> Leibniz challenged “humanity to participate in the work of striving toward perfection,”
> Because the world is the creation of a perfect being, it can achieve only the “best possible” state short of divine perfection.
That's a lot of presumptions: That the creator is perfect, there is even a perfect, what I (Leibniz) call perfect is the god's/gods' perfect, ... while not giving a frame of reference.
I find this a common theme for those who are struggling to marry religious beliefs with logic.
> That's a lot of presumptions: That the creator is perfect, there is even a perfect, what I (Leibniz) call perfect is the god's/gods' perfect, ... while not giving a frame of reference.
The Creator (First Mover) being perfect is not a presumption, but rather a conclusion; see Corollary 1.3:
* https://tofspot.blogspot.com/2014/11/first-way-part-iv-casca...
(You'll need to go through the series of weblog posts (they're not that long) to get the full logic of the argument.)
See also perhaps Aquinas, "Whether God is perfect?":
> [that] there is even a "perfect"
This an important insight to this that I feel many people miss. Most of us consider "striving for perfection" to be equivalent to striving for the "absolute best". Real life often has no absolute best option. Real life is much more like an intricate web of interconnected rock-paper-scissors like relationships and choices, where "better" or "worse" is highly contextual and even conflicting. Aeon had a really nice essay about the problem[0].
Perhaps we tend to have a cultural blindness to this in cultures with European heritage due to the legacy of Plato's "perfect forms", and later how Christianity positions God.
[0] https://aeon.co/essays/attempts-to-choose-the-best-life-may-...
Replace "perfect" with "likely optimal" and you get the general thrust of it without the deus ex machina.
"Because the world is the creation of a likely optimal being, it can achieve only the “best possible” state short of divine likely optimisation"?
If understood in a very mystic transcending meaning of "creation" maybe, otherwise it reads still like dogma to me.
I’m also reminded of quantum probabilities and expected outcomes— how possibilities converge to create reality, like quantum Darwinism. https://www.quantamagazine.org/quantum-darwinism-an-idea-to-...
Meanwhile the realists found the world to be a combustion chamber from life that adapted itself to the combustion chamber and whorships the adaption process instincts.
And we all agreed that staying in the surplus valley of the combustion process is nice, as long as science can deliver. And now we have to jam machinery into our lifes so we can remain sentient, while at the same time speculating for another delivery of surplus coming down the line. Panopticon here, social networks there- and it does nothing yet, atrocities in wartime and civil unrest are still rampant.
Perfection for Leibniz might be considered more of a logical concept than an observable state. After all, he uses the same thing to argue (somehow) for the existence of god! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#ExiGod
This leads to some strange conclusions about perfection that aren't intuitive, and sometimes seem monstous.
> * After all, he uses the same thing to argue (somehow) for the existence of god! https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#ExiGod *
His argument from contingency is probably a better one:
* https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2024/02/avicenna-aquinas-an...
Perfection might be imperfect.
I’m reminded of Pythagorean philosophies of harmony that quickly reveal the imperfections inherent to math, ie right triangle with two sides of one unit producing square root of two or Pythagorean tuning which is so perfect it is imperfect (eg the wolf fifth)
Yes, you must have assumptions to apply logic in the first place. I don’t mind it, even if I have different assumptions.
> with logic
It's actually deductive, application of logic: given some concept, develop the theory it generates (the set of its consequences). The "rationalist" way.
The real context may not necessarily be that of "beliefs" (of doctrinal beliefs as an object... Possibly as a subject, instead).
I think you will be pleasantly amused by this marriage of logic and religious beliefs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_ontological_pro...
It is formally proven that an entity that encompass all qualities of a God must exist.
Very interesting read, Thanks!
If I'm reading that article correctly, the criticism to Gödel is the same criticism I had for Leibniz:
> A proof does not necessitate that the conclusion be correct, but rather that by accepting the axioms, the conclusion follows logically.
> Many philosophers have called the axioms into question.
The real question is, would a perfect Being create an imperfect creation? While I don't proffer any, I think there are valid reasons to do so.
The Christian gnostics reasoned it must have been either a lesser evil god or blind fool who created the material world.