Britannica Sources used in this answer

How did Leibniz defend the claim that this world is the best of all possible worlds?

Created from Britannica articles using AI. AI can make mistakes, so verify using Britannica articles.

Charles Sprague Pearce: Religion — Philosophy of religion Detail of *Religion*, mural in lunette from the Family and Education series by Charles Sprague Pearce, 1897; in the Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz defended the claim that this world is the best of all possible worlds primarily in his work Theodicy (1710) as a solution to the problem of evil.12

His argument rests on the nature of God as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. Leibniz posited that God, possessing infinite wisdom and goodness, surveyed an infinite number of possible worlds before creation. Because God is perfectly good, he necessarily chose to create the world that contained the greatest possible number of compatible perfections.12

Leibniz addressed the existence of evil by arguing that:
* Interconnectedness: A world without the specific evils we observe might necessarily contain other, greater forms of evil due to the complex web of events.1
* Divine Perspective: What appears as a dark patch or an evil in isolation may contribute to the beauty and "plenitude" of the whole, much like shadows in a painting.2
* Sufficient Reason: If there were no single best world, God would have lacked a sufficient reason to create any world at all; since a world exists, it must be the best.31