HistoricalChristian.Faith

Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds — is this the optimal world, and was God bound to create it?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: weak — the distinctive Leibnizian thesis, over and above the general greater-good move, is a double one: that among all the worlds God could conceive there is a uniquely best, and that a perfect God was bound by His own goodness to actualize it — so this is that best world, and its every evil is a necessary thread of the optimal whole. That extra strength buys extra vulnerability without extra support. Its keystone premise — that there is a maximum among possible worlds — is unproven and widely rejected: Aquinas, the tradition’s own greater-good champion, holds that God can always make a better world, and the modern “no best world” argument (for any world, a better is conceivable, as for any number a greater) leaves the thesis with no object to pick out. The necessity half strains divine freedom (does God have to create the best?) and Robert Adams argues a perfectly good God need not; and the empirical claim that this is that best world is what Voltaire buried under the Lisbon dead. The salvageable residue — the general greater-good principle, and the bare conditional “an optimizing God would actualize the best if there were one” — survives; the categorical best-of-all-possible-worlds claim does not hold on its best available case. · advanced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Théodicée, 1710)

Related arguments: the greater good — see also The greater-good theodicy (and the felix culpa) — does God permit evil to draw a greater good? (the general move of which this is the strongest species)

The claim

Leibniz’s 1710 Théodicée — the work that coined the word theodicy — presses the greater-good answer to its most confident possible form. God’s intellect contains infinitely many possible worlds, each complete down to the last detail; His goodness inclines Him to create, and His wisdom to create the best; and since (Leibniz holds) there is a uniquely best among them, that is the one He made:

Now this supreme wisdom, united to a goodness that is no less infinite, cannot but have chosen the best… if there were not the best (optimum) among all possible worlds, God would not have produced any.

— Theodicy, Essays §8.¹ The evils of the world are, on this account, not permitted ad hoc for local goods but are the unavoidable accompaniments of the greatest attainable whole: remove any thread and the fabric is, on balance, worse. Leibniz sorts evil into three kinds — metaphysical (the mere finitude of any creature), physical (suffering), and moral (sin) — the last two rooted in the first, so that evil traces ultimately to the bare limitation inseparable from being a creature at all.²

Two claims are bundled here that must be prised apart, because they fail at different points:

• The existence claim: there is a uniquely best possible world (an optimum, a maximum among worlds).
• The necessity claim: a perfectly good and wise God is bound to actualize it — and therefore this world is that best one.

Who advances it

The thesis is Leibniz’s (1710), composed largely to rebut Pierre Bayle’s claim that the problem of evil defeats reason. It has a long prehistory in the greater-good tradition — Augustine and Aquinas both hold that God draws greater goods from permitted evils — but Leibniz alone adds the optimizing and necessitating structure that makes it the “best of all possible worlds.” It became the emblem of Enlightenment optimism, and thereby the target of its most famous assault: Voltaire’s Candide (1759), written after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, made Leibniz’s Dr Pangloss the byword for a faith that calls a world of plague, war, and earthquake “the best of all possible worlds.” In modern philosophy the thesis is treated chiefly as a foil: Robert M. Adams’s “Must God Create the Best?” (1972) is the standard argument that a perfectly good God need not create the best, and the “no best possible world” objection is a fixture of the literature.³

The evidence for

The conditional is sound, and the framing was fertile. Grant that there is a uniquely best world; then an omniscient, omnipotent, wholly good, optimizing God really would seem to have decisive reason to create it. That conditional — “if there is a best, an optimizing God actualizes it” — is hard to fault, and it captures a genuine intuition about perfect goodness. Leibniz’s possible-worlds apparatus, moreover, was no mere flourish: the idea of a space of complete, maximally-specific ways the world might have been became, three centuries later, the working machinery of analytic modal logic and of the very free-will defense that answers the logical problem of evil. As a way of posing the question of God’s creative choice, the framework is powerful.

Leibniz saw the “no maximum” worry and tried to answer it. He did not simply assume an optimum. In §8 he offers a mathematical analogy: where there is no maximum — “nothing distinguished” — “everything is done equally, or… nothing at all is done,” and he takes God’s refusal to leave creation undetermined as itself a sign that a determinate best exists to be chosen. And his “moral necessity” (God is certain to choose the best, but not compelled as by logic) is a real attempt to keep divine freedom while grounding the choice. Whether these succeed is the question; that he engaged them is to his credit.

Adversarial assessment

Both bundled claims fail, and at different joints.

• The existence claim — is there a best at all? This is the decisive objection, and it is old. For any world God could make, a better seems conceivable — add one more happy creature, one more good, subtract one pain — just as for any number a greater can be named. If the series of possible worlds has no upper bound, then “the best possible world” picks out nothing, like “the largest integer,” and Leibniz’s whole argument is left without an object. Strikingly, the tradition’s own greatest greater-good theologian says exactly this: Aquinas holds that “absolutely speaking… God can make something else better than each thing made by Him” — there is no creation so good that omnipotence could not better it.⁴ Leibniz’s §8 reply merely asserts that a maximum exists; the mathematical analogy cuts the other way, since in mathematics unbounded series with no maximum are perfectly ordinary. The existence claim is unproven and probably false.
• The necessity claim — must God create the best? Even granting a best world, it does not follow that a perfect God is bound to create it. Robert Adams argues that a wholly good God who creates a less-than-best (but still good) world wrongs no one: the creatures of the unchosen better world are merely possible, and possess no right to be created, so God’s choosing a good-enough world over the best is an exercise of grace, not a defect of goodness. If Adams is right, the necessity Leibniz needs to identify our world as the best evaporates. And the necessity half cuts against Leibniz elsewhere too: a God who must create the best, and must include just these evils as its necessary threads, strains both divine freedom (critics charged Leibniz’s system with collapsing toward Spinozist necessitarianism) and creaturely freedom (if this world’s sins are necessary constituents of the optimum, in what sense are they free?).
• The empirical claim — is this the best? Even were there a best world and God bound to make it, the identification of the actual world with it is what the world’s suffering seems to refute. This is Voltaire’s assault: to tell the tens of thousands crushed at Mass in the Lisbon earthquake that they inhabit “the best of all possible worlds” is, he says, not consolation but mockery. The point is the evidential problem aimed at optimism: nothing in our experience warrants the claim that no better world was open to omnipotence, and much appears to tell against it.

What survives. The failure of the best-of-all-possible-worlds thesis does not take the general greater-good answer down with it — and this is the important point for the timeline. One can hold that God permits each evil for an outweighing good (greater-good, rated plausible) without holding that the resulting world is the uniquely optimal one, or that God was bound to create it. Indeed the Adams line — God graciously creates a good world, not necessarily the best — keeps everything the theodicy needs while dropping just the two claims that sink Leibniz. The conditional core (“an optimizing God would choose the best if there were one”) is unobjectionable but idle, since its antecedent is probably false. What does not survive is the confident categorical: that ours is demonstrably the best world omnipotence could make.

Assessment

Weak. Leibniz’s best-of-all-possible-worlds thesis does not hold on its best available case. Its keystone — that there is a uniquely best possible world — is unproven and most likely incoherent (for any world a better is conceivable, as for any number a greater), and it is denied by the tradition’s own foremost greater-good theologian, Aquinas, who holds God can always make a better world. The necessity it adds — that a perfect God is bound to actualize the best — is contested by Robert Adams’s “grace” argument and strains both divine and creaturely freedom; and the identification of this world with the best is what Voltaire answered with the Lisbon dead. The extra strength Leibniz claims over the general greater-good move (rated plausible) is precisely what makes his version fail: it stakes the theodicy on a best-world premise it cannot establish. This is a genuinely-advocated argument with a real proponent, a proof-text, and a standing rebuttal, so it earns its own honest rating — and the honest rating is weak. Its salvageable residue is real but modest: the bare conditional (“an optimizing God would choose the best if there were one”) is sound but idle, and everything the constructive tradition actually needs is carried by the general greater-good principle without the best-world overreach. Flag as overreach any use of “this is the best of all possible worlds” as though it were an established result rather than the most vulnerable species of the greater-good move.

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