Belief in a corporeal God is held to be as great an error as — or perhaps even greater than — idolatry (shirk, شرك). Maimonides sets up a hierarchy of errors by giving examples of things that are more or less wrong than each other. This hierarchy states that the following are instances of increasing degree of “wrongness”:

  1. to believe that someone is standing when in fact they are sitting
  2. to believe that fire is under the air, or that water is under the earth (i.e., that the 4 elements are ordered differently than they really are), or to believe that the earth is flat
  3. to believe that the sun consists of fire, or to believe that the heavens consist of a hemisphere
  4. to beleive that something besides God is to be worshipped.

Similarly, he states that believing wrong things about God, especially believing that he has a body, is “more wrong” than idolatry and invites God’s wrath to an even greater degree than idolatry does. He is convinced that ignorance or tradition is not an excuse for a religious person to continue to hold such beliefs, the same way that ignorance or tradition is not considered sufficient excuse for believing in a mulitplicity of Gods.

In the process of making his arguments, Maimonides puts forward an interesting perspective on idolatry itself.

You must know that idolaters when worshipping idols do not believe that there is no God besides them: and no idolater ever did assume that any image made of metal, stone, or wood has created the heavens and the earth, and still governs them. Idolatry is founded on the idea that a particular form represents the agent between God and His creatures. … By transferring that prerogative [i.e., that of rites of worship] to other beings, they cause the people, who only notice the rites, without comprehending their meaning or the true character of the being which is worshipped, to renounce their belief in the existence of God.