Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil — John Shaqi
Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of EvilLeibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von
Religion
Theodicy: Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Freiherr von
Free will and determinism; Theism; Theodicy
Every theistic philosopher is bound, with whatever cautions, to conceive
God by the analogy of the human mind. When Leibniz declares the harmony of
monads to be pre-established by God, he is invoking the image of
intelligent human pre-arrangement. Nor is he content simply to leave it at
that: he endeavours as well as he may to conceive the sort of act by which
God pre-arranges; and this involves the detailed adaptation for theological
purposes of Leibnitian doctrine about the human mind.
The human mind, as we have seen, is the mind predominant in a certain
system of 'minds', viz. in those which constitute the members of the human
body. If we call it predominant, we mean that its system of ideas is more
developed than theirs, so that there are more points in which each of them
conforms to it than in which it conforms to any one of them. The conception
of a divine pre-establishing mind will be analogous. It will be the
conception of a mind _absolutely_ dominant, to whose ideas, that is to say,
the whole system simply corresponds, without any reciprocating
correspondence on his side. In a certain sense this is to make God the
'Mind of the World'; and yet the associations of the phrase are misleading.
It suggests that the world is an organism or body in which the divine mind
is incarnate, and on which he relies for his representations. But that is
nonsense; the world is not _a_ body, nor is it organic to God. Absolute
dominance involves absolute transcendence: if everything in the world
without remainder simply obeys the divine thoughts, that is only another
way of saying that the world is the creature of God; the whole system is
pre-established by him who is absolute Being and perfectly independent of
the world.
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