Evil

Last year in January I wrote about evil. Now this theme comes up again, through the questions of a good friend. If we watch the events on the world stage and try to feel what people have to suffer who are in less comfortable circumstances than we are in Europe - despite all the problems we also have here - the question could arise: Why did God create this world with all its misery and suffering? Would it not have been possible for the Almighty God to create a better concept and make a world in which we could develop ourselves without having to suffer so deeply?

I myself have always found this an impermissible question, because I can feel that the human mind is too small, too limited, to overview the Divine Thoughts. Therefore I admire Leibniz for his sentence about the perfect creation of God:
'The wise and virtuous acknowledge that, were we able to understand the world order sufficiently, we would find how she transcends all wishes of the most wise human beings and how it is impossible to make her better than she is.' (Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1644 -1716)

'In philosophy, Leibniz is most noted for his optimism, i.e. his conclusion that our Universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one that God could have created, an idea that was often lampooned by others such as Voltaire. Leibniz, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th-century advocates of rationalism. The work of Leibniz anticipated modern logic and analytic philosophy, but his philosophy also looks back to the scholastic tradition, in which conclusions are produced by applying reason of first principles or prior definitions rather than to empirical evidence.' (Wikipedia)

One can imagine that this scientist and philosopher came to his optimistic view on the world order through his deep investigations of mathematics, the development of differential and integral calculus for instance, but he also invented binary arithmetic. One who tries to understand the world order through its exact comprehension must find this order divine and perfect. Leibniz had the ideal that it would be possible to come to a similar exact and true system of social life, that it could become a world in which everything is as absolutely true and trustworthy as mathematical order. He was very interested in scholastics and also in the 'Ars magna' of the Spanish Dominican monk Ramon Lull (Raimundus Lullus). He developed a wonderful system of thinking in such a way, that the scholar can learn to think as truly as is humanly possible.

The access to the world order of Ramon Lull and Leibniz is a totally different way of viewing the world from what is usual in our time. We view the world with our senses, view it by the vast information we get from the media. These thinkers however had an unshakeable trust in reason, that reason is something truly divine that is given to the human being as an instrument to discover the world order - including its evil aspects – and to find a way to form a world of human beings that fits this world order - not through a blind surrender, but by a more and more perfect unfolding of reason. A reason that doesn't remove itself from the world order outside the human being, but that unifies both by acknowledging that they are born from the same source.

‘The Theodicy (Leibniz) tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds. It must be the best possible and most balanced world, because it was created by an all-powerful and all-knowing God, who would not choose to create an imperfect world if a better world could be known to Him or be possible to create. In effect, apparent flaws that can be identified in this world must exist in every possible world, because otherwise God would have chosen to create the world that excluded those flaws.' (Wikipedia)

I don't want to be a disciple of Leibniz, I just want to show how there are thinkers that trust the world order, not from mere belief, but from insight into it. The rational aspects of his thinking go too far, as I see it (Law of Continuity. Natura non saltum facit (nature doesn't make jumps), for instance; also the thesis that contradictions cannot be true at the same time seems not in accordance to spiritual thinking, a spiritual reason). But at the same time it is wonderful to think about this absolute faith in human reason.
 

Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz (1646-1716)Evil by Mieke Mosmuller