WHAT A FRIEND WE HAVE IN LEIBNIZ
I refer of course to the 17th Century German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Leibniz is remembered for many things, though chief among them would be his contribution to the discovery of differential calculus (virtually simultaneous with Isaac Newton, and the controversy rages on to this day as to who "discovered it first" and hence deserves the lion's share of the credit). Like many of the best intellectuals of his day, Leibniz was a polymath and world class philosopher who wrote voluminously on a variety of weighty subjects. Religiously, his work offered an ecumenical approach (Protestants/Catholics) to many difficult issues. He is often remembered for his thesis that this is indeed the "best of all possible worlds."
And therein lies one of the most difficult issues in human existence - the problem of "the way things are" (and the way the Universe is designed) vis a vis the problem of pain, misery, etc. Personally, I find lots of 17 C. philosophy to be very friendly to what we today refer to as "Intelligent Design," a movement I'm very much intellectually invested in (think Newton, Descartes, Locke, et.al.). Christianity has always traditionally responded to the problem of pain by reminding us all that the world, in an often difficult-to-fathom but very real way, is "fallen." It is tainted and ruined by sin. Sin is the origin of so much trouble, pain, and suffering in the human continuum. But Leibniz reinforces the idea that this world we find ourselves in, despite its many difficult intellectual dilemmas, is the best of all possible worlds. ("And God saw all the He had made, and it was very good." Gen. 1:31)
Philosophers have to come to grips with the idea that, perhaps, things just could not be any other way. If I have the capacity to feel pain, that capacity also serves as a warning system for me, to keep me from harm (or worse harm, for instance). I know that I ought to keep my hands directly away from fire, for example, although direct accidental exposure (accident = randomness; free will) to it will hurt me. Nevertheless, my body says "get it out of the fire asap!" This is just a simple example, but I could fill up a book with many others, and you should get the picture. If we feel pleasure in some things, how is it that we quantify that, anyway? Normally by comparing and contrasting the opposite - pain or displeasure. So there can be no feeling of pleasure without the potential for feeling pain. The Greeks often used reasoning by opposites to compare and contrast (e.g., Plato); this proved to be an excellent teaching method; a device to further critical understanding.
Bottom line, therefore, is that the more we understand things like cosmology, astronomy, and the like, the more we realize that the Universe (and the planet we inhabit) - despite what sometimes seem like preposterous examples to the contrary - is exquisitely fine tuned for our lives (and all other animals) to exist. And existence is a conundrum in and of itself.
It is thinkers like Leibniz who make the process of figuring all this out a much more delightful task, and Christian-rationalist oriented thinkers should definitely immerse themselves in his writing, as he is a tremendous ally to our way of thinking. There is no love without free will and choice; there is no freedom without free will and choice; indeed - there could be NO life without the inherent degradation involved in just being alive. Our bodies grow and experience wonderful highs (and lows), but it's baked into our genes that we will eventually die; our bodies over time slowing down and decaying (bones, joints, and just about all the rest of what comprises our "stuff"). So to live is to slowly die, in a morbid sense. The very element (oxygen) that keeps us alive is also the substance that slowly breaks down our cells! The challenge is in how we approach our highly improbable existence in the first place (in a Universe that is otherwise incredibly violent and in many places is totally hostile to what we understand as life).
Leibniz was a champion of logic, and His God (Christianity's) is quite logical. Moreover, he is a champion, in very clear prose, of cause and effect - "nothing is without a reason; no effect is without a cause" (from "First Truths" - a brilliant essay). For Leibniz, these statements were a priori to the notion of truth, and he (as do I and so should you) believes in ontic Truth. "Truths" are found in mathematics, for instance - no scientific law makes any sense without the underlying "truth" contained in its premises and propositions. Truth is there; we cannot deny it - how could this possibly be without intentionality? (i.e., a Designer)
My jaw dropped as I read some of Leibniz's statements prefiguring quantum mechanics, with his razor-sharp intuitions to the way modern physics works (way ahead of his time), but throughout my study of philosophy, I have repeatedly (and pleasantly) found this to be the case among the best thinkers. Consider these statements from Leibniz's essay "First Things": "... there is no body that cannot be actually subdivided." "A world of infinite creatures is contained in every particle in the Universe." As he believed that the Universe was a sort of "whole"; an entirety (a "Monad" - literally a "unity" from the Greek), he believed in the immortality of humans (soul + body); they could never be fully "destroyed"; rather, their energy is merely transformed (a la Newton's transformation of energy, which is neither created nor destroyed). "Ensouled beings do not arise or perish, they are only transformed." However, he did not believe in the transmigration of souls, either; rather, in his words: "souls...do not pass from one body into another which is entirely new to them. There is no metempsychosis; rather, a metamorphosis.
Now my jaw really dropped when I read the next statement from Leibniz (from his phenomenal work "The Principles of Nature and Grace"); one I have articulated many a time in debates with colleagues and friends, and one of the strongest arguments for the existence of God, though I had never ever read it in any philosopher's writings before, and I was stunned to see Leibniz, a kindred spirit, had articulated it there for all to see centuries before. One of the most profound truths of our understanding reads like this in Leibniz, in all its majestic simplicity: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (italics are in the original text -at least in my edition) This supports his sound and strong reasoning for cause and effect in # 7 of the principles he is articulating in his "Nature and Grace" essay: "nothing happens without a sufficient reason." I posited in my last post (on Descartes) that many folks who disbelieve in a Creator God really have to resort to sophism to (so they think) make their points re: cosmology, and Leibniz addresses this very same issue in an extensive footnote to # 11: "The reasons for an alleged vacuum (the idea of matter somehow arising independent of a super intelligence) are mere sophisms."
Leibniz, in the end, was a great champion for the twin pillars of human enlightenment we know as "faith and reason," the dual harbor lights that help us navigate our way through what is all too often a dark and challenging existence fraught with pain, sickness, and loss. Leibniz saw the big picture so clearly, and his writings articulate wonderful underlying principles (and great apologias) as to why believers should maintain a spirit of hope (challenging as that may be at times for all of us).
From # 18 in "Nature and Grace": "The love of God makes us enjoy a foretaste of future felicity. It gives us perfect confidence in the goodness of our author and master, producing a pure tranquillity of mind..." Since "God is infinite, he cannot be wholly known. Therefore our happiness will never, and ought not, consist in full joy, where there would be nothing farther to desire, rendering our mind stupid; but in a perpetual progress to new pleasures and to new perfections."
From one who saw the Universe and the journey of the human being within it so clearly... Thank you, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
TTC
And therein lies one of the most difficult issues in human existence - the problem of "the way things are" (and the way the Universe is designed) vis a vis the problem of pain, misery, etc. Personally, I find lots of 17 C. philosophy to be very friendly to what we today refer to as "Intelligent Design," a movement I'm very much intellectually invested in (think Newton, Descartes, Locke, et.al.). Christianity has always traditionally responded to the problem of pain by reminding us all that the world, in an often difficult-to-fathom but very real way, is "fallen." It is tainted and ruined by sin. Sin is the origin of so much trouble, pain, and suffering in the human continuum. But Leibniz reinforces the idea that this world we find ourselves in, despite its many difficult intellectual dilemmas, is the best of all possible worlds. ("And God saw all the He had made, and it was very good." Gen. 1:31)
Philosophers have to come to grips with the idea that, perhaps, things just could not be any other way. If I have the capacity to feel pain, that capacity also serves as a warning system for me, to keep me from harm (or worse harm, for instance). I know that I ought to keep my hands directly away from fire, for example, although direct accidental exposure (accident = randomness; free will) to it will hurt me. Nevertheless, my body says "get it out of the fire asap!" This is just a simple example, but I could fill up a book with many others, and you should get the picture. If we feel pleasure in some things, how is it that we quantify that, anyway? Normally by comparing and contrasting the opposite - pain or displeasure. So there can be no feeling of pleasure without the potential for feeling pain. The Greeks often used reasoning by opposites to compare and contrast (e.g., Plato); this proved to be an excellent teaching method; a device to further critical understanding.
Bottom line, therefore, is that the more we understand things like cosmology, astronomy, and the like, the more we realize that the Universe (and the planet we inhabit) - despite what sometimes seem like preposterous examples to the contrary - is exquisitely fine tuned for our lives (and all other animals) to exist. And existence is a conundrum in and of itself.
It is thinkers like Leibniz who make the process of figuring all this out a much more delightful task, and Christian-rationalist oriented thinkers should definitely immerse themselves in his writing, as he is a tremendous ally to our way of thinking. There is no love without free will and choice; there is no freedom without free will and choice; indeed - there could be NO life without the inherent degradation involved in just being alive. Our bodies grow and experience wonderful highs (and lows), but it's baked into our genes that we will eventually die; our bodies over time slowing down and decaying (bones, joints, and just about all the rest of what comprises our "stuff"). So to live is to slowly die, in a morbid sense. The very element (oxygen) that keeps us alive is also the substance that slowly breaks down our cells! The challenge is in how we approach our highly improbable existence in the first place (in a Universe that is otherwise incredibly violent and in many places is totally hostile to what we understand as life).
Leibniz was a champion of logic, and His God (Christianity's) is quite logical. Moreover, he is a champion, in very clear prose, of cause and effect - "nothing is without a reason; no effect is without a cause" (from "First Truths" - a brilliant essay). For Leibniz, these statements were a priori to the notion of truth, and he (as do I and so should you) believes in ontic Truth. "Truths" are found in mathematics, for instance - no scientific law makes any sense without the underlying "truth" contained in its premises and propositions. Truth is there; we cannot deny it - how could this possibly be without intentionality? (i.e., a Designer)
My jaw dropped as I read some of Leibniz's statements prefiguring quantum mechanics, with his razor-sharp intuitions to the way modern physics works (way ahead of his time), but throughout my study of philosophy, I have repeatedly (and pleasantly) found this to be the case among the best thinkers. Consider these statements from Leibniz's essay "First Things": "... there is no body that cannot be actually subdivided." "A world of infinite creatures is contained in every particle in the Universe." As he believed that the Universe was a sort of "whole"; an entirety (a "Monad" - literally a "unity" from the Greek), he believed in the immortality of humans (soul + body); they could never be fully "destroyed"; rather, their energy is merely transformed (a la Newton's transformation of energy, which is neither created nor destroyed). "Ensouled beings do not arise or perish, they are only transformed." However, he did not believe in the transmigration of souls, either; rather, in his words: "souls...do not pass from one body into another which is entirely new to them. There is no metempsychosis; rather, a metamorphosis.
Now my jaw really dropped when I read the next statement from Leibniz (from his phenomenal work "The Principles of Nature and Grace"); one I have articulated many a time in debates with colleagues and friends, and one of the strongest arguments for the existence of God, though I had never ever read it in any philosopher's writings before, and I was stunned to see Leibniz, a kindred spirit, had articulated it there for all to see centuries before. One of the most profound truths of our understanding reads like this in Leibniz, in all its majestic simplicity: "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (italics are in the original text -at least in my edition) This supports his sound and strong reasoning for cause and effect in # 7 of the principles he is articulating in his "Nature and Grace" essay: "nothing happens without a sufficient reason." I posited in my last post (on Descartes) that many folks who disbelieve in a Creator God really have to resort to sophism to (so they think) make their points re: cosmology, and Leibniz addresses this very same issue in an extensive footnote to # 11: "The reasons for an alleged vacuum (the idea of matter somehow arising independent of a super intelligence) are mere sophisms."
Leibniz, in the end, was a great champion for the twin pillars of human enlightenment we know as "faith and reason," the dual harbor lights that help us navigate our way through what is all too often a dark and challenging existence fraught with pain, sickness, and loss. Leibniz saw the big picture so clearly, and his writings articulate wonderful underlying principles (and great apologias) as to why believers should maintain a spirit of hope (challenging as that may be at times for all of us).
From # 18 in "Nature and Grace": "The love of God makes us enjoy a foretaste of future felicity. It gives us perfect confidence in the goodness of our author and master, producing a pure tranquillity of mind..." Since "God is infinite, he cannot be wholly known. Therefore our happiness will never, and ought not, consist in full joy, where there would be nothing farther to desire, rendering our mind stupid; but in a perpetual progress to new pleasures and to new perfections."
From one who saw the Universe and the journey of the human being within it so clearly... Thank you, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
TTC
posted by thoughtful conservative at 7:35 PM
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