The Best of All Possible Worlds

Neither am I able to approve of the opinion, that that which God has made is not perfect in the highest degree, and that he might have done better.
Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (1710, George Montgomery translation,1902)

Could God have created a better world than this...?

Leibniz believed the universe to be put together by rigid deductive laws. Everything in it was, he believed, connected to everything else, and if you knew just one truth completely, and really understood all its implications-, you would understand the whole universe. Furthermore, the universe is constructed according to the law Leibniz called "the principle of sufficient reason"-that is, only those causes which were absolutely necessary for a given effect were used by God to build the universe. Although there are any number of "possible worlds" that God might have created, He created this one because it was the absolute best. If God could have created a better world, He certainly would have.

So wisdom is a matter of accepting the world as it is, with its wars, diseases, disasters, moral evil and wickedness, death, and so on, because it is still the best of all possible worlds.

For, imagine a world in which there was no disease. The world would grow in population until we would all be so crowded that nobody would be happy. That would be a worse situation than what we have now!

Or consider what life would be like if there were no death. Again we' d be overcrowded; and, what is worse, people would not set priorities in life. People would live as if nothing mattered, they would have no projects, no plans for what they wanted to accomplish. There would be no values in life. And so on. So, do you agree? Is this the best of all possible worlds? Is there no way in which it could be better?

Bibliography

Leibniz, Gottfried, Basic Writings, Open Court, LaSalle, Ill., 1968.

Russell, L.J., "Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz," Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 4, pp. 422-434.