[Advaita-l] From my files

[S Jayanarayanan]

Thanks for the article. Just one point:

--- kuntimaddi sadananda <kuntimaddisada at yahoo.com> wrote:

[..]

>  David Hume in “Dialogue
> Concerning Natural Religions’ looking at so much evil seen in the
> world
> raises concern about God– “Is he willing to prevent evil, but not
> able?
> Then he is impotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is
> malevolent.
>  Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?”-From Dennis Book.
> These are not invalid questions that can be easily brushed aside. 
> 

The above objection by Hume is well-known. What is less known is that
there is a counter-objection to Hume by Gottfried Leibniz (the inventor
of calculus). Leibniz argues convincingly that God created the "Best of
all possible worlds". Meaning that although God is both willing and
able to prevent evil, He designed the world with the "least amount of
evil that is logically possible". In other words, God has ALREADY
minimized the amount of evil in the world as much as is logically
possible. 

Leibniz, being a mathematician, saw evil as a function that can be
optimized (i.e. minimized). Just as there exist functions like (x^2 +
1) that cannot be minimized below "1" for any real x, maybe evil is
also such a function that cannot be minimized below a certain level
assuming creation by an infinitely intelligent being.

Regards,

Kartik

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