Ward, Keith

Keith is the former Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford. An ordained priest in the Church of England, he holds Doctor of Divinity degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Formerly Dean of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Professor of History and Philosophy of Religion at the University of London, he was Canon of Christ Church, Oxford. He is the author of numerous books, including God, Chance and Necessity; God, A Guide for the Perplexed; What the Bible Really Teaches: A Challenge for Fundamentalists; Pascal’™s Fire: Scientific Faith and Religious Understanding; Is Religion Dangerous; Re-thinking Christianity; and the Big Questions in Science and Religion. Following is how Keith introduces his understanding of God: ’œMost religious believers think that there is a God, a supreme being who created the universe, and whose existence does not depend upon that of the universe. Furthermore, in being a creator, God is thought of as free, conscious and active, as intentionally bringing about the universe for some consciously entertained reason. This means that such believers are committed against hard-line materialism. They are committed to the coherence of the idea of a non-embodied consciousness, which can formulate a purpose and implement it by creating a material universe. Theists do not think that the universe somehow has a purpose inherent in itself. They think that there is a creator God, who exists independently of the universe, and who can create it for a purpose. God, for most believers, has knowledge of everything that is possible and actual. God is able to bring about, to make actual, sets of possible states. So God has knowledge and will. The primary object of God's knowledge and will is said by most classical theologians to be the divine being itself’”as Aristotle put it, God's being consists in a "thinking upon thinking". God is aware of and wills or affirms the divine being as it exists in its own proper perfection. So knowledge and will do not, as such, depend upon some material substratum for their existence. Indeed, they are ontologically prior to all material existences. The primary form of being is something like what we know as non-material conscious agency. That is a basic postulate of theism, and it seems a perfectly intelligible one. If God is already perfect in self-knowing and self-willing, why should God create any universe at all? For most theists God has the ability to actualize states which are not states of the divine being itself, and indeed to actualize beings like God, made in the divine image, insofar as they have knowledge and creative will, naturally to a limited degree. The reason God should actualize such beings is normally thought to be that it is good to do so. Such created beings can enjoy something of the enjoyment that God derives from knowing and willing, and so they increase the number of beings who enjoy, which is good. Perhaps, too, God can enjoy different sorts of actualities by co-operating and sharing experiences with such created personal beings. On some Christian interpretations, it is part of the divine nature to be essentially loving, which involves some form of relationship to other persons, and therefore some creation of such persons. Whether or not that is so, created persons are in the Jewish and Christian traditions said to be like God in having knowledge and will, though their knowing and willing is limited in a way that God's is not.