Leibniz: The Consequences of Ideas with R.C. Sproul

0:01 The person whose thought we're going to examine today is usually considered one of the most important philosophers of the 17th century, but the irony of that is this, that by trade and by even desire, he was not, strictly speaking, a philosopher. Philosophy was something of an avocation for him, something he dabbled in, more or less. Nevertheless, he made some dramatic contributions to the history of theoretical thought. His name is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and I'll write his name on the board because it's not one that you just automatically assume you can spell. This is a Z, by the way, L-E-I-B-N-I-Z. philosopher who, like Descartes, had been educated in the scholastic tradition of the Roman Catholic Church.

1:00 One of his claims to fame historically is that he shares the historic accolade for being the inventor of calculus with Newton. But he was a first-rate, world-class mathematician. that that was also true of Descartes, and it was true of Pascal, whom we'll look at later, God willing. But in any case, Leibniz is noted basically for three things. As a mathematician, he also became well enough known and was kind of a people person and was introduced into the world of diplomacy, and he tried very hard to heal the breach between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism.

1:56 He was a conciliatory person, and he was looking for ways to bring unity out of conflict. That was true not only in the political realm or in the ecclesiastical realm, but also in the philosophical and mathematical sphere. He kept coming back to his own mathematical paradigms in order to find rational solutions to problems that had become, in many cases, quite emotional. He also had the desire, as the disciples of Descartes did, to reconstruct theology so that the new science, which was more and more embracing a mechanistic view of the universe, not displace God. And so he wanted to develop a way of making God necessary to the scientific theories of his day.

2:55 Now, he didn't embrace occasionalism as the French disciples of Descartes did, but he developed a very elaborate theory of metaphysics that is interesting. Virtually no one accepts it today, but it's interesting, and it's called his system of monadology.

3:21 And that's one of the innovations for which he is famous. The second innovation for which he is famous is the development of what is called the law of pre-established harmony, but that for which he's perhaps most famous is for his delicate theodicy. Now, I'm going to go over these quickly today and hope I don't cause you to swim in the soup of confusion. I'm going to be very brief about this first point because of all of the aspects of Leibniz's thought, the one that is most complex and most difficult to handle in brief is his whole system of thought called monadology. In his understanding of reality, he believed that the world was made up and all things were made up of tiny little units of life or of reality that, again, had very strange characteristics to them.

4:38 As I said, that's about all I'm going to say about it, except that these individual units or monads about which he theorized had no secondary causality between them. They had no secondary causality between them. Remember what we mean by secondary causality, the idea that one force imparts energy or a force to something else. But these tiny little units of which everything is made, and each one was kind of a microcosm of the whole universe, and each one had a kind of ability to be alive or to have what he called petite perceptions. You are a perceiving being.

5:32 You think, you see, you taste, you touch, you smell, and so on, and you have a highly developed sense of consciousness and your ability to think and reflect upon things. But for Leibniz, the whole world is alive because the whole world is made up of these little monads. Each monad at least has vague, simple, basic perceptions of the world. So it's not all that far from the American Indian's idea that everything is alive, including rocks and so on. This is one of the things that prompted Edward's question later, what do sleeping rocks dream of? You know, they were having their own petite perceptions. But in any case, of course, his answer was nothing. But in any case, where the monotology comes in to our consideration of this whole question of causality is at this point.

6:31 He believes that from all eternity, God, who creates everything on the basis of these units of being called monads, programs each one of these individual units with their perceptions, with their thoughts, with whatever they have, from all eternity. So again, though each monad does not interact with each other monad by imparting any kind of secondary causality to them, but nevertheless the relationships by which these virtually infinite number of monads coalesce and operate together and make up reality as we see it all done by a sort of computer chip that was put into each one of them by the Creator at the beginning of time.

7:34 So again, the difference between this and the occasionalists was the occasionalists have God intervening at every second to exercise His divine power, and they denied secondary causes. Well, there's also a kind of denial of secondary causality here with Leibniz, and again, putting back all power to God, but it's not that God is intervening every second along the way, but this was His form of scientific predestination, not a blind determinism of blind impersonal forces, but a theological predestination that's built into everything that takes place in the universe, so that the universe for him is not a mechanical system, it's a theological system. And again, he is trying to rescue God from being displaced by physical science. Now, it's the third item that I'm most interested in speaking about today with respect to Leibniz, because Leibniz produces for us one of the most famous theological theodicies of all time.

8:52 The term theodicy is a term that's made up of two roots. There is the Greek word theos, which means God, which we get the word theology, and the word dikaios or dikaiosune, which is the word for justness or righteousness in Greek. And so, a theodicy is an intellectual attempt to justify God. Or to state it in another way, a theodicy is a justification of God. Well, Why would God ever need to be justified? Well, the big problem in theology and in philosophy is the problem of evil. If one is going to affirm the existence of God and attribute to that God, who is the creator of all things, the attribute of goodness, then the basic question is, how can a good Should God have a world where evil exists?

10:05 If God is perfect, why is His handiwork so imperfect? I think we've all wrestled at some time over the question of the origin of evil. Where did evil come from? How did evil begin in history? I remember as a brand-new Christian, I hadn't thought about that at all, and one day I was playing ping-pong in the basement of the freshman dormitory, and I was playing. My mind was engrossed in a ping-pong game, and all of a once it hit me like a ton of bricks. You believe in God, but there's so much evil in the world, there's so much wrong in the world. How could that happen? How could a good God allow bad things to coexist with Him? So as soon as you raise that question about evil, you're then, if you affirm the existence of God, you're now faced with the question of justifying a good God for creating a universe that has fallen.

11:12 Some have called this the Achilles' heel of the Christian faith and the most difficult theological problem we face. All right, well, let's look at how Leibniz approached this question in brief. First of all, in his approach to the question, he made a distinction among three distinct types of evil. First of all, there is what he called metaphysical evil. I'll give a definition of that. Metaphysical evil is something akin to the way Plato thought. Metaphysical evil means some imperfection of being in the universe. Evil would be the lack of pure, perfect being that is basic to anything that is finite.

12:20 Only an infinite being has metaphysical perfection, according to the philosophers. Anything that's finite, anything that's changing, anything that's in a state of flux, anything Anything that has the category that we've talked about many times already of becoming is not as high a level of being as pure being or as supreme being. So that only pure being or supreme being, eternal, perfect being, would be perfectly metaphysically good. And anything, again, that is changing, finite, derived, dependent, contingent, and so on, would be a lower level of being, so it is called metaphysical evil. Now, I'm going to put quotes around that word evil, because what that means simply is that it is imperfect, it is less in the fullness of being than God.

13:21 Now the second kind of evil that Leibniz delineated was what he calls physical evil. Now, what he means by physical evil is disease, natural catastrophes or calamities like earthquakes, fires, floods, volcanic eruptions, all of those things by which nature can wreak havoc on the inhabited people of this world. Those are called by Him physical evil. They bring harm physically to us and to the world. So that's physical evil. Then the third category, again I'm going to put quotes around the word evil.

14:17 The third category is the category of moral evil. Now, remember when we started this and we said, if God is good, how could He create a world where there's so much evil? Usually what we're thinking about when we think about evil there is we're thinking about moral evil. But we also worry about those catastrophic events that take place in this world that insurance companies are still fond of describing as, quote, acts of God, the flood, the tornado, the earthquake, and so on, that bring unbelievable misery and pain to the world. And so you also, even if we didn't have such a thing as moral evil among ourselves, we would still ask the question about God's character, about creating a universe where all these bad things happen. Remember, this was one of the basic questions that the disciples came to Jesus about during His earthly ministry when the word had come out about the temple that had been under construction that it fell on these innocent people, and then that Pilate had mingled the blood of the

15:39 worshipers with the blood of the sacrifice in the slaughter that we hear of only in that instance in the New Testament. And basically, the question that the disciples are raising is, how could God allow these things to happen? I mean, here are these people minding their own business, walking down the street, and all of a sudden this temple falls over and it crushes them to death. It was a physical accident. Nobody intended for the temple to fall or the tower to fall. It was an act of nature or physical consequences where nobody pushed the tower over on top of these people. So, how can a good God allow Vesuvius to erupt and bury the city of Pompeii in volcanic ash?

16:34 Where's God in all of this? Of course, Jesus answers the question, unless you repent, you shall all likewise perish, because following the Old Testament, the presence of physical evil, the presence of death, the The presence of disease, the presence of conflict in the creation, is all tied into the moral evil of human beings that is part of the consequences of the fall. But that's another approach. Because if we say that, we still have to ask, where does this come from? Where does the moral evil come? Well, the way that Leibniz approached this, as I said, was first he distinguished among the three different types of evil, and then tried to posit a relationship between each one of these. That is to say, again, he still has his monatology theory, is that moral evil flows out of physical evil, and physical evil and moral evil both flow out of metaphysical evil.

17:45 That is to say, they are necessary consequences of a metaphysically imperfect creation. That is, since we are finite, out of our finitude comes physical weaknesses, and out of both our finite status and our physical weaknesses come our moral failures. And then he went on to say that God is absolved in all of this because when God created the universe, He had a virtually, I say virtually, infinite number of possible worlds He could have created.

18:38 I say virtually because there's one kind of world even God could not have created. God would not have been able to create a metaphysically perfect God. Because, for God to create a metaphysically perfect God, He would have to create another God. But that even God can't create another God. Why not? Because the second God would still be a creature. The second God would be dependent on the first God for its very existence. So that you can't have God creating another God. God can create are creatures. That's the nature of creation. So, God cannot impart to His creature His own self-existent eternal being. Now, with that given, and if God is going to create, He knows at the beginning that He can't create another God, so He can create various different different types of universes.

19:46 He has, again, a virtually infinite number of types of finite universes He creates. Now, God being good is naturally going to create the best model that He could possibly create, because if He has the option of creating model A or model B, and model A is more perfect than model B, or to put it the other way, model B is more imperfect or evil than model A. God would not be good to choose the second model, and if He were really good, He would choose the first model. And so, obviously, being all-wise and all-righteous, God selected the best world he could possibly create, an ideal world, as it were. Now, you've probably heard the expression that we are living in the best of all possible worlds.

20:54 That sentiment, that idea, the best of all possible worlds, finds its roots in this theodicy of Leibniz. Now, you've also probably heard of Voltaire's famous little work, Candide. Many of you had to read it when you were in college, and it tells the story of this Dr. Pangloss, who seems to be a bumbling idiot because he naively assumes that he's living in a world that is the best of all possible worlds. This was written after a major calamity beset Europe. The Lisbon earthquake of that time was more devastating, I guess, than the San Francisco earthquake in our own day. And again, people, because of the devastation of the Lisbon earthquake, were asking this question afresh, where's God in all of this?

21:49 How could God allow this to happen? And Voltaire cynically looked at the work of Leibniz and said, you know, he's just an idiot, Dr. Pangloss here, walking around with his head in the clouds thinking that this is the best of all possible worlds, and that even though we're not gods, we can conceive of a much better world than we're presently living in. And not only that, the Scriptures themselves talk about a world that will be better in the renovations. That's the fatal problem from the Christian perspective of this theodicy, is that it's on a collision course with the biblical story of creation and of fall and of renovation. The New Testament or the Old Testament does not look at moral evil as a necessary consequence of finitude.

22:45 That's the critical point, because in our modern day, there are many, many theologians and psychologists who eliminate responsibility of real moral evil, saying that we just do what comes naturally, that sin is a necessary consequence of being a finite creature. We are human, after all. To err is human. To forgive is divine. And so, from a Christian viewpoint, this attempt to justify God fails because it, first of all, doesn't justify God, and second of all, doesn't square at all with the view of moral evil that we find in classical Christianity.