One of the classical arguments against the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good God is the fact that evil exists in the world. You don’t have to look far to see it – just turn on the nightly news and you’ll see plenty of terrible things happening. If God exists, why doesn’t He stop these bad things from happening? Gottfried Leibniz advocated a rather radical solution to the problem of evil – he said there was no evil in the world. All the “bad” things that we see are actually good things, although we may not immediately understand why. This week’s piece will examine the specific reasons for his argument that this is the “Best Possible World.”
The Argument
When you were a child and misbehaved, your parents (probably) punished you for it. At the time, it seemed like a terrible wrong, and you couldn’t see any positive aspect to it. Now, however, you (again, probably) recognize that it was for the best. Yes, getting grounded was unfortunate at the time, but it helped you mature and become a better adult for it. Leibniz thinks that those things we call evil can be thought of in the same way. When we were children, we couldn’t see the “big picture” and the good that would come out of our suffering at the time. The same may be true for us as adult humans – we can’t see the good that will come from all the so-called evil that takes place in the world. If your best friend gets murdered, at the time you’re of course going to see it as purely evil, with no redeeming qualities. But, Leibniz believes, this is no different than the child being punished. We only focus on the immediate, and are quick to judge the event as evil without seeing the big picture. When “evil” actions are taken, we must believe that “the course of things (particularly punishment and atonement) corrects its evilness and repays the evil with interest in such a way that in the end there is more perfection in the whole sequence than if the evil had not occurred.” Perhaps in the wake of your friend’s death, you’ll become an advocate for new legislation that ends up saving hundreds of lives, and your life finds direction and meaning. The evil of his murder has now been repaid with interest, as Leibniz says, and the whole sequence of events is now “more perfect” than if you had just become a lobbyist and helped pass the bill.
You might object that this obviously isn’t how things end up. Just look at the Holocaust – nothing good seems to have come out of that. We still turn our back on genocides (like Rwanda), and millions of lives were taken all because of one maniacal dictator. If this evil is going to be “repaid with interest,” God sure is taking his time on this particular loan (and many, many others). Leibniz’ response to this criticism is to agree with the last point – God may be taking his time to sort it all out, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. Even an event as horrific as the Holocaust may, ultimately, produce more good than evil, even if “we cannot always explain the admirable economy of this choice while we are travelers in this world,” and in such a way that the sequence of events would be less than perfect without the Holocaust in there.
The Rebuttal
Leibniz’ argument clearly has a number of issues. First of all, it obviously require belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God. In addition, it still seems to raise a number of problems with Leibniz’ other beliefs. Leibniz believed that “the happiness of minds is the principal aim of God.” If God set up the rules of the universe, and if He wants to maximize happiness, why didn’t He just make it so that people are in constant bliss AND it’s the most perfect set-up imaginable? Why force us to “invest”? Perhaps you’re willing to believe that there is some reason God has which we couldn’t possibly understand, but that’s a pretty big leap of faith.
The Implication
Unlike most of the arguments I look at, if you accept this one as truthful, you’re actually going to feel a whole lot better about your life. No matter what happens, you should be ecstatic knowing that it’s all contributing to the absolute perfection of the universe, and the maximum amount of pleasure imaginable. You just need faith in God, and the inability to believe that He would allow evil in the world.
Additional problems #1:
“Perhaps in the wake of your friend’s death, you’ll become an advocate for new legislation that ends up saving hundreds of lives, and your life finds direction and meaning. The evil of his murder has now been repaid with interest, as Leibniz says, and the whole sequence of events is now “more perfect” than if you had just become a lobbyist and helped pass the bill.”
This is an example of a “Defeat-of-Evil” theodicy, which holds that it’s better for an evil to exist and be “defeated” than for the evil not to exist, which somehow never manages to look less than absurd. Maybe your friend’s death to motivate you to lobby for life-saving legislation, but that’s not the only possible motivation. Why wouldn’t be better for your friend to be alive and you lobby for the legislation for some other reason? If it’s a good thing for the people saved by the legislation to be alive and for your life to have direction and meaning, why isn’t it better for the people saved by the legislation to be alive and for your life to have direction and meaning and for your friend to be alive too?
Basically, it trvialises human existence by reducing it to the banality of a morality play, one in which we (the characters) are very much secondary to the plot.
Additional problems #2:
The Parent Analogy also fails because any responsible parent punishing a child (or allowing them to suffer) is going to make at least some effort to explain to the child (up to the level of the child’s comprehension) why they are being punished (or allowed to suffer) in that way and what lessons they are expected to learn from it. In other words, a responsible parent tries to maximise the transparency of the reasons for punishment/suffering. In the case of God and human suffering we don’t have anything like this.
There’s a nice discussion of this topic here:
http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.ie/2012/06/dougherty-on-parent-analogy-and.html
There’s also the question of why a supposedly omniscient and omnipotent being needs to set things up so that the goods that might compensate for the evils of the world are so obscure. Wouldn’t it be better if they were more transparent? That way at least part of our suffering would be mitigated by our understanding of the reason for it, and our ability to learn the right kind of lesson from it would be enhanced. Isn’t our non-comprehension itself an evil? A Leibnitzian might counter that this evil is itself compensated for by some greater good that is obscure to us, but sooner or later this excuse stops working. Like all evidential arguments, the evidential Argument from Evil has to be based on the evidence available to us now, and its conclusion is going to revisable in the light of future evidence. The “Unknown Compensating Good” gambit doesn’t undermine the provisional conclusion that the existence of evil tells against theism. Frankly, it’s about as germane (and about as convincing) as a creationist arguing that the theory of evolution can be dismissed just because there might be unknown facts of biology that would falsify it.
I always found appealing to the “mysterious ways” (unknown causes) defense against the POE and the problem of nonbelief seems to be a cop-out. I’m not as familiar with Wykstra and the others defending the epistemic theodicies such as the Parent Analogy as I ought to be (and I have a bunch of their material on my ever-growing reading list). But, the problems you pointed out seem sufficient for rejecting the parent analogy (unless they try to counter that God has maximized his transparency through X,Y,Z already, and that’s the best he can do).
Also, thanks for the link. That seems like an interesting critique of CORNEA.
(I also have a question for you; do you run a blog? If so, can you provide a link?)
No, I don’t have a blog, I’m afraid. In fact, limited internet access means that my entire online presence is limited to commenting. Sorry.
I don’t think this account quite does justice to the complexity of Leibniz’s view. Remember that Leibniz would always write with a particular audience in mind. He would give completely different arguments for the same view depending on the expertise of his audience. So while Leibniz often talked about the ‘best possible world’ in terms of ethics and the problem of evil, it was actually grounded by purely metaphysical and mathematical considerations.
The rebuttal section of this article only deals with the most basic, ‘public-facing’ version of Leibniz’s account – the version that he would give to vaguely interested nobles at court and German princesses in correspondence. It ignores all the amazing philosophy going on in the nitty-gritty metaphysical details.
> First of all, it obviously require belief in an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God.
The best possible world is the one with the maximum of diversity, and there are all kinds of complicated notions tied up with this, not least of which are Leibniz’s commitment to the principle of continuity (‘nature doesn’t make leaps’) and his discovery of the differential calculus (which relies on continuously diminishing quantities – there are no ‘gaps’ between elements that do not contain a third element).
The famous example comes at the end of *Theodicy*, where Leibniz gives us an image of a vast pyramid, each of whose blocks is a room containing a particular version of the life of Sextus. So each room is a possible Sextus. In the room at the tip of the pyramid, Sextus rapes Lucretia.
Why is this version of Sextus’s life at the tip of the pyramid? On the one hand, there’s the ethical view: the apparently evil act of Sextus raping Lucretia leads to the otherthrow of the last tyrannical king of Rome and the foundation of the Roman Republic.
But on the other hand there’s the much more complex metaphysical account: the tip of the pyramid is the point at which Sextus enters into relations with every other possible monad. And the version of Sextus that rapes Lucretia converges with the maximum number of other possible monads, in order to form a world that contains the maximum number of *compossible* monads. Again: the criteria are diversity and continuity – metaphysical considerations, not ethical. Understood in this way, Leibniz’s account does not rely on a benevolent God, and maybe not even an omniscient God.
> If God set up the rules of the universe, and if He wants to maximize happiness, why didn’t He just make it so that people are in constant bliss AND it’s the most perfect set-up imaginable?
The nature of monads makes this impossible. Each monad expresses the entire world, but it only expresses a certain region in a clear manner (the rest remains obscure). A monad can increase or decrease its region of clear expression. By increasing its region of clear expression, a monad can become reasonable, and ‘elevate’ itself by more closely resembling the nature of God (who, of course, is the only thing that expresses the entire world clearly). This is what happiness consists in: an increased region of clear expression.
But the key point is that one monad’s increase in clear expression carries with it a corresponding *decrease* in the clear expression of another monad. There is a kind of economy of clear expression, where one monad can only elevate itself at the expense of another. And it is the fact that some monads decrease their region of clear expression which leads to the necessity of evil. Leibniz defines ‘damned’ or evil monads as monads which clearly express one and only one thing: a hatred of God. But by ossifying and reducing their clear expression almost to nothing, these damned monads allow other monads to increase their region of clear expression and elevate themselves towards God. It’s hard not to admire the beauty of Leibniz’s model: evil is not only necessary, but becomes a kind of noble sacrifice on the part of damned monads so that others might be elevated.