> In such a way, Leibniz, to cite Milton, dared to “justify the ways of God to men.” Voltaire responded with a snarky misreading that exploited the undeniable empirical fact that evil was not balanced by good in the lives of every discreet individual. But Leibniz made no such claim. The best world was optimized as a whole, containing just as much good and evil as was required for the totality of creation.
I like this paragraph. I've never been a big fan of Voltaire's criticism (although I may have not understood it fully, not being a philosophy expert of any kind). To me it always seemed like Liebniz tried to explain why there was suffering on the whole, and Voltaire responding with "there is suffering!". Like you are not really arguing the point.
My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase. I assume God was not forced to create a world?
Couldn't that be a misreading of Voltaire though? I didn't interpret Candide as "there is suffering", I interpreted it as "this is obviously not the best possible world and no logical gymnastics can convince me it is"
(With the collorary that logic is pretty useless in moral philosophy if it's only used to find contrived justification for the status quo.)
> My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase.
Is that better? it would also require not having all the good things from creation.
Nah, just create the world at a state where modern medicine can cure cancer, like we're on the slow road to doing.
In the 1800s someone might have asked "if suffering is required and a child is going to die of a systemic infection, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase".
To me it's clear that human flourishing without much suffering is possible in this universe and it's more about knowledge and power to prevent suffering being hard to come by. The kind of knowledge that e.g. could have been written down in ancient religious books or whatever if we had a best possible world.
> My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase. I assume God was not forced to create a world?
It is not really possible to answer these questions when one does not know the spiritual infrastructure. Eg, say reincarnation of the soul is real, and in a previous life a soul has been in the body of an industrialist on whose account cancer causing pollution was spewed out. In the next incarnation, it seems valid for that soul to experience the effect of the earlier incarnation's actions. If that is it, the soul may in fact be learning and growing, which may be the point of the exercise.
I know that this is all conjecture, but I hope I am relaying my point - that without understanding the spiritual domain, these sorts of moral appraisals are moot.
That is a really excellent point and in fact gets at the difficulty of arguing any rational point about religion. I'd guess that every rational argument that appeals to religion at all can be made to work or not work depending on this background "spiritual infrastructure". This is one reason why rationalists often feel like religious thinkers are moving the goalposts.
Maybe the 5-year-old who died of bone cancer was just playing Roy on the hardest difficulty.
However, this shiftiness also undermines every religious platitude as well. God loves you, everything happens for a reason, etc. etc. etc. -- maybe, or maybe God is trapped in a human coma patient and Loki is just fucking with us. If you have degrees of freedom over this "spiritual infrastructure" then it's completely impossible to reach any conclusion.
I think you and Voltaire are thinking along the same lines. Both are a rejection of a bloodless utility maximisation creed on the simple basis that human morality just doesn’t work that way.
"Their first child, Sofya, had been conceived in Baden-Baden, and was born in Geneva on 5 March 1868. The baby died of pneumonia three months later, and Anna recalled how Dostoevsky "wept and sobbed like a woman in despair"."
So Dostoevsky suffered the pain of losing a child.
Despite that, an argument about "tear of child" was put into antagonist's mouth.
> Leibniz challenged “humanity to participate in the work of striving toward perfection,”
> Because the world is the creation of a perfect being, it can achieve only the “best possible” state short of divine perfection.
That's a lot of presumptions: That the creator is perfect, there is even a perfect, what I (Leibniz) call perfect is the god's/gods' perfect, ... while not giving a frame of reference.
I find this a common theme for those who are struggling to marry religious beliefs with logic.
> That's a lot of presumptions: That the creator is perfect, there is even a perfect, what I (Leibniz) call perfect is the god's/gods' perfect, ... while not giving a frame of reference.
The Creator (First Mover) being perfect is not a presumption, but rather a conclusion; see Corollary 1.3:
This an important insight to this that I feel many people miss. Most of us consider "striving for perfection" to be equivalent to striving for the "absolute best". Real life often has no absolute best option. Real life is much more like an intricate web of interconnected rock-paper-scissors like relationships and choices, where "better" or "worse" is highly contextual and even conflicting. Aeon had a really nice essay about the problem[0].
Perhaps we tend to have a cultural blindness to this in cultures with European heritage due to the legacy of Plato's "perfect forms", and later how Christianity positions God.
Meanwhile the realists found the world to be a combustion chamber from life that adapted itself to the combustion chamber and whorships the adaption process instincts.
And we all agreed that staying in the surplus valley of the combustion process is nice, as long as science can deliver. And now we have to jam machinery into our lifes so we can remain sentient, while at the same time speculating for another delivery of surplus coming down the line. Panopticon here, social networks there- and it does nothing yet, atrocities in wartime and civil unrest are still rampant.
Perfection for Leibniz might be considered more of a logical concept than an observable state. After all, he uses the same thing to argue (somehow) for the existence of god! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#ExiGod
This leads to some strange conclusions about perfection that aren't intuitive, and sometimes seem monstous.
I’m reminded of Pythagorean philosophies of harmony that quickly reveal the imperfections inherent to math, ie right triangle with two sides of one unit producing square root of two or Pythagorean tuning which is so perfect it is imperfect (eg the wolf fifth)
It's actually deductive, application of logic: given some concept, develop the theory it generates (the set of its consequences). The "rationalist" way.
The real context may not necessarily be that of "beliefs" (of doctrinal beliefs as an object... Possibly as a subject, instead).
> A key to Leibniz’s view is symmetry of creation. The best only emerges against the worst, the beautiful against the ugly, the harmonious against the dissonant.
Leibniz's surviving corpus is massive and sprawling (far larger than any other member of the Republic of Letters) so it could be that i haven't read whatever this is a reference to, but I don't recognise this sense of balance. For Leibniz as i understand him ours is the best of possible worlds because God created it to be this way, in his infinite benevolence and wisdom, and whatever the calamities occur must be part of some kind of plan of which we can only be ken (apperceptive) to a fraction thereof.
Reading Leibniz is like standing at the gate of modern and medieval thought. He didn't so much 'ransack' ideas, as this piece says he does, as try to reconcile even the most contradictory of positions. It's odd but exquisite.
If anyone wants to jump in I would recommend Lloyd Strickland's annotated translation of the Monadology (Leibniz's Monadology). Or really anything by Strickland, including his book on Leibniz on binary. See Strickland's website: http://www.leibniz-translations.com/
The balance idea sounds like misremembered Hegel. I think the best of all possible worlds theory should be seen for what it is: an attempt to reconcile the idea that a perfect god made the world with its observable imperfections. It’s intellectually more satisfying than the “fallen world” idea which just leads to more questions, and it remains compatible with mainstream Christian doctrine.
If you want to reject mainstream Christian doctrine that’s fine, but it’s not what Leibniz was trying to do.
In any event, his most lasting influence isn’t even in the realm of philosophy. Dude was a genius.
> intellectually more satisfying than the “fallen world” idea which just leads to more questions, and it remains compatible with mainstream Christian doctrine.
Doesn't mainstream Christian doctrine say that we're in a fallen world? Isn't that bit about "by Adam's sin we all sinned" (I'm forgetting the rhyme) a pretty central part of the catechism? (basically Romans 5:12)
Now as to God creating a universe in which a fall like that could occur (one that emphasizes free will), is that perhaps what Leibniz was addressing?
Pretty hard considering Hegel would not even be born a few decades after Leibniz died. Agreed that it is preferable to the "fallen world" starting point of so many other philosophies. Once you think the world is fallen or broken, the only remaining thing is trying (and waiting ;) ) to bring about some kind of Utopia by changing humankind, nature, etc..
Leibniz independently invented calculus, including the notation for the derivative that is most common today.
He also basically invented computer science -- he did pioneering work in binary arithmetic, designed a mechanical calculator, and came up with the concept of a "universal language", which was an early attempt at codifying the rules of logic and reason into a form that could be operated upon mechanically.
I need to plug “why evil exists” [1] as it was where I first learned about Leibniz and how he framed the renascentist period as one where men got closer to God through progress, until shook by the Lisbon earthquake. It is in audiobook form and starts with Gilgamesh all the way to pope Benedict XVI.
In Ideas That Created the Future [1], a curated and edited set of influential computer science papers, the Leibniz contribution is "The True Method" [2], which I read more or less as "if we could formalize everything, we could use mathematical methods to find answers to all questions".
In the collection of papers, it's picked because of its ideas later formalized in Boolean logic, and logic programming in general.
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I like this paragraph. I've never been a big fan of Voltaire's criticism (although I may have not understood it fully, not being a philosophy expert of any kind). To me it always seemed like Liebniz tried to explain why there was suffering on the whole, and Voltaire responding with "there is suffering!". Like you are not really arguing the point.
My question has rather been that, if suffering is required and a child getting bone cancer and dying at five is the best of all possible worlds, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase. I assume God was not forced to create a world?
(With the collorary that logic is pretty useless in moral philosophy if it's only used to find contrived justification for the status quo.)
Is that better? it would also require not having all the good things from creation.
In the 1800s someone might have asked "if suffering is required and a child is going to die of a systemic infection, maybe the whole project should have been scrapped at the planning phase".
To me it's clear that human flourishing without much suffering is possible in this universe and it's more about knowledge and power to prevent suffering being hard to come by. The kind of knowledge that e.g. could have been written down in ancient religious books or whatever if we had a best possible world.
It is not really possible to answer these questions when one does not know the spiritual infrastructure. Eg, say reincarnation of the soul is real, and in a previous life a soul has been in the body of an industrialist on whose account cancer causing pollution was spewed out. In the next incarnation, it seems valid for that soul to experience the effect of the earlier incarnation's actions. If that is it, the soul may in fact be learning and growing, which may be the point of the exercise.
I know that this is all conjecture, but I hope I am relaying my point - that without understanding the spiritual domain, these sorts of moral appraisals are moot.
Maybe the 5-year-old who died of bone cancer was just playing Roy on the hardest difficulty.
However, this shiftiness also undermines every religious platitude as well. God loves you, everything happens for a reason, etc. etc. etc. -- maybe, or maybe God is trapped in a human coma patient and Loki is just fucking with us. If you have degrees of freedom over this "spiritual infrastructure" then it's completely impossible to reach any conclusion.
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This is an argument made by one of the Dostoevsky characters, a famous "tear of a child" argument.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyodor_Dostoevsky
"Their first child, Sofya, had been conceived in Baden-Baden, and was born in Geneva on 5 March 1868. The baby died of pneumonia three months later, and Anna recalled how Dostoevsky "wept and sobbed like a woman in despair"."
So Dostoevsky suffered the pain of losing a child.
Despite that, an argument about "tear of child" was put into antagonist's mouth.
Like a very long joke, which builds and builds and builds and builds, the punchline in the end arrives.
It's in the last sentence: "Yes, but you have to work for it". (I.e. he intended to stress an outer point.)
> Because the world is the creation of a perfect being, it can achieve only the “best possible” state short of divine perfection.
That's a lot of presumptions: That the creator is perfect, there is even a perfect, what I (Leibniz) call perfect is the god's/gods' perfect, ... while not giving a frame of reference.
I find this a common theme for those who are struggling to marry religious beliefs with logic.
The Creator (First Mover) being perfect is not a presumption, but rather a conclusion; see Corollary 1.3:
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/11/first-way-part-iv-casca...
(You'll need to go through the series of weblog posts (they're not that long) to get the full logic of the argument.)
See also perhaps Aquinas, "Whether God is perfect?":
* https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1004.htm
This an important insight to this that I feel many people miss. Most of us consider "striving for perfection" to be equivalent to striving for the "absolute best". Real life often has no absolute best option. Real life is much more like an intricate web of interconnected rock-paper-scissors like relationships and choices, where "better" or "worse" is highly contextual and even conflicting. Aeon had a really nice essay about the problem[0].
Perhaps we tend to have a cultural blindness to this in cultures with European heritage due to the legacy of Plato's "perfect forms", and later how Christianity positions God.
[0] https://aeon.co/essays/attempts-to-choose-the-best-life-may-...
If understood in a very mystic transcending meaning of "creation" maybe, otherwise it reads still like dogma to me.
And we all agreed that staying in the surplus valley of the combustion process is nice, as long as science can deliver. And now we have to jam machinery into our lifes so we can remain sentient, while at the same time speculating for another delivery of surplus coming down the line. Panopticon here, social networks there- and it does nothing yet, atrocities in wartime and civil unrest are still rampant.
This leads to some strange conclusions about perfection that aren't intuitive, and sometimes seem monstous.
His argument from contingency is probably a better one:
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/02/avicenna-aquinas-an...
I’m reminded of Pythagorean philosophies of harmony that quickly reveal the imperfections inherent to math, ie right triangle with two sides of one unit producing square root of two or Pythagorean tuning which is so perfect it is imperfect (eg the wolf fifth)
It's actually deductive, application of logic: given some concept, develop the theory it generates (the set of its consequences). The "rationalist" way.
The real context may not necessarily be that of "beliefs" (of doctrinal beliefs as an object... Possibly as a subject, instead).
It is formally proven that an entity that encompass all qualities of a God must exist.
If I'm reading that article correctly, the criticism to Gödel is the same criticism I had for Leibniz:
> A proof does not necessitate that the conclusion be correct, but rather that by accepting the axioms, the conclusion follows logically.
> Many philosophers have called the axioms into question.
Leibniz's surviving corpus is massive and sprawling (far larger than any other member of the Republic of Letters) so it could be that i haven't read whatever this is a reference to, but I don't recognise this sense of balance. For Leibniz as i understand him ours is the best of possible worlds because God created it to be this way, in his infinite benevolence and wisdom, and whatever the calamities occur must be part of some kind of plan of which we can only be ken (apperceptive) to a fraction thereof.
Reading Leibniz is like standing at the gate of modern and medieval thought. He didn't so much 'ransack' ideas, as this piece says he does, as try to reconcile even the most contradictory of positions. It's odd but exquisite.
If anyone wants to jump in I would recommend Lloyd Strickland's annotated translation of the Monadology (Leibniz's Monadology). Or really anything by Strickland, including his book on Leibniz on binary. See Strickland's website: http://www.leibniz-translations.com/
If you want to reject mainstream Christian doctrine that’s fine, but it’s not what Leibniz was trying to do.
In any event, his most lasting influence isn’t even in the realm of philosophy. Dude was a genius.
Doesn't mainstream Christian doctrine say that we're in a fallen world? Isn't that bit about "by Adam's sin we all sinned" (I'm forgetting the rhyme) a pretty central part of the catechism? (basically Romans 5:12)
Now as to God creating a universe in which a fall like that could occur (one that emphasizes free will), is that perhaps what Leibniz was addressing?
He also basically invented computer science -- he did pioneering work in binary arithmetic, designed a mechanical calculator, and came up with the concept of a "universal language", which was an early attempt at codifying the rules of logic and reason into a form that could be operated upon mechanically.
Only thing I’ve read by Voltaire but it slapped.
[1] https://books.google.pl/books/about/Why_Evil_Exists.html?id=...
In the collection of papers, it's picked because of its ideas later formalized in Boolean logic, and logic programming in general.
[1]: https://direct.mit.edu/books/edited-volume/5003/Ideas-That-C...
[2]: https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/624726/3/The%20true%20method.pdf