Leibniz’s Solution to the Problem of Evil

Leibniz believes that God is omniscient. An omniscient god would know everything about his creations including the future, which is hence predetermined. Leibniz then has to explain how evil, which is seen everywhere in the world, is possible under such a perfect God. 

 

What is a Substance?

To understand the relationship between God and his creation, Leibniz believes that he first needs to establish what a substance is. A substance as a subject has properties or predicates. He asserts: “the nature of an individual substance or of a complete being is to have a notion so complete that it is sufficient to comprise and to allow the deduction from it of all the predicates of the subject to which this notion is attributed.”[1]

Such complete knowledge is not possible for man, but it is what an all-knowing God knows. What human beings know about events are only after they have occurred, through history books or experience, while God already knows all about them a priori. Leibniz in addition believes that in each thing, the entire world is reflected, “like a mirror of God or of all the universe.”[2] Each object cognises and acts out its role in its own way. Every person may be encountering the same universe, but each possesses his own unique point of view. In this way, Leibniz thinks the universe is multiplied by each substance, hence multiplying the glory of God. According to him, “every substance bears in some sort the character of God’s infinite wisdom and omnipotence, and imitates him as far as it is capable.”[3]

Certainty and Necessity

However, if God knows everything about all his creations, including the future, this threatens human freewill. Since he does not want to abandon the concept of human freewill, Leibniz addresses this problem by differentiating between contingent and necessary truths. This distinction remains difficult since “future contingents are assured, since God foresees them,”[4] though Leibniz denies that makes such contingents necessary. Hence he adopts a different strategy, differentiating between certainty and necessity.

“If a conclusion can be deduced infallibly from a definition or notion, it will be necessary,” he writes.[5] However, since everything that will happen to a substance is already in its nature, Leibniz makes the additional requirement that necessity will require that its “contrary implies contradiction.”[6] To illustrate necessity, he points to geometry as knowledge that is necessarily true. For instance, according to Euclid, a straight line is the shortest distance between two points. Any other kind of line, such as a curved line, would not be the shortest possible and hence contradict that proposition. Hence, that proposition is necessarily true and is indeed an axiom in Euclidean geometry.

Certainty is a different kind of necessity, which is “only necessary ex hypothesi.” It is contingent in Leibniz’s book because the contrary does not imply contradiction. For instance, for today’s breakfast, I ate bacon but I could have eaten something contrary to bacon, such as ham. It is not a contradiction, invalidating the concept of breakfast the way a shortest non-straight line would contradict geometry. According to Leibniz, my eating ham for today’s breakfast is not “impossible in itself, although it is impossible (ex hypothesi) that this should happen.” According to him, my eating bacon for today’s breakfast would have been in my nature, the same way Julius Caesar, because of his nature, had to “cross the Rubicon than to stop at it.”



Best of Possible Worlds

Leibniz makes two major assumptions. The first is that “God will always do the best.”[7] The second is that man likewise will try to do his best, though since we are not perfect, our choices may turn out sub-optimal. Just because God always chooses the best does not mean that imperfection cannot exist. It remains possible though it does not actually happen since “its imperfection […] makes God reject it.”[8]

Leibniz’s metaphysics, supported by these two assumptions, lead to two counter-intuitive consequences:

1) Every substance is independent of every other substance. It only has a relationship with God. As earlier noted, all events in a substance’s existence is already predetermined and are predicates of its being. While things might seem to affect one another in a casual chain, they do not. It is actually God that is the cause of the correspondence. “What happens to each one is only a consequence of its idea or complete notion alone, since this idea already includes all predicates or events and expresses the whole universe,”[9] writes Leibniz.

2) Leibniz answers the problem of evil by explaining why Judas is permitted to exist despite his betrayal of Jesus, which is a sin. According to Leibniz, “this evil must recompense itself with interest in the universe, that God will draw from it a greater good,”[10] leading to the “best of all possible worlds.”[11] In Judas’s case, this notion can be defended since Jesus had to be sacrificed to pay the sins of the believers. If he was not betrayed, then he would not have died and then be resurrected. Presumably, God has already made all the calculations and this ‘solution’ suited his purpose best. Leibniz makes clear that “God is not the cause of evil;”[12] evil is not the privation of good but serves as a pathway towards the best world.

Problems with Leibniz’s Arguments

For (1), since everything is already predetermined, Leibniz needs to account for moral responsibility and the contradiction of human free will. He does this by adopting compatibilist arguments. (2) is a corollary of (1). The ‘best of all possible worlds’ dogma has been lampooned to great effect in Voltaire’s Candide where the ever-suffering Pangloss sticks with the dogma despite all the evidence to the contrary. Leibniz’s God certainly has a lot to answer for if the current world is the best He could imagine. The suffering and injustice in the current world seems to know no end, with no good outcome currently in sight except mass extinction, first by global warming and then later complete annihilation by smashing into the sun. Even lesser mortals can imagine a better possible world sans cancer, babies born with Aids, concentration camps, torture, genocide, serial killers and rapists, global pandemics, death from hunger, and a rather lengthy list of ailments that plague humanity today and for the foreseeable future. God’s great plan seems uncertain, if not downright ludicrous.

Conclusion

Leibniz sets the stage for his metaphysics with assumptions surrounding God’s perfection. With perfect knowledge, all is predetermined, including the evil in the world. He believes God has a grand plan for the best possible world, that yet somehow requires evil to get there. Contrasting common sense notions of what a best world looks like versus the reality of this world, Leibniz’s doctrine on the ‘best of all possible worlds’ seems sadly mistaken.



Bibliography

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Discourse on Metaphysics, 1846.

———. Essais de Théodicée Sur La Bonté de Dieu. Paris, 1710.


[1] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, 1846, sec. 8.

[2] Leibniz, sec. 9.

[3] Leibniz, sec. 9.

[4] Leibniz, sec. 13.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, sec. 14.

[10] Leibniz, sec. 30.

[11] Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée Sur La Bonté de Dieu (Paris, 1710).

[12] Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, sec. 30.