The Best of All Possible Worlds

There are two questions that have divided the thinkers of history, from antiquity to the early modern period, like nothing else. First: is there a God? Second: if there is, how could it be that He would allow evil to exist in the world? One of the most prominent figures who debated this issue was Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. In this article, we’ll talk about how he tried to reconcile belief in God with the existence of evil in the world. 

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The Last Polymath

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) is regarded as one of the last polymaths in history. All-rounders like him – who knew all there was to know about mathematics, philosophy, law, physics, languages and God knows what else – have been around forever. In ancient times there was Aristotle, who dissected fish with one hand and wrote a work of dramatic theory – which is still relevant today – with the other. In the Islamic Golden Age there was Ibn Sina (Latinised as Avicenna), in the Middle Ages there was Albertus Magnus and in the Renaissance there was Leonardo da Vinci. 

And in the Baroque era, there was Leibniz. To give you a quick idea of the manifold fields of activity this endlessly busy thinker was engaged in, here’s a list of some of the projects he worked on: he planned the construction of a submarine, produced evidence of the human subconscious, thought up some ways to improve door locks, invented parts for one of the first mechanical computing machines, documented the binary system in mathematics, developed infinitesimal calculus and co-founded modern linguistics. There’s really no gravestone big enough to fit all that on it! Over the course of the 18th century, however, this species of universal genius gradually died out, because each field of knowledge became so broad that no single thinker, even the most talented, could excel in all of them at once. Sooner or later, they had to specialise.

Theodicy: The Problem of Evil

As a polymath, Leibniz also grappled with one of the most important questions that has preoccupied humanity for millennia. How can it be that God – after all, most people believed in God at the time – would allow evil to exist in the world? If you believe that God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good – as is asserted in the Christian understanding of God, at least – then you’re faced with a major problem. This problem can be described roughly as follows: 

Either God wants to eliminate evil, but can’t – which is impossible, since God is all-powerful.

Or He can eliminate evil but doesn’t want to – which is also impossible, since He is all-good. 

Or He doesn’t want to and He can’t – which, logically, can’t be possible either.

Attempts to Resolve the Problem

There have been several attempts to resolve this problem. Perhaps the simplest solution is to become an atheist. We could also try to resolve the contradiction between God and evil by arguing that evil is not, in fact, evil, but rather the absence of good. This argument provides an answer to the claim that an all-merciful God could not possibly bring forth evil: it asserts that God does create good after all, but that, here and there, humanity still fails to be wholly good. And that makes sense – after all, if man were perfect, he would be God. Others say that we need the bad, the ugly, the corrupt in the world in order to be able to recognise good, beauty and purity at all. Kant said that the problem was simply an overburdening of human reason, which is stretched to its limits by this question. And what did Leibniz say? 

The Best of All Possible Worlds

In his treatise, Leibniz comes to the conclusion that the existence of God is not at all incompatible with the existence of evil in the world. According to him, our world is – and this phrasing would end up bringing him more trouble down the line – ‘the best of all possible worlds’. What did he mean by that? The basic idea is that there are countless possible worlds. Worlds that we can imagine, that have existed for as long as ours and are just as fully formed, but differ in certain aspects. For example, we could imagine a world in which there are only four continents. Or a world inhabited entirely by dark-haired people. Secondly, Leibniz asserts that everything that exists must be fully explicable by some reason. The very fact that our world exists, therefore, means that there must be a reason for its existence. But it also means that there must be some explanation for the evil in our world. God has a good reason for allowing evil to exist, even if we don’t know or understand it. We just don’t see the big picture. We may believe that it would be better to live in a world that is just like ours minus the war, murder and disease. But God knows much more than we do. In fact, He is all-knowing, meaning He can see everything that has ever happened or that ever will happen. Only He knows about all possible worlds and, since He is also all-good and all-powerful, He must have actually chosen the best of all possible worlds – ours. We may not understand it, but that is not because it is not true, but rather because we cannot understand it.

The Big Picture

Leibniz’ aim here was to relavatise evil by placing it in a broader context. Another fascinating idea, related to these concepts, that he develops in his treatise is that everything is interrelated. Every person, every event, every object is connected in countless ways with countless other people, events and objects. It is naive to believe that one could simply subtract all evil and everything else would remain the same. Even the tiniest change in our existing world could have manifold consequences unforeseen by us. Eliminating a lesser evil could even lead to much greater evil. Just think, for example, of the development of the vaccine in the 19th century and the English countryside doctor Edward Jenner, who infected his 11-month-old son with the cowpox virus for the purpose of his experiments. These highly morally questionable experiments on living people are certainly a form of evil – yet ultimately, they resulted in the discovery of the live vaccine, which has helped to save millions of lives and even eradicate some diseases completely. 

In the late 20th century, one concept from advanced mathematics found its way into mainstream popular culture: the ‘butterfly effect’, named after the much-quoted question posed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz: ‘does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?’. The answer to this question is of course ‘yes’, though I am simplifying the theory behind it in the extreme here. This idea that the world is a ‘deterministic dynamic system’, and that any change in this system could trigger incalculable consequences on the other side of the world, was enthusiastically taken up by film-makers and writers and has formed the premise of various films, books and plays. Perhaps this concept does not correspond in detail to the philosophical arguments developed by Leibniz, but the core idea is similar. The world is made up of complex interrelationships and not of simplistic equations, such as God = good, world = evil, so God couldn’t have created the world. Evil is not one-dimensional and, unfortunately, it cannot simply be taken out of the equation.

A Baroque-Era Shitstorm?

This thesis did not make Leibniz popular with everyone, especially not with his French colleague François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire. In response, the latter wrote his satirical novella Candide, or Optimism, a story as appalling as it is darkly funny about how awful the world really is. The naive protagonist encounters murder, death, rape and war at every turn, yet despite everything, he proclaims to the end that this is surely the best of all worlds. I don’t know whether you could call this a Baroque-era shitstorm, because a ‘shitstorm’ tends to involve a statement that provokes a great deal of vehement and public dissent in a very short time. But I’m sure that Leibniz and Voltaire would certainly have clashed on Twitter. 

Other Things You Might Be Interested in: 

Voltaire wrote his novella Candide in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. You can find out why this earthquake shook people’s faith in this article.

Alain de Botton gives you a sophisticated rundown of Voltaire’s Candide in this YouTube video.

The BBC released an excellent podcast episode ‘The Ontological Argument’ that focusses on a related question – does God exist and how can we prove it?