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Dev Benjamin (unsplash.com)
For 2000 years, humans believed in Greek philosopher Aristotle’s (384 BC–322 BC) geocentric world view, which consisted of the celestial spheres, with the earth and humans as the centre of the universe. Through the writings of Claudius Ptolemy (approx. 100 AD–170 AD), this viewpoint entered into the European literature – especially the religious literature – of the Middle Ages. In the following centuries, Nicolaus Copernicus’s (1473–1543) thesis that the earth circled the sun revolutionised our view of the world. For the first time, the importance of humans shifted from the centre of the cosmos to its edges. This was the beginning of one of the most remarkable periods of history: the Scientific Revolution. Religious faith was called into question by scientific arguments. Looking through a telescope, Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) saw with his own eyes that Venus appeared in our sky in phases similar to those of the moon: this was evidence that Venus circled the sun, and a further contribution to the establishment of the heliocentric world view. Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) ultimately calculated the elliptical orbits of the planets in our solar system. He did this with the help of data from Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), which was based on Brahe’s observations of the stars in the sky.
In the seventeenth century, during Leibniz’s time, the predominant view was that only God, not humans, could know the truth about nature. Accordingly, new knowledge about nature, our earth and the universe could only be contained in the message of the revelation – that is, the Bible. All findings resulting from scientific research were considered hypotheses without a claim to the truth.
For Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, an avowed adherent of empirical science, this was not satisfactory. He overcame this discrepancy by drawing on the French nature philosophers René Descarte and Pierre Gassendi to formulate a theological-philosophical argument: because God had given humans the capacity to reason, it was possible for them to obtain insights into the perfection of creation, even outside of the Holy Scriptures. For Leibniz, Christian faith and science were just two different ways of determining the truth.
Leibniz’s rationalist metaphysics is characterised by the notion of the harmony and beauty of an infinite “world organism”. The underlying idea is that everything in existence is permeated by unalterable, logical and rational laws based upon mathematical foundations. According to Leibniz, this also includes evil as a necessity which, however, ultimately dissolves within the harmonious cosmos. Because God has aligned everything perfectly and thus created the “best of all possible worlds”.
This mode of thinking led Leibniz away from a focus on humans, our earth, our solar system and the “known universe” to a bigger idea: an infinite space with endless possibilities for “countless universes” with many “rational beings”. All connected by a comprehensive order which only God could completely comprehend.
The idea of “multiverses” has inspired us again today through theoretical physics.
“To the people of old, only our earth appeared to be inhabited, [...] the rest of the world was, in their opinion, made of some glowing and some crystalline spheres. Today, though, we have to recognise – regardless of which boundaries one assigns to or denies the universe – that there are countless earths the same size or even larger than ours, and that these are equally likely to have rational inhabitants, although they do not need to be humans. The earth is just one planet – that is, one of the six main satellites of our sun; and because all fixed stars are also suns, we can see how meaningless our earth is among visible things, as it is simply an appendage of one of these suns. It is possible that all suns are inhabited by blissful beings, and nothing is forcing us to believe that there might be many among them who are damned; only a few examples and tests are sufficient to show the benefits that good derives from evil. Additionally, because we have no reason to assume that stars are everywhere: could there not be a big empty space on the other side of the world of stars? Whether or not this is the Empyrean, it is sufficient to believe that this vast space surrounding the whole world is filled with happiness and blessedness. One can look at it as an entire ocean into which the currents of all blessed creatures flow once they have achieved perfection within the world of stars. What does this mean for our view of our planet and its inhabitants? Is it not incomparably less than a physical point, given that our earth, compared to the distance of some fixed stars, can only be observed as a dot? The known part of the universe – when compared with the unknown part, which we nevertheless have to assume exists – is therefore reduced almost to nothingness, and all evils that can be held against us only have meaning relative to this almost nothingness: must we not therefore say that all evil is also almost nothing relative to the good of this world?”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
