always what is best and wisest on the whole” (1738/1978, IV, 574). In short, given his
absolute perfections, God is not free to fail to do what is best and wisest on the whole.
Freely doing what is beyond the call of duty is an option only for beings who are free to
fail to do what they see to be the best thing for them to do.
It is important to note that the difficulty of reconciling thanking and praising God for
doing what is best and wisest to be done is limited to situations in which there is a best
action available for God to perform. Leibniz, the prominent eighteenth-century German
philosopher, relying on the principle that God must always create what he sees to be the
best, concluded that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds. If there is a best
possible world, then it would appear that God had no choice other than to create it. But if
there is no best world, if for every world creatable by God there is a better world God can
create, then even God could not create a best world. If that were so, it might be
reasonable for God to choose a good world to create, and his selection of that world
rather than some better or worse world might be a free choice for which he is responsible.
The inhabitants of that world might then be grateful to God for creating them, for he
could have created some other world instead. Alternatively, if there are several possible
worlds equally good and none better, God would be free to select one of those worlds to
create and may be responsible for creating it.
The conclusion we've reached—that God's absolute goodness and moral perfection
preclude his being free to create a world less than the best, provided there is a best world
he can create—has seemed to many to unduly restrict God's powers with respect to
creation. In a well-known article, “Must God Create the Best?” Robert M. Adams (1972)
argued that even if there is a best world that God can create, he would do no wrong in
creating a world less than the best provided the lives of its creatures were on the whole
good. Suppose, to come to the heart of
end p.
Adams's argument, we concede this point and allow that a perfect being need not be
doing something morally wrong in creating a world less than the best provided the world
he did create was one in which its inhabitants lived good and productive lives. Still, if a
perfect being had a choice between creating a world in which its creatures are happier,
more understanding of others, more loving, and so on than the creatures of some other
world, wouldn't such a being prefer to create the better world? Wouldn't God's choice of
the inferior world indicate some defect or mistake? Adams's response to this objection is
that God's choice of a less excellent world could be explained in terms of his grace,
which is considered a virtue in Judeo-Christian ethics. It is Adams's understanding of the
Judeo-Christian view of grace that lies at the core of his objection to the Liebnizian view
that the most perfect being “cannot fail to act in the most perfect way, and consequently
to choose the best.” So, any answer to Adams's view that God need not choose to create
the best world must take into account his view that the Judeo-Christian view of grace
implies that God may create a world less than the best.
Adams defines the concept of grace as “a disposition to love which is not dependent on
the merit of the person loved” (1972, 324). Given this definition and given two worlds,
W1 and W2, that differ in that the persons in W1 are happier and more disposed to
behave morally than are the persons in W2, with the result, let us suppose, that W1 is a