Best of All Possible Worlds - Criticism

Criticism

Critics of Leibniz, such as Voltaire, argue that the world contains an amount of suffering too great to justify optimism. While Leibniz argued that suffering is good because it incites human will, critics argue that the degree of suffering is too severe to justify belief that God has created the "best of all possible worlds". Leibniz also addresses this concern by considering what God desires to occur (his antecedent will) and what God allows to occur (his consequent will). Others, such as the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga criticized Leibniz theodicy by arguing that probably there is not such a thing as the best of all possible worlds, since one can always conceive a better world, such as a world with one more morally righteous person.

The Theodicy was deemed illogical by the philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell points out that moral and physical evil must result from metaphysical evil (imperfection). But imperfection is merely finitude or limitation; if existence is good, as Leibniz maintains, then the mere existence of evil requires that evil also be good. In addition, libertarian Christian theology defines sin as not necessary but contingent, the result of free will. Russell maintains that Leibniz failed to logically show that metaphysical necessity (divine will) and human free will are not incompatible or contradictory.

The mathematician Paul du Bois-Reymond, in his "Leibnizian Thoughts in Modern Science", wrote that Leibniz thought of God as a mathematician:

As is well known, the theory of the maxima and minima of functions was indebted to him for the greatest progress through the discovery of the method of tangents. Well, he conceives God in the creation of the world like a mathematician who is solving a minimum problem, or rather, in our modern phraseology, a problem in the calculus of variations – the question being to determine among an infinite number of possible worlds, that for which the sum of necessary evil is a minimum.

The statement that "we live in the best of all possible worlds" drew scorn, most notably from Voltaire, who lampooned it in his comic novella Candide by having the character Dr. Pangloss (a parody of Leibniz and Maupertuis) repeat it like a mantra. From this, the adjective "Panglossian" describes a person who believes that the world about us is the best possible one.