Episode #038 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

So, Gottfried Leibniz versus Sir Isaac Newton—it really is one of the biggest Twitter feuds in human history. Sure, you got the whole who-invented-calculus-first thing, and that was a big deal. But that would be what people wrote about in the tabloids back then if they had tabloids. That issue certainly was a high-profile issue, but it was far from the extent of their disagreements with each other. On many issues, they’re seen as two profoundly genius intellectuals who hold very different opinions that often contradict each other. And these disagreements run deep, you guys, even down to the foundation of reality itself.

We’re all very familiar with the Newtonian model of the universe. It’s shaped scientific thought since the day he laid it out—you know, this mechanistic atomism where the physical world is made up of real, physical objects. Well, the fact that Leibniz and his theory—this infinity of spiritual points he calls monads—the fact that it eventually didn’t hold up to scientific scrutiny and the fact that the Newtonian view prevails, it may have been due to a fatal flaw present in his experiments directly from the start, an assumption that he made. But it’s interesting to consider for a second—for us, because we aren’t scientists—how different science would be and how different the world might look if for some reason—I don’t know what it would be—if at some point in history Leibniz’s monadology achieved the same level of notoriety that Newton’s system did. Just imagine how different we would think about science. Just imagine how different we would think about our place in the world.

Now, this is the beginning of me delivering on my promise from last week of making sure we understand why Leibniz was so compelled to create this system of monads, his motivation. The bottom line was, he was scared. He saw the writing on the wall. He was worried that these new theories that were coming around presenting the universe to be mechanistic were going to make God unnecessary or, even worse, incompatible. Leibniz was born in 1646, and when he was only six years old, his father died. And this was a pivotal moment in his life because this left him under the care of his mother who was deeply religious. And she made sure she passed on as much of that as she could onto the young Gottfried Leibniz.

One of the principal tasks of Leibniz’s life—one that he spent countless hours arguing about and working on—is this relationship between theology and this new emerging body of thought. And the result of this is that in the context of this larger war that’s going on between these two competing interests—Leibniz is a major thinker on one side that was trying to make peace between those two sides—he ends up having a lot of the same argument over and over and over again. That’s just how it goes, though. I mean, during the short period he was a thinker on this planet, certain really pivotal issues were being discussed. And they just happened to be what he spent his brain power on.

So, when you look at his Monadology, understand that this is why he needs this God-centered foundation in the first place. And understand that when he talks about all these special attributes of the monads that to us seem pretty arbitrary—I mean, come on, monads don’t have windows? What is that about?—understand that these attributes to Leibniz aren’t arbitrary and that he deduces that these attributes must exist based on the results of these arguments that he’s having in the real world about things like the relationship between humans and God, the nature of reality, and how humans interact with that reality.

But if you asked Leibniz for the one issue that many of these conversations centered around, the issue that’s central to our episode today and an issue that Leibniz was probably beyond tired of talking about by the end of his life, it would be the problem of evil. How do you explain the fact that there is supposedly a magic being up in the sky who is both all-knowing and all-powerful and without limitations—how do you reconcile that with the fact that evil exists in the world, that horrible things happen to completely innocent people all the time?

And when somebody asks this question in modern times, they’re not just talking about human behavior. They’re not just talking about drive-by shootings and serial killers murdering dozens of people. They’re not just talking about things that can be explain away with some concept like the devil who’s somehow influencing their behavior. They’re talking about things like natural disasters too. Look at the videos of the tsunami that happened a couple years ago—just this giant, horrifying wave helplessly engulfing groups of children and their parents and their friends. Is God just sitting back and watching as these kids inhale salt water and suffocate and get torn to bits by telephone poles and houses and cars slamming into them? On that same note, is God sitting back and watching pandemic disease? Did God sit back and watch the bubonic plague happen—millions of people choking on their own bodily fluids? How does one reconcile that reality with the existence of an all-powerful, infinitely good God?

Now, when somebody brought this up to Leibniz, especially by the end of his life, he must have just wanted to beat his head against the wall until they walked away and stopped asking him the question. This question plagued him his entire life. And although he has one of the most famous and brilliant responses to this question, it hardly went away after he died. It’s commonly been referred to as the biggest and most important theological question that Christians face today. And it’s one that, for the record, still hasn’t been answered definitively.

We see this all the time. Some terrible thing happens in the news. There’s some horrific school shooting or a terrorist attack. And in the coming weeks, people do a lot of soul searching. They’re confused. It gets hard for them to accept that despite all their efforts, despite the fact that them and everyone around them lives so ethically, how can one person do this? How can a small group of people do this to all of humanity? Why would God allow that to happen? And then what inevitably happens is some big-name Christian blogger gets on the internet, and they come out with some post attempting to console people and give their reasons for why they think this stuff happens.

Now, what most people don’t know is that this type of blog post has a name. But the name was given to it long before it was ever written down in blog form. It’s called a theodicy. The word “theodicy” is a combination of two Greek words: one meaning God, the other meaning just. So, in short, it’s a thing that somebody writes about God in order to justify his action or inactions. Somebody writes a theodicy, and they’re kind of like being God’s defense attorney, so to speak. Well, like I said, these modern-day Christians aren’t the only people that ever wrote a theodicy. And like I said before that, Leibniz has one of the most famous theodicies ever written. So, let’s talk about it.

Now, if you have a good memory, you’re going to remember that we talked about this before. Plotinus, right? But let me make something clear, the problem that Plotinus is trying to solve during his time is a completely different beast than the problem Leibniz is trying to solve during his time and the problem that modern Christians try to explain away. Let me explain. A common occurrence in today’s world—somebody strolls up to a modern-day Christian and they say, “You believe in an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God that put you on this planet to glorify him and be happy. Yet millions and millions of people die of horribly painful, completely preventable diseases each year. I hereby call the existence of your God into question. Because if he did exist as you say he does, he would never allow that to happen.”

Well, Plotinus was a Neo-Platonist. And from his perspective and through the perspective of most thinkers in the Middle Ages, talking about some evil that’s going on in the world didn’t cause them to question whether they were wrong about God existing or not. It made them question whether they understood how it was possible in the first place. We can understand this. I mean, they looked around them back then at all these perfectly ordered, unexplainable phenomena around them, and they were pretty darn certain God existed at that point. They saw evil in the world, and they didn’t question whether God existed because of it; they were legitimately confused about why it happens, how it’s even possible. And they looked for a reason why it could possibly exist.

Now, as we talked about before, Plotinus does it from the perspective of metaphysics: that evil is not something God creates or allows; it’s the absence of good. Evil is the absence of good—good things being the creation of God, this infinitely good source known as the One. Maybe a good example is, let’s say a piece of wood represents all of creation. God created it. This infinitely good being created this piece of wood. Now, if there’s a hole in that piece of wood, it’s not that God created that hole. That hole is the absence of his creation. This is the basis Plotinus uses for saying why it’s possible that evil can exist in the world.

Now, there’s much more to his theory, and you can always go back and listen to the Plotinus episode to get a refresher course. But the point is, there’s a big difference between what Plotinus was doing—which is reasoning to a conclusion that allows for evil to even be possible in a world created by God, just in theory—there’s a big difference between justifying that and justifying what Leibniz and the modern-day Christians seem to justify, which is that God can intervene and change the course of history, and in fact he does it all the time, yet he still allows for terrible things to happen to innocent people. How do you explain that? This argument is commonly referred to as the underachiever argument: claiming that God could work harder but doesn’t for whatever reason. Two very different problems that we’re trying to solve here.

And we can relate to this. We’ve all heard someone talk about God in such glowing terms. We’ve all heard someone tell a story like, you know, I was at home. My baby started acting weird, so I decided to take it to the hospital. And as we’re driving down the road, my car blows a head gasket. I’m stranded on the side of the road. And I look into the backseat, and my baby is blue. It can’t breathe. It’s convulsing on the seat. And I frantically wave my arms at all the passing cars. And this really, really compassionate, middle-aged guy pulls over, and he takes my baby. And he rushes it to the hospital and saves its life. God is so incredible! Jesus influenced that man’s behavior. The man would have, otherwise, driven past me. He never would have stopped and helped me and my baby. But God put it in his heart to pull over on the side of the road and make my life better than it would have been if God hadn’t intervened.

The even more incredible part to me about that story is that God does all of this completely outside the man’s conscious awareness. I mean, before this person blew a head gasket in their car, this guy wasn’t just driving down the road singing some Journey song and then bing! He gets taken over by God, pulls over on the side of the road, and says, “I am here to take you to the hospital,” like some Jesus robot. No, he thought he was acting on his own volition. He thought he was just being compassionate, helping another person out, being ethical.

Well, aside from the other problems, the problem with attributing this miracle to a supernatural God that intervened in your world to make your life better than it otherwise would have been—the problem that Leibniz needs to address—is that we also have to give God credit for the 99 times out of 100 that the baby dies in that scenario. We also have to give God credit for the person that hitchhikes down the road and tries to get help and then gets picked up by some Steve Buscemi-looking guy who kills them, augers a hole into the side of their head, and makes a decoration for their mantlepiece, you know? This is known as the underachiever argument.

And the response that Leibniz gives is that it’s not that God is an underachiever; it’s that we humans just perceive him to be an underachiever naïvely when, in fact, we are living in the best of all possible worlds. So, to clarify a part of last week’s episode, when Leibniz calls this existence the best of all possible worlds, he’s referencing this notion that God could do more but chooses not to. Alright. So, he obviously disagrees with it, but that puts him in a very interesting place. He’s committed now. To Leibniz, the world is not arbitrary. Every act of creation by God was driven by a specific purpose, or a sufficient reason. His principle of sufficient reason is something that he’s very famous for. God didn’t just make the world kind of good, to Leibniz. He made it the best he possibly could, and for good reason.

Now, this leaves Leibniz with the task of proving how that’s possible when people like Steve Buscemi exist in the world. And this would have been a very common argument levied against him. We live in the best of all possible worlds? Okay, well, imagine the world if the holocaust never happened. Isn’t the world today a slightly better place if millions and millions of people weren’t killed back in World War II? Why didn’t God make that world possible?

Leibniz argues against this in a couple ways. First he says—well, to give a modern example—let’s not pretend like we know for a fact that if 9/11 never happened the world would be a better place for it, alright? We are not all knowing as human beings, but God is. For example, maybe that attack prompted a response from the United States that caused us to intervene in the Middle East, and it prevented some future attack where half a million people died. God could be allowing certain things to take place as damage control for future events.

Now, the second way that he refutes it and the one that I think is far more compelling than that is—Leibniz would say we live in the best of all possible worlds. How arrogant and shortsighted is it for us to assume that human happiness is the metric that God uses to determine how good the world is? The universe is bigger than you, human species. Understand that. He talks about how it could be just as likely that God created the best of all possible worlds, but he’s considering all sentient creatures: all the polar bears, all the dogs, all the cats. And maybe a few thousand human beings dying over here is ultimately better off for all the polar bears and the dogs and the cats.

Now, this is a really interesting argument for me. And it should be said, to be a totally unbiased and comprehensive podcaster, I should say that Leibniz gives all kinds of examples of how God might measure goodness in the universe that don’t necessarily have to do with humans. And it’s not entirely clear which one he subscribes to personally. But the conflict with modern Christianity is obvious here. We as humans are the exalted species. What’s going on here? We aren’t on the same level as all these other animals, the polar bears. We’re special! This whole universe was created so that we could have this ethical obstacle course, not for the polar bears with their Coke commercials. Forget them. The point is, it’s tough to reconcile the modern Christian worldview with the wanton killing of humans. That’s all I’m saying.

But it really doesn’t matter because the whole point that Leibniz is making here is that we don’t know what gauge God uses to determine what good is. So, how can anybody say that we’re not living in the best of all possible worlds? Now the burden of proof is on the person that claims otherwise, you know? For someone to refute that we are living in the best of all possible worlds, they have to prove that that’s the case.

Leibniz looks at Plotinus’ argument about evil just being the absence of good or a hole in a piece of wood, and he thinks it’s ridiculous. He writes, “If God is responsible for all of creation, then he’s also responsible for the holes he leaves in it.” Leibniz says that everything that happens in the world, good or evil, can ultimately be tied back to God’s will. But that doesn’t mean God does it all with a smile on his face.

And this is the big difference to Leibniz. When God wills for good things to happen, he does so, Leibniz says, by decree. And when he wills evil things to happen, he’s just kind of letting it happen. But why does God do this? Because he is doing his duty as God. Just doing my job, man. And that job is to create the best possible world. See, originally, at the beginning of everything, God contemplated all possible ways the universe could have played out, and he chose the best one. We humans, we feeble humans may not understand all the ins and outs of why it’s the best one. After all, why it’s the best one may have very little to do with us at all. So, evil, to Leibniz, is a necessary evil.

He makes it very clear that we should make the distinction between the best of all possible worlds and a perfect world as we would see it. He has this whole section of his Theodicy where he talks about how it’s logically impossible for God to have created a perfect world and that the presence of evil isn’t indicative of God not existing; it’s a catalyst for some larger good. And this is a huge point: evil is not just the absence of good like Plotinus would hold; evil is a necessary state of affairs to allow for some greater good.

There’s an example that Bertrand Russell gives in The History of Western Philosophy. And he illustrates this concept very well. He talks about how, as humans, we would perceive being thirsty or dehydrated as something bad or something evil towards us, right? So, when we’re thirsty or dehydrated and we arrive at that babbling brook up in the hills and we drink some cold, clean water, it tastes really good. The goodness of that water is far greater than if we weren’t thirsty at all and we drank some water out of an airport urinal. By the way, I just realized I just destroyed Bertrand Russell’s example. I’m not trying to insult the great Bertrand Russell. You guys know how much reverence I have for him, but you get my point. Our thirst represents something we perceive to be an evil.

Now, Leibniz would say, maybe you could wrongly think that in a perfect world God wouldn’t ever allow you to get thirsty. He wouldn’t ever allow anybody to be thirsty. But this world actually is the best of all possible worlds, because when you drink the water, you derive more goodness from that drinking experience than you would if something like thirst never existed in the first place. So, it’s not that God doesn’t see this evil happening. Maybe, Leibniz says, statistically speaking, if you could play out every possible universe like God can, maybe God realized that by allowing thirst to exist and, therefore, allowing to exist the augmented experience of drinking when you’re thirsty, the universe is overall a better universe for it. Not that it guarantees that no single human will ever die of thirst, but over the long run, statistically speaking, it is a better universe.

Here's where it comes together. This is why the monads have a preprogrammed Broadway script inside of them and are windowless, meaning nothing can go in or out. Leibniz thinks that God created the best of all possible worlds. And to ensure that it stays that way, he created these monads in a state of preestablished harmony. And all the other attributes fall in line. The monads are arranged in a hierarchy. Some monads serve other monads. All of these attributes are to ensure that the best of all possible worlds remains.

Now, as proud as I am for explaining that, this is far from where the conversation ends, right? This just walks us into another giant area of philosophy that, by the way, is going to become more and more important and talked about on this show as philosophy becomes more and more atheistic in the coming years. I’m talking about the age-old question of free will versus determinism. Wait, real quick, by the way, we see how this conversation takes us here, right? This is one of the most commented-on aspects of Leibniz. Here is this religious guy—the guy that wants to reconcile the impeding differences between theology and this new scientific, mechanistic view of the universe. And he chooses to reconcile it by saying that God created this universe in a state of preestablished harmony.

Well, if God predetermined things to happen in a certain way, then how does that allow for the notion of free will? Remember Spinoza, one of the other great continental rationalists. He didn’t allow for the concept of free will. He thought it was an illusion. Well, Leibniz did think free will was possible. And the question arises not only how individual humans have free will but also whether God himself can be said to have free will if he, in fact, created the universe in a state of predetermined order that he’s never going to deviate from, and he ensures that it stays that way. Can that be said to be a limit of God’s power? Can he be said to be all-powerful then? He can’t intervene and change the universe because to do so would be going against the best of all possible worlds.

Well, for the record, I don’t think it’s necessarily a contradiction. I mean, if we’re going to say that this God exists and that he created everything, isn’t it also possible that, like Leibniz says, he contemplated all the possibilities and decided on a path and just never deviates from that path because it’s perfect? But the idea of individual free will being compatible with Leibniz is honestly still up for grabs. He claims it is, but his arguments are far from compelling for modern listeners. There are a couple that are interesting though. And we’re going to go over them right now.

One of the main ones is that these windowless monads that Leibniz lays out—one of the reasons why they need to be windowless is that they’re also entirely self-containing if that’s the case. And they’re, therefore, not influenced by any sort of conditioning, exterior conditioning, that would support determinism. The only thing these monads have in the first place to be able to make decisions is what’s inside of them already. So, every decision that they make comes completely from inside themselves. So, therefore, they have to have free will.

Most of the other arguments have to do with some variation of compatibilism. Now, we’ve talked about compatibilism before when we talked about the stoics. This whole conversation can get lost in the minutiae real quick if you let it. So, there are just so many different, individual shades of determinism, compatibilism, etc. Maybe the most useful thing to say at this point in philosophy, one that’s going to keep your interest on the subject, is that Leibniz kind of ran into a brick wall here. God has this preestablished harmony that at least in some capacity is dependent on human action. But human action is completely free.

Here's what I will say. Compatibilists think the idea of determinism and free will are compatible with each other. Determinism is always some variant of the idea that free will is an illusion. We think we’re making free choices in the world, weighing pros and cons and deciding on the best course of action—whether to get the regular cheese or the 2% milk cheese at the supermarket. But though it seems like we’re making those decisions spontaneously, they really could have been perfectly predicted before we made them.

Imagine some really advanced computer program that knew everything there was to know about your genetics and the biological processes operating in your brain. And then it also knew every experience you ever had in your life from the second you’re born, all the experiences you’ve had with cheese in the past, all the experiences you’ve had with higher calorie foods versus lower calorie foods, all the experience you’ve had getting made fun of for gaining weight by people. And this even goes down to every experience you’ve had with, for example, red packages versus blue packages. Thousands if not millions of variables all spinning around being calculated in your mind that lead to that decision.

Can this advanced computer program also calculate and determine exactly what you would have done before you did it? After all, what is the brain other than just some advanced computer making calculations based on the experiences that you’ve had in your life? And if you think that computer can perfectly predict every decision that you make before you make it, can you really be said to have free will, or do you just think you have free will? Interesting question.

Well, the biggest argument against compatibilism by proponents of determinism is that compatibilists really aren’t proving that free will is compatible with determinism. They’re just switching the definition of what freedom is. Compatibilism is usually some variant of the idea that we are making free choices, but there are certain events or external things that we have no control over occurring. For example, let’s say you’re driving down the freeway. You’re on a road. You can choose to do a lot of things. You can choose to speed up, slow down, change lanes to the left or right. You can choose to put a “Coexist” bumper sticker on the back of your car. But no matter what you do, you’re still going to end up in the same place. You’re still going to take the same off ramp you would have taken. You’re still going to go through the same junctions you would have simply by virtue of being on that road.

But is that still free will in the sense that most people think about it? And by the way, as we’ll find out in future episodes, determinism doesn’t just have to leave us these emotionless robots living out our lives. And here’s something to think about throughout the week. As I mentioned on the John Locke episode, if we believe that we are solely byproducts of our conditioning, then it becomes much more difficult to feel hostility towards that annoying person at work or even people like Steve Buscemi.

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.