Natalia Spitha Philosophy 106: Early Modern European Philosophy Dr.

Griffith Paper 2 11/22/2013

Could God have done better?1

Early on in his Discourse on Metaphysics G.W. Leibniz makes a strong statement about the omnipotence and omnibenevolence of God, namely that he created this world we live in because it is the best world that could possibly exist. As Leibniz writes, [he cannot] approve of the opinion of some moderns who maintain boldly that what God has made is not of the highest perfection and that he could have done much better (Leibniz 225). Such an opinion, he claims, would be fully contrary to the glory of God, because it would give God an evil attribute (under the premise that doing lesser good that you can is relatively evil). However, the arguments that he uses to support this claim make it appear kind of troublesome to me, as I am not in full agreement with his process of justifying that our world is indeed the best possible it could have been. In this paper, I will discuss contrasting arguments on the question of whether a better world could possibly exist, in attempt to show that Leibnizs justification entails some circular reasoning, which suggests that the model of God as simultaneously omnipotent and omnibenevolent is problematic. To begin with, Leibnizs argument about this world being the best possible one does have a logical basis, so it is important to appreciate his perspective before evaluating or dismissing it.
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I would like to acknowledge Jeong-Hwan Bae 16 for our insightful discussion on moral and physical perfection as criteria in Leibnizs evaluation of worlds.

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Starting from the Cartesian idea of God as a perfect, omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient being, Leibniz considers it self-evident that a God possessing all these attributes, and especially being all-powerful and all-good, would never choose to create (or, worse, content to creating due to lack of ability) anything less than the best world that can possibly exist. In the quickly-to-beraised question, but cant we imagine a world better than this one? Leibniz would answer no, because when we think we are imagining a different world, we are only focusing on selective changes (in relation to our current world) we desire, without realizing that the elements of a world are all interrelated and the tiniest change within a world could potentially change everything else about it. In that sense, possible worlds would come in something similar to package deals, in which only certain combinations or sets of substances can exist, and the best of those package deals is our own world. One might see a problem here, because we could argue that, if worlds come in package deals and God cannot create any combination he would like, Gods omnipotence is challenged. However, I would defend Leibniz against this argument, because the real issue here is whether a possible world makes logical sense, not whether a world is a combination of every element, virtue etc. at the ideal level (which according to Leibniz is not logically plausible). God, bound by logic and only logic, has chosen to create the best among the logically possible worlds, in the same way that a talented composer, bound by the available music pitches and only those, could theoretically create the best possible 3-minute wedding song, even though he cant for example, put a rest and a note at the same instant, which is logically impossible.. But what is it that makes the nature of possible worlds similar to a package deal? We can better understand why Leibniz argues for this by taking a look at Leibnizs perception of a world. Reading further into his Discourse on Metaphysics, we can see that Leibnizs cosmology

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views identity as based on what he refers to as substances or monads (from mono, i.e. unit) which are the immaterial building blocks of the universe. The Monadology involves multiple ideas discussing which would go beyond the limits of this paper , but the key principle we should understand from it is that any individual subject is itself a monad, and that the monad incorporates all of the subjects predicates into the subject itself. In Leibnizs words, the nature of an individual substance or of a complete being is to have a notion so complete that it is sufficient to contain and to allow us to deduce from it all the predicates of the subject to which this notion is attributed. (Leibniz 228) To give an example, the Leibnizian monad of Beethoven contains that he was born in 1770, that he would die in 1827, that he would compose 32 sonatas, and everything else about his life. But it also incorporates things such as that he would meet Haydn, or that, in 2009, a symphony orchestra in Illinois would perform and record his 3rd piano concerto but a man in the audience would cough during the recording. As Leibniz would say (he uses the example of Alexander the Great, but makes the same point), in [his] soul there are vestiges of everything that has happened to him and marks of everything that will happen to him and even traces of everything in the universe, even though God alone could recognize them all. (Leibniz 228) What this tells us about the world is that, since each individual substance seems to express, or at least reflect through the process described just above, the whole universe as well as all the other monads-individuals, each individual is fully bound to their particular world and everything that it entails. We cannot change just one thing about the world (for example, remove Adolf Hitler from history) without affecting every other monad in the universe, because Hitler is, in a way, an inseparable part of the identity of every other monad in the universe. As a result, creating a world identical to ours only without Hitler would be logically impossible, because the

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identity of every other individual in that world would also change. Even if one remains skeptical about accepting Leibnizs theory of monads, ones intuition would hardly disagree with the conclusion that even a miniscule change has the ability to alter the course of events in history completely; imagine the hypothetical scenario that Einsteins mother misses a ferry for a few seconds, and that ferry ends up sinking. If she had been a few seconds earlier, Einstein might never have been born, which would have significantly affected the set of scientific knowledge we currently have. In a similar manner, if Hitler had not been born, the behavior of many people in his era would have been different, different people would have met each other at different places, and different people would have been born. The first reaction I had to this argument was to wonder, why is there a problem with ending up with a different world than this one? Removing Hitler from history will probably lead to a world in which I do not exist, but what should God care about this, if the resulting world is better? Leibniz would probably argue, yes, God would not mind if removing Hitler (and me) from history led to a better world; but the problem is that removing Hitler (possibly along with other negatively perceived elements) would not yield a better world in the first place. Our misconception that we can conceive of a better world (when for example we imagine a world in which there was no war or evil in people) comes from the inadequate knowledge we have of the general harmony of the universe and of the hidden reasons for Gods conduct [which] enables us to judge audaciously that many things could have been rendered better. (Leibniz 225) This is consistent with Leibnizs theory of monads that we saw above, since God and only God has the power to see through each monad and view the complex relationships that it has with every other monad in the world. However, while this response shows that we are limited on our understanding of whether

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a change we want to see in the world will actually make it better (maybe removing Hitler is somehow related to a comet striking the earth in the 1940s and destroying humanity!), it still does not provide any evidence that the world we currently live in is the best of all possible worlds. First of all, what criteria define how good a world is? And most importantly for this discussion, do we have any way of quantifying those criteria in order to compare possible worlds? I personally cannot find any satisfying answer, especially to the latter question, in Leibnizs text. For example, when asked to define what the criteria are for evaluating the quality of a world, Leibniz talks about the sought balance between physical perfection and moral perfection. According to Leibniz, a world of physical perfection would be one which is at the same time the simplest in hypotheses and the richest in phenomena (Leibniz 227), as we might think with the number , which is in essence as simple as the ratio of a circumference to a diameter of a circle, but finds applications in explaining multiple more complex phenomena in the external world. Moral perfection refers to the happiness of human minds, whose perfections consist in their virtues (Leibniz 226) and expects human minds to live up to a certain moral standard. The best possible world would then be the one when there is as good of a balance between moral and physical perfection as possible. This premise does not seem justified enough to accept with certainty, but even if we do assume it is true, we need to ask how we can know how well each possible world maintains this balance, which is impossible for a species like us that has only had experience of one world. Leibniz would, as we saw earlier, say that God is the one who is supposed to be (and is) making this judgment, but the question remains: how can we know that he chose the best possible world to create? It is here, back at the initial question, that I find that Leibniz engages in circular reasoning

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in his whole argument. In the start of his argument, Leibniz presents and denounces the moderns claim that God could have done better, which would imply that God is either not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent. But in his attempt to disprove this claim, Leibniz often relies on that exact premise questioned by the moderns, namely that God is omnipotent and omnibenevolent and would have chosen the best possible world, which makes the argument circular. For this reason, even though I genuinely admire the logical process Leibniz follows in his argument for if we accept his initial premise that God is all-good and powerful, his argument stands fairly well I cannot help but thinking, when reading his Discourse, that he is reluctant to question his deeplyengraved religious perspectives, to which he seems to hold on throughout. His argument has a certain beauty in it, but would have been much more plausible to people of varying religious (or a-religious) backgrounds if he had attempted to find an argument for the best possible world independent of his assumption about Gods powerful and wise qualities.

Works Cited Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Discourse on Metaphysics (1686). Modern Philosophy: an anthology of Primary Sources / edited by Roger Ariew and Eric Watkins - 2nd Ed. Hacket Publishing Company. Indianapolis 2009. pp. 224-247.