Evil against God

Epicurus starts from the common preconception of the gods as blessed and incorruptible beings, and takes it seriously to the end: a perfectly happy being knows neither anger nor favour, for the care and toil of governing a world would betray a need, hence an imperfection. It follows that the gods, set apart in the intermundia, exercise no providence and dispense neither reward nor punishment: popular piety, which pictures them jealous and vengeful, is the real impiety. This theology is therefore not a covert atheism, of which he was accused, but a therapeutic strategy, the first remedy of the tetrapharmakos, which removes the ground of the fear of the gods.

The blessed and incorruptible being neither has trouble itself nor causes trouble to another; hence it is moved neither by anger nor by favour.Principal Doctrines, I

Letter to Menoeceus, 123-124 (the blessed gods, unconcerned with men) · Principal Doctrines, I (the blessed and incorruptible being knows neither trouble nor anger)

The so-called Epicurean dilemma, transmitted by Lactantius, concludes that a God at once good and all-powerful is incompatible with the existence of evil: either he wishes to prevent it and cannot, or he can and will not. For Epicurus, the blessed gods do not meddle with the world.

Lactantius, On the Anger of God, 13 (attributed dilemma); Letter to Menoeceus

God is the supreme, necessary and personal substance, cause of the pre-established harmony and author of the choice of the best world. Leibniz proves him along several lines: the sufficient reason of the contingent universe must lie outside it; the eternal truths presuppose a divine intellect; he takes up and amends the ontological argument. This is theism in the full sense, providential and creative, not the impersonal God of Spinoza, whom he opposes.

Monadology, §38-45 (God, sufficient reason, source of the eternal truths) · Theodicy, §7-8 (God, cause of the best world)

Evil is not a positive reality that God would have produced, but a privation, a limitation inherent in every finite creature (metaphysical evil), from which follow suffering (physical evil) and fault (moral evil). God does not will evil, he only permits it when it is the condition of a greater good in the economy of the whole. This is the theodicy, the word Leibniz coins to justify God against the argument from evil: he turns the objection around by showing that a world with no evil at all would be less perfect than ours, and so unworthy of a wise creator. The position is resolutely justificatory rather than tragic or rebellious.

Theodicy