The Best of All Possible Worlds

On April 12th, 2023, I gave a talk for the Rising Tide Foundation entitled Paolo Sarpi: The Key to Modern Science. In preparation for this talk, I spent some time reading Plato (c.427 BCE - 348 BCE) and Aristotle (384 BCE - 322 BCE). When I was reading Plato's Timaeus, I was struck by the following passage:

Now of the four elements the construction of the Cosmos had taken up the whole of every one. For its Constructor had constructed it of all the fire and water and air and earth that existed, leaving over, outside it, no single particle or potency of any one of these elements. And these were his intentions:

first, that it might be, so far as possible, a Living Creature, perfect and whole, with all its parts perfect; and next, that it might be One,

inasmuch as there was nothing left over out of which another like Creature might come into existence; and further, that it might be secure from age and ailment, since He perceived that when heat and cold, and all things which have violent potencies, surround a composite body from without and collide with it they dissolve it unduly and make it to waste away by bringing upon it ailments and age. Wherefore, because of this reasoning, He fashioned it to be One single Whole, compounded of all wholes, perfect and ageless and unailing.¹

So Timaeus described how the Constructor had created the World, or the Universe as we would know call it, as a Living Creature, perfect and whole, with all its parts perfect.

This struck me as very reminiscent of this passage in Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s (1646-1716) correspondence with Samuel Clarke (1675-1729), in which Leibniz was critiquing Isaac Newton’s (1643-1727) Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica.

Sir Isaac Newton and his followers also have a very odd opinion concerning the work of God. According to them, God Almighty needs to wind up his watch from time to time, otherwise it would cease to move. He had not, it seems, sufficient foresight to make it a perpetual motion. No, the machine of God’s making is so imperfect, according to these gentlemen, that he is obliged to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to mend it, as a clockmaker mends his work, who must consequently be so much the more unskillful a workman as he is more often obliged to mend his work and to set it right. According to the opinion, the same force and vigor remains always in the world and only passes from one part of matter to another agreeably to the laws of nature and the beautiful pre-established order. I hold that when God works miracles, he does not do it in order to supply the wants of nature, but those of grace. Whoever thinks otherwise must needs have a very mean notion of the wisdom and power of God. [pp.320-321]²

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

All of a sudden, Leibniz’s “fundamental assumption that God has chosen the best of all possible worlds” [Leibniz, Theodicy, p.168] takes on a clear meaning, beyond the simple moral arguments that Voltaire parodied in his Candide. The Universe is a perpetual motion “machine”, and since it has already been proven that it is impossible to construct a perpetual motion mechanical device, the logical conclusion is that the Universe cannot simply be understood through the principles of mechanics, nor will there ever be a Heat Death, as predicted by theoreticians working with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.

À suivre…

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1. Plato. Timeus. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=plat.+tim. [Plat. Tim. 32c,32d,33a].

2. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, eds. G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, Hacket Publishing Company, 1989.