Personal Idealism

Keith Ward

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506484471
• eBook ISBN: 9781506484488
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

A short, definitive account of Keith Ward's theology, based on the philosophy of personal idealism, this book records his views about God, revelation, the kingdom of God, life after death, the incarnation, atonement, and the Trinity. In summary, it is a concise and clear account of most central Christian doctrines, formed in the light of modern science and Idealist philosophy.

In the My Theology series, the world's leading Christian thinkers explain some of the principal tenets of their theological beliefs in concise, pocket-sized books.

1

The Existence of God

HAVING BEEN AN atheist, I know that if there is no God, there is no reason to take Jesus seriously, since he was mistaken about some of the most important questions of life. So one big question to address is whether there is a God, and we have to ask first what we mean by God, what God is like.

God in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian traditions, is taken to have supreme knowledge, supreme creative power, and supreme goodness. If such a being created anything, it would create things for the sake of their intrinsic goodness or value. An intrinsic value is something that is worth existing just for its own sake. For instance, if you ask, ‘Why aim at happiness?’, the only obvious answer is, ‘Because it is good’. There is a good reason for any conscious being to choose it. It is not good as a means to something else; it is intrinsically good; it is reasonable to choose it just for its own sake.

Other intrinsic values are states such as: knowledge, understanding, creativity (ability to do new things), the appreciation of beauty, and friendship (which includes co-operation and compassion). These are states which are intrinsically good, they are worth-while goals or purposes for any conscious, feeling, choosing (intelligent) being.

I think that a supreme mind (God) would choose for itself the highest degree of such intrinsic values which could co-exist. If friendship is a great intrinsic good, it will create other minds to which it can relate.

This means that the cosmos will have what is called a personal explanation. This explains why something is as it is because it is intrinsically good, and is chosen by a conscious being for that reason. Personal explanation, in terms of purposes and values, is quite different from scientific explanation, which is in terms of initial physical states and predictable laws, without reference to purposes and values at all. It looks as though if we want to explain our world, personal explanation must be added to scientific explanation. In fact, scientific explanation cannot account for purposes and values, whereas personal explanation is a good explanation of why the initial physical states and laws are what they are – because they seem to be exactly what is required to make the specific intrinsic goods of this universe possible.

If some ultimate mind, which knows all possibilities, knows which are good, acts to realise some good states, and enjoys them, that would be a completely satisfactory explanation of why the cosmos exists. That is the hypothesis of God.

Some people think that a supreme mind could not exist without a brain. But I know that I have thoughts and feelings before I learn that they are connected, in an admittedly mysterious way, to my brain. As the philosopher David Hume said, what I can without contradiction conceive apart could logically exist apart. I cannot see any contradiction in the existence of thoughts and even perceptions existing without any physical body or brain. There may be a deeply hidden contradiction, but if we cannot find one, we have to remain open to the possibility that non-embodied minds could exist. God cannot be ruled out just by definition.

But, some people ask, if we explain the universe by saying that some Mind created it, what created that Mind? God, the supreme Mind, created time, so is not in time (God is timeless). If God is timeless, God cannot be brought into being, for then there would be a time when God was not, followed by a time when God was. That is impossible. It follows that the question, ‘What created God?’ is a nonsensical question. It asks, ‘Who brought into being something which is incapable of being brought into being?’ And this is nonsense. Ultimate Mind is eternal, and cannot be caused or destroyed.

If an eternal Mind created the cosmos, it made something which was always possible into something actual, and it did so for a purpose, in order to create good states. That is what minds do, when they are working properly. Possibilities cannot just exist on their own, because possible things do not actually exist. If there really are possibilities, they must exist in something that is actual. The obvious place where possible things exist is in minds. Even in our minds, we can think of many possible things. Eternal Mind thinks of every possible thing. So, this Mind is maximally knowing.

Some people say that God is omnipotent and omniscient. I do not object to that, but if so, omnipotence cannot mean that God can do absolutely anything, and omniscience cannot mean that God knows absolutely everything, past, present and future. That would lead to logical problems, but they are easily avoided. God cannot do anything that contradicts God’s own nature. God cannot, for instance, do something evil, or commit suicide, or turn into a frog. But God can still be maximally powerful – more powerful than any other being, actual or possible.

God is also a personal being who cooperates with and responds to finite beings who are free and temporal. For God realises in the divine being all perfections, and they will include the creative ability to do new things and the capacity for friendship and love. If God is creative and responsive in such ways, God must be capable of change, and so in some sense temporal (but not confined to our spacetime, of course). I have said that God is eternal, but the more complex fact is that God is eternal and changeless in some respects and free and changing in others. There is no problem in this; for instance, one can be necessarily loving, but changing in the ways of expressing that love. God can exist, be maximally creative, knowing, and loving, all eternally and changelessly, yet there may be many changing ways in which God expresses creativity, and many things that God has not decided yet. Even God cannot know what those are. There are some states which even a maximally knowing and maximally creative being cannot know. God is still, however, maximally knowing, knowing more than any other actual or possible being.

Another important property of God is that if all possible worlds exist in the mind of God (as possibilities), then God must ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Existence of God
• 2. Good and Evil
• 3. The Philosophy of Idealism
• 4. Revelation
• 5. Interpreting the Bible
• 6. The Kingdom of God
• 7. The World to Come
• 8. The Incarnation
• 9. The Atonement
• 10. The Trinity and the Redemption of the Cosmos
• Appendix