The great German philosopher and polymath Wilhelm Leibniz once opined that natural disasters - say like the Indian Ocean Tsunami in December, 2004 (which killed 227,000), aren’t the result of any divine punishment for sin but simply the consequence of a regulated and overall consistent system of natural laws. In fact, according to Leibniz we actually inhabit the "best of all possible worlds". That is, in the sense of balancing all the physical aspects of its formation along with the realistic consequences that can arise from them.
In order to make his case Leibniz invoked the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Suppose God created two parallel Earths, one A - over 'here' (in our own Milky Way galaxy), one B - over 'there' (in the Andromeda galaxy). There would be no sufficient reason why he should not have placed them the other way around. Thus, the Principle of Sufficient Reason - which was necessary for the world to exist in the first place- would have been violated. I.e. how can two 'best possible worlds' be totally exchangeable in respect to their created locations?
More importantly, Leibniz contended - in an exchange of views with another philosopher, Malebranche- that: “God permits evil for the sake of a higher value”[1]. I.e. to entice fellow humans to assist and give of themselves. Hence, for God to intervene to halt suffering – say by child cancer victims, or those affected in the horrific Boston Marathon bombing, or killed in the Newtown massacre - would “require Him to violate superlative principles He put in place to govern the world[2].”
In other words, humans shouldn’t complain because in fact this Earth we live on is the “best of all possible worlds”. It has exactly the right admixture of evil, relative to good! Along the same lines, one must bear in mind that the cosmos and world are still in a process of evolution, and that de facto incomplete process allows for what we call evil. It was the philosopher N.M Wildiers who first observed[3]:
Whatever is yet to be completed is of necessity
imperfect, defective, unfinished. Evil
is thus structurally part and parcel of a world in evolution. An evolving world
and a perfect world – these are mutually contradictory ideas.
A perfect world was always impossible because whatever defects the world exhibits can be traced to its incompleteness. In other words, evil - natural and man-made- is inevitable in an imperfect world governed by evolution. If we know and have data to support that we inhabit an evolving world and universe then it is irrational to expect it not to display evil. But at the same time we need to recognize the evil apparent is not overpowering or absolute.
One Notre Dame professor writing several years ago about Leibniz and his philosophy, noted[4]:
One unsettling consequence of Leibniz’s view is that God’s plans and purposes aren’t as human-centered as we might have believed. It is oddly wonderful to think the whole cosmos, even natural disasters, revolves around us, but that belief may already be hard enough to sustain given what we already know about the history and size of the universe.
Indeed, and I might add it's the epitome of human arrogance and conceit to believe such given a cosmos sixty-six billion light years in diameter and teeming with trillions of galaxies each containing over a one hundred billion stars each on average. Only a totally ignorant or self-worshipping species could entertain such an incredibly egomaniacal fantasy!
So to believe any natural disaster or cosmic event is purely for human purposes and interpretations is to commit a ghastly mental crime that boggles the imagination. It rivals that of the egomaniac ant in one ancient Barbadian legend. According to that legend, an ant decided one today to pick up a small piece of straw in its mandibles and drive all humans from its land! Before it could move two inches it was squashed by a human foot. Not intentionally, but merely because the ant’s movements were in the wrong place at the wrong time
The whole history of the advance of modern science, especially astronomy, also provides a cautionary tale to anthropocentrism in showing how humanity has been repeatedly driven out of its preferred roosting perches: from Copernicus’ revelation of the heliocentric theory of the solar system (showing the Sun, not the Earth was the center of the solar system), to the discovery that the solar system is not at the center of the Milky Way galaxy but two thirds to the edge, to the discovery that the Milky Way itself is not the center of the cosmos, but that all galaxies (in clusters) are moving away from each other in the expansion with no single geometric center.
Finally, in 1997-98, the discovery that the matter of which we are composed doesn’t even comprise the predominant building blocks for the cosmos. It’s only about 7 percent of the total. The other 93 percent is dark energy and dark matter![5]
We’d do well to bear all
this in mind, next time we fancy a major earthquake or natural disaster is "God’s punishment". Or that multiple earthquakes or other natural disasters
herald some "end times" event!
See Also:
Brane Space: The Complexities of Natural and Human Imperfection ("Evil")
[1] Nadler: The
Best of All Possible Worlds: A Story of Philosopher, God and Evil, 133.
[4] Newland,
The Wall Street Journal, April 7, 2010, A15.
[5] This is
based on a wealth of data from multiple publications, referencing the Boomerang
and MAXIMA UV measurements to do with type Ia supernovae. See e.g. . Perlmutter,, Physics Today,
April, 2003, 53.
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