Sufficient Reason for the Best Possible World
Leibniz, Classical Theism, and the Problem of Evil - Chapter 1 (part 1)
Greeting readers! For those who follow Theological Letters (I thank all of you), you know that I am up against a literary deadline. I have a forthcoming book on Leibniz and the problem of evil with Routledge. Longtime followers of Theological Letters may remember me posting about this back when I was first writing the volume (here).
Well, my mid-August deadline is fast approaching, and I have dutifully cleared the decks, so that I can focus on completing my revisions on time. As promised at the close of March, I would share my progress as I go. I write today to make good on that promise.
On March 30, I posted the updated Introduction to the book. I have once again revised it and posted the link below. If you have not read it, I recommend starting there.
Today, I offer the opening of Chapter 1, Sufficient Reason for the Best Possible World. The chapter is too long to post all at once, so I’ll be posting sections as I finish them. This means you’ll be seeing more frequent posts than usual until the manuscript is complete.
So, with that, I present to you the opening of Chapter 1 of Leibniz, Classical Theism, and the Problem of Evil: Why Classical Theism Must Affirm That Our World Is the Best of All Possible Worlds. Grab a cup of coffee, sit back, and enjoy. And if you have yet to read the Introduction, take a look at that before settling in with chapter 1. Enjoy!
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Chapter 1
Sufficient Reason for the Best Possible World
No fact can hold or be real, and no proposition can be true, unless there is a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise.
— G. W. Leibniz (E 707)
… [W]e must seek the reason for the existence of the world, which is the whole assemblage of contingent things, and we must seek it in the substance which carries the reason for its existence with it and which is of consequence necessary and eternal.
— G. W. Leibniz (G 6.106)
In January 1665, the Journal des sçavans (“Journal of the Learned”) arrived on the shelves of book sellers in Europe. With pages littered in book reviews, accounts of scientific experiments and discoveries, and articles about philosophy and theology, the journal was the first European periodical created for public discourse about science and philosophy. On June 27 and again on July 4 of 1695, the ink-soaked pages of the journal would bear the name G. W. Leibniz, as the philosopher of Leipzig offered his first published presentation of his novel theories of substance and causality to the public.1
Novel hardly begins to describe the picture of our world that Leibniz paints. A more careful look at his theories appears in later chapters, but for now, let it suffice that Leibniz rejects our “commonsense” impressions that the world is composed of dense material objects floating about in space that move and are moved by means of push and pull. Instead, the various changes in our world are plotted by divine Wisdom before the creation by eternal decree, producing a harmony so perfect that we mistake it for a series of crude mechanisms. In Leibniz’s own words, “God … gives to each substance in the beginning a nature or internal force that enables it to produce in regular order … everything that is to happen to it” (L 457). What this means is that every substance has causal independence. The soul of Julius Caesar does not cause his body to cross the Rubicon by means of tugging upon levers that connect soul to body. Rather, his soul spontaneously changes, as does his body, and the changes in these two independent substances correspond so perfectly that they leave the (false) impression that the one moves the other, when in fact the two move independently but harmoniously by divine design.
The brilliance of Leibniz was unquestionable, even to those who ardently disagreed with him. One could hardly be so different from Leibniz in opinion than French atheist and materialist Denis Diderot, which is why his assessment of the philosopher speaks volumes:
Perhaps no man has ever read as much, studied as much, meditated more, written more than Leibniz; … [to Germany] this man does as much honor as Plato, Aristotle, and Archimedes together do to Greece … What he composed about the world, about God, about nature, about the soul, contained the most sublime eloquence. If these ideas had been expounded with the coloring of Plato, the philosopher of Leipzig would cede nothing to the philosopher of Athens.2
Though Leibniz’s genius never failed to impress, his theories often did. One whom his innovative theory of substance (the “monadology”) and causality (“pre-established harmony”) failed to impress was Pierre Bayle, founding editor of the periodical Nouvelles de la république des lettres (“News from the Republic of Letters”) and author of the celebrated, though sometimes maligned, Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary). Bayle balked at Leibniz’s theories, characterizing the Leibnizian world as one in which things spontaneously change without any cause for doing so and in which every event, movement, and change perfectly correspond with one another, like a ship that reaches its port without a pilot or a machine that carries out its purpose without the guiding hand of a man of intelligence. Such a world, says Bayle, is replete with impossibilities so fantastical that not even God himself could arrange them.3
Leibniz was a man who greatly enjoyed a good dialogue partner, so a challenge by an opponent as worthy as Bayle was welcome.4 The Achilles heel of Bayle’s attack is the charge of impossibility. As Leibniz points out, men of finite intellects are capable of building automatons that can walk down a street and turn the corner without the slightest sentients or accompanying awareness of their surroundings. How much more is God, who can create sentient and intelligent beings, capable of producing (G 4.555)?
Strange though this exchange may seem to those unfamiliar with Modern philosophy, the context for the dispute was a burgeoning mind-body problem. Like Leibniz’s theories of substance and causality, we will devote greater attention to this problem in later chapters. But by way of context, much of Modern philosophy carried a taste for mechanical ways of thinking about the world, preferring to see it as composed of dense objects that move through space by means of push and pull mechanisms governed by laws of motion. Yet, if such a characterization is true, then we face a very real problem: How is it that thoughts, which have no density or mass, might cause movements within the body?5 Leibniz represents one group of philosophers who entertain the possibility that they do not, that the correspondence between bodily movements (say, my arm rising) and thoughts (say, the thought to raise my arm) may not be causally connected the way we presume. Nicholas Malebranche had proposed the theory of occasionalism (though the theory predates him),6 according to which God actively produces such correlations, perceiving our thoughts and moving our bodies accordingly.7 Though sympathetic to the independence of mind and body, Leibniz disliked Malebranche’s proposal because it, in Leibniz’s assessment, requires a perpetual miracle, God intervening in and redirecting nature moment to moment.8 Hence, Leibniz’s alternative in which God gives each substance a nature that produces all its future changes in a manner that harmonizes with the changes of other substances within the world.
To no surprise, Leibniz’s rebuttal did not resolve the dispute. Bayle replied to Leibniz in the second edition of his Dictionary, and Leibniz, in turn, replied back, first by letter and then in L’Histoire critique de la république des lettres, the very periodical of which Bayle was founding editor (G4.554-71). Although this exchange began as one about causality, it evolved into something more, into a discussion about the relationship between God and his creation. Steven Nadler summarizes the shift,
The intense but ever cordial exchanges between the German archrationalist and the exiled French skeptic continued until Bayle’s death in 1706. At a certain point in their dialogue, however, the metaphysics of substance and causality gave way to more imperative issues about God, nature, and the relative values of faith and reason. Above all, Leibniz and Bayle opened up a debate on a particularly troublesome series of moral and theological questions regarding the relationship between God and his creation. Some of these problems had been of great concern in medieval religious philosophy and even in pagan antiquity. But they took on new urgency in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as the Reformation movements and their Catholic opponents fought bitterly over the proper doctrines and practices of Christianity.9
Two very closely related issues emerged in the dispute. The one is the relationship between God and evil, which we will consider shortly. The second, which could not be disentangled from the first, is the relationship between truths of faith and truths of reason. Bayle embraces the idea that there is an irreducible conflict between divinely revealed truths — truths of faith — and truths of reason. When articulated by the French skeptic, the claim is stronger than what we find in other Modern philosophers, such as John Locke. Locke grants that there is a difference between truths that can be discerned and demonstrated by reason alone, such as truths of mathematics, and the sorts of truths God reveals by his prophets. The latter concern matters that are not inherently impossible but which cannot be demonstrated by reason alone. For example, might God one day raise the dead and call all to judgment? Locke sees no impossibility in the proposal, but only God can tell us whether such a thing is true because it depends wholly on his choice to do so.10 But Bayle’s claim is much stronger. He writes, “However much there is in man to discern good and evil, notwithstanding we say that what light he has is turned to darkness when it comes to seeking God, so much so that he cannot in any way approach him through his intelligence and reason.”11 In Bayle’s assessment, this darkness does not simply hide from us divine truths but often produces conflict between reason and faith.
Rightly or not, Bayle’s belief appears to be an outgrowth of his “Calvinist” anthropology,12 with its nature-grace divide derived from Augustine of Hippo.13 Nature cannot reach up to God, becoming pleasing to him by its own power but requires God to break in by an act of grace, converting the soul by a supernatural act. And so it is in matters of erudition. A person does not come to believe the truths of faith by means of education but by grace.14 The fact is reflected by the innumerable faithful who, in the quiet of their own hearts, admit a tension between the doctrines of faith but nonetheless cling to such truths, somehow knowing them to be so, not thanks to erudition, but thanks to the work of the Holy Spirit within them.15 Bayle admits that, as rational animals, we cannot help but employ reason in our assessment of articles of faith. But the sober man stops short of subjecting such articles to the rigors of the rational mind, lest one distort such divine truths by formulating them in a way God would not have us do.16
The result when applied to the problem of evil is aptly summarized by Hubert Bost,
… [A] good and omnipotent God (the a priori necessity) and the existence of evil and misery (the a posteriori reality) are irreconcilable in reason, but in faith they coexist. When the rationalists, who have no room for anything that might even have the semblance of being contradictory, claim to have found the solution, they are ridiculed by Bayle …17
The contrast between Leibniz and Bayle could not be more stark. Leibniz explains his position on faith and reason in the opening of his Theodicy, which he published in Amsterdam anonymously four years after Bayle’s death in 1706.18 Before tackling the problem of evil, the philosopher of Leipzig replies to his departed friend and dialogue partner in a Discours preliminaire sur la conformité de la Foy avec la Raison (“Preliminary Dissertation on the Conformity of Faith with Reason”). Leibniz begins with his unwavering trust in the law of contradiction and the resulting conviction that “two truths cannot contradict each other” (G 6.49). For this reason, if truths of faith and truths of reason are, in fact, both true, then they cannot contradict. For both truths have a common source, God. Or as Leibniz puts it, “the light of reason is no less a gift of God than that of revelation” (G 6.67). Any apparent conflict must be precisely that — an appearance only.
Far from being an innovation of Enlightenment rationalism, the position is rather traditional. Medieval Christian realists,19 such as Thomas Aquinas, held the same, believing that truths of logic and mathematics are extensions of divine Wisdom, making them as necessary as the God in whom they are rooted. And for this reason, Aquinas insists, “Nothing which implies contradiction falls under the omnipotence of God.”20 Why? Because the laws of logic are derived from God himself. On this view, God’s omnipotence — his power to do anything — does not mean that God can do whatever word combinations we might string together, be it “square circle” or “a rock so large that it limits the lifting power of a being whose power has no limits.”21 Rather, omnipotence is the power to do any-thing, and formal contradictions are not things. They are nonsense, nothing more than meaningless strings of words cast upon the air.
Lest we think such a view is the invention of scholastics, we find the same position before these Latin writers in the 4th century Arian dispute, which gave rise to the first ecumenical council of the Christian Church — the Council of Nicea (325 AD) — and which occasioned the writing of the (first draft) of the Nicene Creed.22 When discussing the ramifications of Arius of Alexandria’s claim that the Son of God is created, the pro-Nicenes frequently speak about the formal contradictions that result from the heresy, insisting that not even God can perform such nonsense.23
In short, the view Leibniz expresses is exceedingly ancient and formative in Christian thinking from its earliest times. Innovation falls, not to the realists who believe omnipotence to cohere with the law of contradiction, but to medieval nominalists, such as William of Ockham, who piously disapprove of “binding God” with the fetters of reason and logic.24 Modernity gave rise to many philosophers of Ockham’s ilk,25 but Leibniz was not one of them.26 Leibniz very much places himself within the traditional position, insisting that the realm of “Eternal Truths” (Verités Eternelles) — that is, those eternal truths within the Mind of God — include that “which are altogether necessary so that the opposite implies contradiction” (G 6.50).27
In equally traditional fashion, Leibniz admits a difference between the truths that reason discerns of its own accord and the truths that God reveals by some extraordinary revelation. Like other Christian philosophers of his day, he presumes that the latter are transmitted to humanity by means of prophets who are shown to be such by accompanying miracles.28 The faithful believe these revelations, not by direct experience of the truth proclaimed, but by testimony of the prophet — like one who believes things about China by the testimony of those who have traveled there, even if he himself has never been. Leibniz does not even deny the role of the Holy Spirit in moving the rational mind toward faith in such truths (G 6.49-50). What he denies is that the things revealed, or even the miracles by which they are demonstrated, contradict the truths that reason discerns independent of such revelation.29