Historical+Background

=Historical Background =

The Enlightenment
 “[The] Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) [was] the philosophical, scientific, and rational attitudes, the freedom from superstition, and the belief in religious tolerance of much of 18th-century Europe. In Germany, the //Aufklärung// (‘Enlightenment’), which extended from the middle of the 17th century to the beginning of the 19th century, was a literary and philosophical movement that included Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, and Emanuel Kant. The Yiddish literature of Eastern Europe experienced a new dynamism, while a similarly invigorating freedom of ideas affected writers as far apart as Sweden, Russia, and Britain. In France the Enlightenment was associated with the //philosophes//, the literary men, scientists, and thinkers who were united in their belief in the supremacy of reason and their desire to see practical change to combat inequality and injustice. The movement against established beliefs and institutions gained momentum throughout the 18th century under Voltaire, Rousseau, Turgot, Condorcet, and others. Through the publication of //Encyclopédie// (1751-76) their attacks on the government, the church, and the judiciary provided the intellectual basis for the French Revolution.” - page 475, from the //Oxford Reference Encyclopedia//

Leibniz's Philosophy
 “Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz [was born in] 1646 [and died in] 1716. [He was a] German rationalist philosopher, mathematician, and logician. He spent his life in the diplomatic and political service and in 1700 was appointed first president of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin. Leibniz is chiefly known as an exponent of optimism; he believed that the world is fundamentally harmonious and good, being composed of single units (monads), each of which is self-contained but acts in harmony with every other; these form an ascending hierarchy culminating in God. Their harmony is ordained by God, who never acts except for a reason that requires it, and so this world is the best of all possible worlds (a view satirized in Voltaire’s //Candide//). Leibniz made the important distinction between necessary (logical) truths and contingent (factual) truths, and proposed a universal logical language that would eliminate ambiguity. He also devised a method of calculus independently of Newton.” - page 805, from the //Oxford Reference Encyclopedia//

 “Leibniz’s argument, however can be freed from dependence on his peculiar metaphysic, and transformed into what is called the argument from design. This argument contends that, on a survey of the known world, we find things which cannot plausibly be explained as the product of blind natural forces, but are much more reasonably to be regarded as evidences of a beneficent purpose.

 …There is one important difference between this argument and the others, namely, that the God whom (if valid) it demonstrates need not have all the usual metaphysical attributes. He need not be omnipotent or omniscient; He may be only vastly wiser and more powerful than we are. The evils in the world may be due to His limited power. Some modern theologians have made use of these possibilities in forming their conception of God. But such speculations are remote from the philosophy of Leibniz, to which we must now return.

 One of the most characteristic features of that philosophy is the doctrine of many possible worlds. A world is ‘possible’ if it does not contradict the laws of logic. There are an infinite number of possible worlds, all of which God contemplated before creating the actual world. Being good, God decided to create the best of the possible worlds, and He even considered that the one to be the best which had the greatest excess of good over evil. He could have created a world containing no evil, but it would not have been so good as the actual world. That is because some great goods are logically bound up with certain evils. To take a trivial illustration, a drink of cold water when you are very thirsty on a hot day may give you such great pleasure that you think the previous thirst, though painful, was worth enduring, because without it the subsequent enjoyment could not have been so great. For theology, it is not such illustrations that are important, but the connection of sin with free will. Free will is a great good, but it was logically impossible for God to bestow free will and at the same time decree that there should be no sin. God therefore decided to make man free, although He foresaw that Adam would eat the apple, and although sin inevitably brought the punishment. The world that resulted, although it contains evil, as a greater surplus of good over evil than any other possible world; it is therefore the best of all possible worlds, and the evil that it contains affords no argument against the goodness of God.” - page 564-565, from the //History of Western Philosophy// by Bertrand Russell