The Best of All Possible Worlds

In the best of all possible worlds, that's his actual hair.

It was a semi-random connection.  In fact, I can't even remember what I was studying, but suddenly, I was reading Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz.

Ah, the joys of being a small church pastor.

Leibniz, in the event that you don't regularly come across him on TMZ, was one of the most brilliant minds of the early modern era.  He was a seventeenth century philosopher and mathematician, and was notable for, among other things, inventing calculus at exactly the same time Newton did.  Because, you know, he needed it.  That, and he developed a binary logic system, the conceptual precursor of all modern computing.

In the seventeenth century.

He was also a deeply committed Christian, and what had caught my eye was the name of a "proof" for God's creative handiwork, something that's popularly called "the best of all possible worlds" argument.

That argument, roughly, was that our world was the best of all possible worlds.  Everything about our world had been designed optimally, Leibniz suggested, even the difficult things.  Challenges existed to create strength.  Struggle and suffering existed to create courage and endurance.  The Department of Motor Vehicles existed to instill patience.  And so forth.

This argument for divine beneficence doesn't really hold, not if you look at the dynamics of our little species.  Holocausts and wars and a cornucopia of petty unnecessary human cruelties are far too deep a blight on our world to imagine that this is the best possible thing that could exist.  When Voltaire launched his ultimately successful challenge to this assumption, that was kinda the point he drove home.

Yet the cosmology that Leibniz felt undergirded his "best possible world" argument was startlingly contemporary.  The universe, he suggested, was not just one single necessary reality.  It was, instead, just one possible universe.  In the mind of God lay the knowledge of every other possible thing that might conceivably exist, every probable outcome, and every variant iteration of every sentient being.  The mind of God, as Leibniz would have it, contained the vision of the multiverse.

This, from the co-creator of calculus.  Dude.

Throughout his writings, this idea was iterated and reiterated.  In his Essays on The Goodness of God, he wrote it as a myth, in which a priest is lead to the truth by a vision of Pallas Athena, Goddess of Wisdom:

The halls rose in a pyramid, becoming even more beautiful as one mounted towards the apex, and representing more beautiful worlds. Finally they reached the highest one which completed the pyramid, and which was the most beautiful of all: for the pyramid had a beginning, but one could not see its end; it had an apex, but no base; it went on increasing to infinity. That is (as the Goddess explained) because amongst an endless number of possible worlds there is the best of all, else would God not have determined to create any; but there is not any one which has not also less perfect worlds below it: that is why the pyramid goes on descending to infinity. (Leibniz, Theodicy, p. 416)

Leibniz thought, of course, that the only world made "real" was our own.  That meant it was, by necessity, the best.  The rest remained unspoken by God, like a story untold, or a book conceptualized but not written.

I don't agree there, as our understanding of the cosmos points more and more to a wildly richer, deeper, and nonlinear creation.  But then again, I honestly don't know that the actual, physical, and material existence of other universes makes them any more accessible.

The best possible universe we will ever know is the one we inhabit, after all.

It's what gives such existential weight to our choices, and what makes grace so very, very important.

Haiti and Human Suffering

On the day after Christmas five years and a few weeks ago, Indonesia was struck by a massive tsunami. Hundreds of thousands of human beings lost their lives, killed by the onslaught of an unstoppable tidal surge. It was a time of immense tragedy and human suffering. In coming to terms with this event, many folks of a religious persuasion offered up reasons that God might inflict such suffering on humankind. Among some sections of Christianity, stories were told of churches remaining unharmed. That the vast majority of those who lost their lives were Muslim...so...well...perhaps God was annoyed at their lack of Christian faith. In the conservative Islamic world, the spin was both different and exactly the same. Indonesia was being punished for being insufficiently Muslim, allowing the infidels to drink and wear bikinis and spend lots of money in beachside resorts to sustain the local economy.

Today, the news comes from Haiti that a sizable earthquake has devastated that poverty-stricken nation. Back when I was a kid, the little evangelical free church my family attended in London used to regularly provide supplies to Haitian communities. We wrote letters to Haitian kids. Things were hard there thirty years ago, and they haven't improved. It is the Bangladesh of the Northern Hemisphere. The reports coming in this morning are spotty, but the likelihood is that there are many, many thousands dead. Slipshod construction and the crowding that comes from endemic poverty makes a temblor unusually devastating. Wretchedly undeveloped infrastructure and incompetent, corrupt government make it even worse. It is going to be bad.

Over the next week or so, the eyes of our nation will be turned to that broken state. Until some juicy celebrity scandal reclaims our undivided attention, that is. During this week, I do not doubt that somewhere, someone who claims to be a follower of Jesus of Nazareth will decide that God is somehow responsible for this event. Perhaps Haitians were not praying hard enough. Or they weren't the "right sort of Christian." Or they were immoral. Maybe someone will decide that the practice of vodun is to blame. There has to be a reason!

We can't help ourselves. We want to believe that faith somehow gets us excused from suffering, even though our faith teaches no such thing. We want to believe that just praying hard enough will protect us from disaster and keep us fat and happy and rolling in material blessings, even though our faith shows us nothing of the sort. Our desire to come up with a theological reason for the bad things that happen has nothing to do with our Maker, and everything to do with our own egocentrism.

But the reality of existence is that we are small and easily broken, and that death comes eventually to us all. Faith does not change that reality. What it does, though, is help us respond to that reality. What a faithful response needs to be has nothing to do with explanations or justifications. That sort of speculation is actively counterproductive.

Instead, Christians need to respond with caring. We need to be providing evidence of the love that lies at the heart of our faith. That will come in the form of material aid, in doctors and medicine and food and blankets and rebuilding supplies. It will come through the presence of aid workers who give comfort.

It is that caring that matters, that work that matters, that effort to bring about good in the face of the reality of our smallness and mortality that matters.

Atheist Theodicy is an Oxymoron

Whilst engaged in some highly entertaining back and forth about God and the nature of being yesterday, I found myself suddenly wondering about the place of theodicy in the arsenal of arguments used by atheists.

Theodicy, in the event you're unfamiliar with the term, is the indictment of the divine. Properly understood, it's a challenge issued to a god who is failing to uphold the terms of their relationship with a devotee.

Let's say you're a follower of Cthulhu. You've gotten your hands on the Necronomicon, not just any copy, but one signed at Barnes and Noble by the Mad Arab himself. After years of preparation at Miskatonic University, you've found your way to the submerged city of R'lyeh. You've waited several increasingly depraved lifetimes for the stars to align in the appropriately disturbing eldritch patterns. You utter the incantations through lips steeled with glazed madness, summoning the most vile of the Elder Gods into our plane of existence, where it can begin unleashing the waking nightmare that will consume all of being.

But when the Ancient One finally exudes through the rift, it arrives with a slightly warm sixer and asks you're up for an evening of Super Mario Party with all of the avatars of Yog Sothoth.

Of course you'd be disappointed. The terms of the agreement have been violated! Where's the madness? Where's the gibbering? Isn't there going to be any gibbering? The Ancient One hasn't held up it's end of the bargain! OOOOOH!

That is the essence of theodicy...well, if you're way too much into H.P. Lovecraft, anyway.

Atheistic theodicy generally takes the form of a riff on the problem of suffering. If God is beneficent, omnipotent, and omniscient, then, the argument goes, God is doing a crappy job. Human beings suffer. We are afflicted with wars and plagues and disasters and Glenn Beck. Why would a loving God subject us to Glenn Beck? If you expect clear and mechanistic interventions from the Creator, then you are inevitably going to be as disappointed as an evicted devotee of Creflo A. Dollar.

I understand why the problem of suffering shakes so many folks from faith. There are are range of answers to that given by the world's faiths, some of which are utterly inadequate. Blind obedience or declaring the self-evidently horrific to be somehow a manifestation of God's will are among the more feeble responses to mortal unpleasantness. The more conceptually robust answers revolve around divine inscrutability, a rejection of anthropocentrism, and the assertion of human agency in causing suffering. Both Buddhism and the sentient portions of Christianity handle the question of suffering differently, but in ways that have existential validity...if you're open-minded.

What I found myself wondering yesterday is this: is atheistic theodicy an oxymoron? Can it even exist? I find it akin to saying, "God does not exist, and He's a bastard, so you shouldn't believe in Him anyway." That isn't a coherent statement. You cannot sanely condemn a God that you don't believe exists.

To be fair, I think what atheists are doing when they surface suffering as a reason not to believe isn't theodicy at all. It's a related thing, but not really that gut-wrenching challenge born of existential anguish that comes from the heart of the suffering faithful. I've been there.

For the atheist, the problem of suffering or injustice is just a rhetorical tool, part of the explanation one gives for one's nonbelief and can present in an effort to persuade others of the validity of your position. It's a fair challenge, and one that requires an honest and respectful response, but it isn't theodicy.

It's a challenge to another's faith, not God. Creodicy, perhaps?