The best of all possible worlds ...

 "The glass is half empty," says the pessimist. "The glass is half full," says the optimist. "Everything happens for a reason," says the optimist. "It always goes wrong," says the pessimist." Just so is the world divided.

Philosophers and theologians tempted to play the game of pouring water into a glass more or less come up with the same bifurcation. Gottfried Leibniz in Theodicy (1709) gave us the notion that the world in which we live is the best of all possible worlds. This was, more of less, Leibniz's argument:

1. God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good.
2. God as all knowing would know which is the best possible world out of all the possible worlds God could imagine.

3. God as all powerful could create any of those worlds. 

4. God as all good would always choose to create the best of all possible worlds.
5. This world is created by God.

6. Therefore this world is the best of all possible worlds.

For Leibniz the glass is half full. Always look on the bright side of life. Bad things happen, but it could be worse. Rest content in the faith that God created this world as the best it could be. All things happen for a reason.

The foil to Leibniz's optimism is Voltaire's short novel Candide (1759). Voltaire lampoons Leibniz with the character Dr. Pangloss an optimistic philosopher for whom "all happens for the best in the best of all possible worlds." Candide, the hero of the book, takes a world tour of disasters, cruelties and misfortunes and explores the way different religions try to make sense of the suffering and the evils of the world. Ultimately, no sense is to be made and Candide finally finds peace in pastoral life.

The novel ends:

“Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle for love of Miss Cunegonde: if you had not been put into the Inquisition: if you had not walked over America: if you had not stabbed the Baron: if you had not lost all your sheep from the fine country of El Dorado: you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio–nuts." 

"All that is very well," answered Candide, "but let us cultivate our garden.""

Candide Annotated: Penguin classics by François-Marie Arouet Voltair. 

Voltaire is often taken as ultimately pessimistic. The world is very bad. You can't change it. You can't work it out. The best you can do is cultivate your own garden.

Who to choose: Leibniz of Voltaire? Must we choose? Leibniz suffers from the complaint that if this is the best of all possible worlds that God could create, then God did a pretty bad job. More seriously, for God, Leibniz's God is the creator of evil. That doesn't seem to square with his claim that God is all good. That's not just a problem for Leibniz but for any that claim that God created the world, that God is all good, and  evil truly exists in the world. Voltaire rejects claims for God's goodness given the evils of the world. The world is simply the way it is. It's best to go look after your own garden. In other words, take care of yourself, there's nothing else you can do.

For myself, with both Leibniz and Voltaire I'm happy to sit with the fact that this world is the only one we've got. Good things happen. Bad things happen. Nature gives us extraordinary bounty and beauty. Nature also gives us disasters and suffering. But I'll give Leibniz a miss in his trying to give God a pass with the notion that God would know that any other imagined better world would actually be worse. It still makes God the author of evil, even if God might have been the author of more evil in a different world. I have long since abandoned trying to solve theodicy. To accept the traditional notions of the attribute's of God (ominpotency, omniscience, and ominbonevolence) locks you into trying to solve that which is unsolvable. Yet laying aside the unsolvable with the simplistic, "everything happens for a purpose" at times seems hollow. Sometimes "shit happens," period. Some shit will always remain shit. We need a different way of thinking about God in a world of characterized by both good and evil. 

With Voltaire (as readers of this blog might know) I am all for focusing on those things that we can in fact control, and where we can in fact make a difference. But I shall depart from Voltaire's "tending our own garden" if that means forgetting about the suffering in the world and merely focusing on the self. Some things we control do affect others for the better—perhaps not, for most of us, matters of world importance, but certainly for those we love, live with, work with, live near, and interact with on a daily basis. Some of us, in our work lives, have responsibility for decision-making that affects many people, sometimes thousands. In all these areas we can make a difference. Pushing Voltaire's metaphor, if we include all those relationships, connections and interactions as part of our garden, then I'm onboard. Our world might not be the best of all possible worlds but we can make our world better, one act of lovingkindness after another. Count me in on that.

+Ab. Andy