#884 Leibniz vs. Voltaire

Dr. craig’s response

Jordan, I’m delighted to receive a question this week from Taiwan! Be assured that here in the USA we are following the situation in Taiwan with great interest and concern.

I want to urge you to read the section of Alvin Plantinga’s book God, Freedom, and Evil dealing with the problem of evil before you teach your class. It will prove invaluable to you.

Plantinga calls Leibniz’s claim –which was the butt of Voltaire’s ridicule—that this is the best of all possible worlds “Leibniz’s Lapse.” What Plantinga shows is that if there are (as Luis Molina believed) certain contingently true counterfactuals of creaturely freedom about how any possible person would freely act in any set of freedom-permitting circumstances God might place him in, then there are logically possible worlds which God, despite His omnipotence, cannot actualize. That is because the actualization of any possible world containing free creatures is not determined by God alone but depends in part on the co-operation of those creatures.  If they wouldn’t co-operate, God might decide not to create them; but if He does create them, He can’t guarantee what they will freely choose. God has to choose from among the possible worlds which are feasible for Him given the counterfactuals of creaturely freedom that are true.

For all we know, it’s possible that in any world of free creatures feasible for God at least some of the creatures would freely go wrong and do evil. Indeed, it’s possible that any world of free creatures feasible for God would have just as much evil and no more good than the actual world! So while the actual world need not be the best possible world, as Leibniz thought, it could be the best feasible world. Despite all the suffering that Voltaire points to, it may be that no better world was feasible for God.

This raises your question of what criteria are being used to rank the value of worlds. A world with horrible evils might have compensating goods that more than offset those evils. For example, surely God is concerned with the salvific balance between saved and lost in any world. I think that it is not improbable, much less impossible, that only in a world suffused with natural and moral evil would the optimal number of people freely come to know God and find eternal life and happiness. That constitutes an incommensurable good which more than outweighs the suffering. Voltaire doesn’t really present any decent argument that God cannot have morally sufficient reasons for permitting the evils that we see. His appeal is purely emotional (“Look at the Lisbon earthquake!”) and his method is mockery, not argumentation.

More recently, Plantinga has suggested that the self-sacrificial, atoning death of Christ on our behalf may be a good of such enormous value, perhaps infinite value, that any world containing that death will be better than one without it. Since Christ’s atoning death presupposes the existence of sin, however, that implies that any world containing the atoning death of Christ will be a world that contains moral evil. So the best worlds may contain great amounts of moral evil. Add to Plantinga’s suggestion my suggestion about God’s seeking an optimal balance of saved and lost, and you have the makings of a very powerful defense against the problem of evil. This could very well be the best of all feasible worlds, and Voltaire has no argument to the contrary.