II. The definitions of necessity and contingency Leibniz gives are the key to understanding his solution to this problem. He gives them as follows:
Necessity: Anything that would be contradictory were it not true (or, true in all possible worlds).
For example, it is necessary that the interior angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees. This cannot be false about triangles in any world, because it is contained in the definition of 'triangle' that it has interior angles that add up to 180 degrees and if some shape has interior angles greater than that, it is not a triangle anymore. On to contingency:
Contingency: Anything that would not be contradictory if it were not true (or, true in some possible worlds).
For example, in this world (the best of all possible worlds), "Rowan likes black coffee" is true. But if it were not true, this would not be contradictory because it is not contained in the definition of Rowan that he likes black coffee. This is true because we can imagine or conceive of a world exactly similar to this one where this proposition is false, and we can do this without contradiction. As a corollary, statements about possibility such as "Rowan could have disliked black coffee" must also be true, per this definition, as this is entirely possible, and its denial does not produce a contradiction.
Thus, contradiction means merely that something is false in all possible worlds. For example, a 'squared circle', a square and a circle constructed such that they have the same area, is contradictory because it is not an existent in any possible world (it is an impossible object).
Nor does divine foreknowledge, the fact that God can see what happens in advance, make one's actions any more necessary than they are. Foreknowledge merely amounts to God knowing what one will do. Mere foreknowledge of future events does not make one's actions necessary. Once again, there is no contradiction produced by their falsity. "Events that are chancy and contingent in themselves don’t become otherwise through God’s having foreseen them. So: they are assured, but they are not necessary." Thus, none of our choices is necessitated, statements about other possibilities we could have taken are true, and thus we can rightfully be held responsible for our actions.
A concern obviously remains though. Didn't I say that Leibniz thinks God chose this, the best of all possible worlds, the one that we live in? Doesn't that mean he chose this world, and thus all past, present, and future actions taken by us? The problem seems to have just been pushed out. Leibniz has a clever but incredible unsatisfactory response to this.
He says: 'sure, the actual world and its series of events are decided in advance by God, but just as his foreknowledge of our actions did not necessitate them in the sense defined above, nor does God's choosing to actualise this perfect set of possibles make them necessary either.' In other words, just because God chose to actualise this world does not immediately make the world, and the events that make it up, necessary. After all, since God freely chose this world, it is entirely possible that he could have actualised some other world. He is not bound to actualise the best of all possible worlds, He chooses this one world because of His goodness. Indeed, as we noted earlier the things that make up this world such as "Rowan likes black coffee" could easily have been false, and thus remain contingent, even if chosen by God. Similarly, the next time I sin and seal my fate in hell for all eternity, God's choice to actualise it does not make it necessary in the sense given above!
IV. Now you really ought to resist. You might say: "sure, I grant that, according to this definition, they are still contingent events in themselves. But God chose to actualise this world in which we sin, and he did this well before we were born, where we could not possibly have any control. Thus, we are still determined to sin in a certain way as a result of Gods choice and not of our own volition. How could God possibly hold us responsible for that?" This seems definitive. What can be said against this?
Here I really don't know what I could say in defence of Leibniz. One answer he offers is to further draw a distinction between absolute and conditional necessity. The former denotes any necessary proposition that is true irrespective of any condition, which even God cannot prevent from holding. For example, three times three equals nine. The latter denotes anything that is necessarily true, given that something else is. In the case considered, we have the conditional necessity:
If God created the best of all possible worlds, then any sin that he actualises within that world will necessarily occur.
Here, the antecedent is not necessary (because God could have chosen otherwise), even though the consequent is. Thus, Leibniz grants that all future contingents and thus all future actions (especially future sins) have a conditional necessity, but not an absolute necessity. Yet how is this supposed to allay our worries? Indeed, it just seems to formalise them! We are still "assured" to act in a certain way and thus, seemingly, not free, nor responsible for sin. Here, seems to be the lesson: contingency, or, the lack of necessity, does not entail freedom.
V. Perhaps he ends up being something like an analytic compatibilist. Compatibilists say that statements about possible actions are true even if determinism is (whether it be absolute or conditional). Further, they say that free will relies merely on the fact that certain counterfactual conditionals about possible action come out true. For example, "Rowan could have clapped his hands 10 times before writing this sentence" seems true, in some sense, irrespective of determinism. Thus, we have free will irrespective of determinism, because it is true that there is no contradiction in our conceiving of some alternative course of action in our reasoning.
There seems to be a lot wrong with the compatibilist case though, as I have previously written. First of all, this is not the sense of freedom we care about (and this is the real impetus behind the above objections). Freedom has nothing to do with the hypothetical makeup of possible worlds, our hypothetical freedom. Rather, the freedom we care about is in the actual world. This is our categorical sense of freedom. Second, all kinds of absurd counterfactuals will be true, especially for Leibniz, who must think an infinite number of counterfactuals will be true (since any of an infinite number of possibilities could have been chosen by God). Thus, we cannot individuate non-arbitrarily between plausible and implausible counterfactuals. In fact, we would have to give up the distinction and say that literally anything is possible for any person. Here is what I have to say about the matter:
I have two objections to the compatibilist. First, it is hard to see how the first sense is how we should interpret the notion of “could have acted other than they did.” To be more specific, the agent could not have acted otherwise, in the actual world, because they did not act otherwise. This is surely the sense of freedom we care about here. Just because certain counterfactuals come out true in our theory of semantics tells us nothing about the world as it is. Thus, I offer an adapted formulation of what we mean by free will:
Free Will: The ability or power for some agent to have performed some act, other than they have, in the actual world.
Second, if we ignore my first point and grant that a conditional analysis is sufficient to make free will compatible with determinism, then the compatibilist is committed to an infinite number of absurd but conceivable counterfactuals being true about the agent’s free will. For example, it would be true that “the agent could have chosen to grow wings and fly (if the universe were different)” or “the agent could have mastered the art of teleportation and became an international thief (if the universe were different)” because you could just as easily construct a possible world to accommodate these possibilities. The compatibilist will reply that such remote possible worlds are irrelevant to understanding sentences about free will (as they will be false). However, there is no non-arbitrary line to draw in kinds between plausible and implausible worlds. For this reason, the first sense of possibility is entirely trivial. In other words: so what if these sentences are true? They are mere fancies of the mind, projected into the past. This shows that when people talk about free will, they are talking about it in the second sense, which reinforces my decision to redefine free will to avoid this worry.
Thus, I really see no obvious way out for Leibniz. There is no way the 'merely' conditional necessity gets around any of the associated problems of free will, for broadly the same reasons the compatibilist fails. As a consolation, he writes:
Strictly speaking, we never have perfect freedom of mind. But that doesn’t prevent us from having a certain degree of freedom that the lower animals don’t have; it is our capacity for reasoning, and for choosing on the basis of what emerges from our reasoning
But I don't see how acknowledging our responsiveness to reasons makes us any freer to choose between sinning or not sinning, when we have been set up to sin from the very beginning.
VI. If this is all correct so far, it is hard to see how God's punishment could possibly be just in a determined world. If some group holds your family hostage and threatens to kill them unless you rob a bank for them, do we justly blame the person who robs the bank? No. It is even direr in the case of God. It is no mere physical coercion that causes you to sin (which you could rebel against in the actual world); it is metaphysical. You could not have not sinned, in the actual world. Each particular sin in the actual world is the direct and single metaphysical result of God actualising the world in this particular way, which you have no categorical power over—which he then he punishes you for! Leibniz sometimes seems almost to rejoice in this outcome:
It can be further said that God as Architect satisfies God as Lawgiver in everything, and that thus sins carry their punishment with them by the order of nature, and by virtue of the mechanical structure of things itself; and that in the same way noble actions will attract their rewards by ways which are mechanical as far as bodies are concerned...
However, I must hold that it is absurd. God cannot justly punish anyone in a determined world. This produces a dilemma for the theist, that I would like to outline in an argument:
(1) The world is either strictly determined (whether absolute or conditional) or it is not.(2) If the world is determined and God punishes sinners, then God is unjust.(3) If God exists, then he cannot be unjust.(4) Therefore, if the world is determined, then God does not exist.
Premise (1) is exhaustive, (2) is my own plausible addition, (3) follows from traditional accounts of God as an infinite (or perfect, or most simple) being, and (4) follows from the premises. Going the other way also creates a dilemma. If we accept that the world is partially indeterministic, that there is no fact of the matter about certain future events (free choices of human souls), then God both was not the creator, cause, or sufficient reason of certain parts of reality and also cannot know whether certain events will occur (because there is no fact of the matter to know). Thus, if this is the case, God must neither be all-powerful (omnipotent) nor all-knowing (omniscient). We go on as follows:
(5) If the world is not strictly determined, then God is neither omnipotent or omniscient.
(6) If God exists, then he is both omnipotent and omniscient.
(7) Therefore, if the world is not determined then God does not exist.
Once again, premise (5) is my own, (6) follows from traditional definitions of God as an infinite (or perfect, or most simple) being, and (7) follows from the premises. Thus, we can conclude:
(8) Whether or not the world is determined, God does not exist.
It seems we must give up God. I consider two objections. First, compatibilists might point out that the argument relies on an incompatibilist premise: that just punishment is incompatible with determinism. Most compatibilists think that we can justly punish someone in spite of determinism, thus they would also deny (2). However, compatibilists are usually justifying some secular, instrumental punishment, not the eternal and infinite punishment of God, which seems always to be unjust, no matter what one does, so I don't think this objection holds.
Second, there might be space to deny (5) by saying that God not knowing some event will occur when there is no fact of the matter is not a lack of knowledge on his part, because there's nothing to know. (Indeed, medieval philosophers seemed not to think this was ever an issue.) However, presumably, God knows all of the events leading up to one's decision and what decision you will choose, right up to the event. It seems like his infinite (or simple, or perfect) nature is still violated somehow by Him not also knowing what you are to choose. Further, there still must be events that are utterly uncaused by Him, and thus events that he is not the cause of, violating his omnipotence.
Perhaps this does not actually entail that he is not omnipotent. Both Scotus and Aquinas thought that we had libertarian free will in either the will or the intellect, respectively, and that this was not an issue for his potency. But even if this is true, God being the first cause of all things is the premise needed to get any cosmological arguments off the ground. If you throw out the idea that the only uncaused being is God and that there are other uncaused events such as our free choices, then modal arguments (used by e.g. Scotus) that guarantee the necessary existence of uncaused beings lose their teeth, because it would mean either that free choices are necessary existents too or that uncaused beings do not necessarily exist. The former means decisions aren't really free and the latter means the existence of God cannot be demonstrated (via this important proof at least). It also means you have to somehow defend libertarian free will, which is not exactly in vogue (not that that means it's false, but I certainly haven't run into a plausible version of it). Further, this route is a priori not available to anyone who believes in any version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason or determinism in the actual world (like Leibniz does).
Obviously, this is by no means definitive, many of these premises are denied by theists of many different stripes and have been the subject of centuries-long debates, but all of them do have some theoretical cost in their denial. To me, problems like this and the problem of evil seem genuinely insuperable for theism.
That being said, it is worth saying what other philosophers I know somewhat well would deny. Indeterminist metaphysicians such as Bergson and Whitehead deny that God is an infinite being and thus deny premises (3) and (6). Leibniz would deny (2) and give some consequentialist style justification for why God punishes and how that ends up making this world the best of all possible worlds. Similarly, Pascal seems to think that our standards of justice are essentially false and that anything God does we might think is unjust, is only so to us. He writes:
I spent much of my life believing there was such a thing as justice, and in this I was not mistaken, for in so far as God has chosen to reveal it to us there is such a thing. But I did not take it this way, and its is where I was wrong, for I thought that our justice was essentially just, and that I had the means to understand and judge it, but I found myself so often making unsound judgements that I began to distrust myself and then others...I realised that our nature is nothing but continual change and I have never changed since.
This also amounts to a denial of (2). Spinoza would also deny (2) (along with (3) and (6)), but on the grounds that God does not punish sinners. Finally, the argument does not apply to Plotinus' One, which lacks categories such as goodness and power, but his de-anthropomorphised First is not my target here.
None of these conclusions are very satisfying. In Spinoza's case, God is the one reality that we are immanently among. Thus, not much that can recognisably be said to be God is left. Similarly, for the indeterminists and process theologians, God seems to be explanatorily superfluous (in the case of Bergson) or quite distant from what we normally consider to be God (in the case of Whitehead). Pascal's solution ends up being no more convincing than any other iteration of "God works in mysterious ways." Finally, in Leibniz, we get the truly awful solution that God metaphysically condemns us to sin, and then punishes us eternally for it. In sum, we have two conclusions: (1) contingency does not entail freedom and (2) some deep and satisfying cost must be paid in order to save God in a satisfying way. I'm glad I'm not a theist because this stuff would truly drive me mad.
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