backwards methodology to solve this by tautologically insisting that anything God makes, including nature’s “foibles,” is therefore perfect and not a foible—well, eeesh, I’m sorry to tell you, but the pantheist can say exactly the same thing right back at you, pal! No way to win there. Ward is doomed.

This is the kind of damage theology does to a rational mind. And it’s not to be admired or sought after. It’s barely even worth our examination. Reality is a much more productive target of our intellectual efforts than this. Even fiction is a more productive target of our intellectual efforts than this. And that’s before we even get to Ward’s God being a genocidal homophobic sexist, or Jesus being an asshole whom not even his own devoted believers listen to, or Christianity being an especially ridiculous conspiracy theory. No one should be wasting so much intellectual energy trying to make this work. You’d be better off trying to make something more empirically logical work. Like, make humanism logical, and a pursuit worthy of unconditional devotion. Surely you can pull that off, even more easily, if you can contort your way into making a terrifying cosmic monster somehow have all possible ideas without being diminished by it according to some weird alien standard of dignity. Theists are just making too much work for themselves, and to no admirable end.

Even within the closed box of his strange worldview, Ward’s theory of divine ideas makes no analytical sense, and contradicts all observations, and thus has already been empirically falsified. This cannot be how any God’s mind works. The only silver lining is that that’s fine, because there is no God to “figure out.”