The Best of all Possible Worlds

I am teaching a Sunday School on Theodicy, and I must say my favorite of all the theodicies that don’t work (which is the same set as the set of all theodicies) is Leibniz’s.

Leibniz is that Leibniz, the one who also invented calculus (independent of Newton, and along a different route ¹). Leibniz proposed a “Best of all Possible Worlds” theodicy, sort of along these lines:

P1) God has the idea of infinitely many universes.
P2) Only one of these universes can actually exist.
P3) God's choices are subject to the principle of sufficient reason, i.e., God has reason for his choices.
P4) God is good.
C: The universe that God chose is the best of all possible worlds. 

Gottfried Leibniz
1646-1716

God was not surprised by the mess that would result from human free will and moral free-agency, and the inevitable resulting pain and suffering. So God solved a massive (nonlinear) optimization problem to minimize the evil and/or to have it achieve the greatest good.

Leibniz’s view distinguishes between three types of evil, viz.,

1) Moral Evil: Can only be performed by volitional beings — creatures with understanding and free will.

2) Natural Evil: Physical suffering -- disease, injury, natural disasters.

3) Metaphysical Evil: Anything less than metaphysical perfection is “evil”.

Man’s finiteness results in a unavoidable departure from even the possibility of metaphysical perfection (essentially finiteness is a defect) and this inherent metaphysical evil results in moral and natural evil and so, metaphysically speaking, evil was um, well, a “necessary evil”.

I think Leibniz was correct in the big picture. God, for his purposes, did create the best of all possible worlds. However, the glaring error in Leibniz's theodicy is to tie the existence of evil to man’s finiteness. After all, Adam and Eve were finite before the fall, and we’ll be finite in glory. This model, contra orthodoxy, suggests moral evil should be present in both circumstances.

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¹ Newton invented calculus to prove he could treat a massive, spherically symmetric mass (like, approximately, the earth and sun) as a point mass located at its center, and to solve differential equations. Leibniz was interested in the area under a curve. Leibniz invented the familiar calculus symbology that we still use today.