  Ward strikes an original note in his attempt to accommodate the reality of God with epigenesis. Since he believes that novelties could only be generated by the interplay of genuinely free agents, he conceives of God as limiting himself in the exercise of his power, so as to let the monads free: “Unless creators are created,” he says, “nothing is really created” (437). Having renounced omnipotence, God cannot have knowledge of a future he does not control anymore. This means that the notion of divine omniscience—which in the case of Leibniz takes the form of the doctrine of complete concepts—must be abandoned.  God lacks knowledge of future contingents; nevertheless, he is aware of all the possibilities open to a monad at any moment, so that the future will never come to him as unexpected: “God, who knows both tendencies and possibilities completely, is beyond surprise and his purpose beyond frustration” (479). Clearly, such a God cannot be the perfect, immutable God of Leibniz and of classical theism, but is a developing God whose knowledge of the world increases with the unfolding of cosmic history. How does such a God lure the world towards greater perfection? This question too is left unanswered; always candid, Ward acknowledges that God’s “modus operandi…is to us inscrutable” (479).