Theodicy

Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) forced the problem of evil in his 1697 Dictionnaire historique et critique. He may have been inspired by Nicolas de Malebranche's (1638–1715) insistence on the world's imperfections—albeit in the context of an argument for the supremacy of God. For Malebranche, evils prove that God sought not to create the best of all possible worlds but only the most perfect in relation to God's ways. He could have created a better world, but this world, the work of "general" rather than "particular volition," better expresses his nature.

Leibniz's Essais de théodicée (1710) responded to Bayle's challenge, but offers little that was really new. Leibniz himself traced its most famous claim—that this is "the best of all possible worlds"—back to Plato. The related idea that a perfect world is not possible because not all possible things are "compossible" with each other has a Stoic pedigree. Both claims had come close to the surface of Martin Luther's polemic with Desiderius Erasmus and were explicitly made by Spanish Jesuits and by the Cambridge Platonists.

While Leibniz thought that we would do well to be more attentive to the good in our lives, his argument was a priori. A God infinite in goodness, power, and wisdom would not create a world unless it were good, and, if several worlds were possible, would create none but the best. "It is true that one may imagine possible worlds without sin and without unhappiness," Leibniz conceded. Yet, "these same worlds again would be very inferior to ours in goodness. I cannot show you this in detail. For can I know and can I present infinities to you and compare them together? But you must judge with me ab effectu, since God has chosen this world as it is" (Theodicy §10).

Optimism.

Christian Freiherr von Wolff (1679–1754), Leibniz's most influential disciple, thought that Leibniz had unnecessarily abandoned the best argument against atheism—the argument from design, known in Germany as teleology or physico-theology. Much early-eighteenth-century thought offered teleological arguments that this was the best possible world. The word optimism (from optimum, the best), coined in the 1730s, lumped together decidedly different arguments. Wolff's Leibnizian arguments are quite different from Alexander Pope's assertion, in his best-selling Essay on Man (1733), that "Whatever IS, is RIGHT."

The hollowness of optimistic claims was shown by Samuel Johnson's Rasselas (1759), Voltaire's Candide (1759), and most decisively by David Hume's posthumously published Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). Hume's character Philo declares "Epicurus' old questions" concerning the compatibility of belief in God with evil "yet unanswered." Immanuel Kant tried to show that they could never be answered.

Kant.

Although he was originally a defender of optimism and remained impressed by the evidences of physico-theology, Kant pulled the rug out from under the project of theodicy. As an endeavor fusing theoretical and practical reason, philosophical theodicy for Kant represented a particularly dangerous form of pretension: it threatened to blunt the sense that defined the human ethical vocation—that the world of our experience is not as it ought to be. In his mature philosophy of religion, Kant was particularly attentive to insincerity and saw philosophical theodicies as a key example.

In his essay "On the Failure of All Philosophical Efforts in Theodicy" (1791), Kant likened theodicists to Job's comforters. By contrast, Job, whose faith in God was firmly rooted in the moral law rather than in the claim to be able to understand God's ways, was able to stand fast in his piety despite his "counterpurposive" experiences. In the place of the hypocrisy of "doctrinal" theodicy Kant recommended Job's "authentic theodicy": "honesty in openly admitting one's doubts; repugnance to pretending conviction where one feels none" (p. 33).