Nothingness an aspect of existence.
The real state of the case is not that existence springs from non-existence, but that non-existence is a simple aspect of existence, or rather an illusion of thought. The notion of creation will be more and more widely displaced by that of evolution and variation. Different worlds are eternal variations on the same theme, the tat tvam asi of the Hindus tends to become a scientific variety. A substantial unity of the world and the solidarity of all the beings in the world will, undoubtedly, be more and more clearly demonstrated.
God responsible for evil.
The creation may be considered, since Kant’s time, as a demonstrably indemonstrable and even inconceivable hypothesis; but Kant did not stay to inquire whether the Biblical dogma of the creation will not tend to appear to us increasingly immoral; a tendency which, according to Kant’s principles, would suffice to cause it to be rejected in the future. A doubt, which some thinkers of antiquity felt keenly, has come to be widely diffused in our days; a Creator is a being in whom all things find their reason and their cause, and who, consequently, is ultimately responsible for everything. He is responsible for all the evil in the universe. As the idea of infinite power, of supreme liberty of action became inseparable from the conception of God, God was deprived of every excuse, for the Absolute is dependent upon nothing. Everything, on the contrary, depends on Him and finds its reason in Him. In the last resort He alone is culpable; His work, in the manifold series of its effects, presents itself to modern thought as one sole action, and this action, like any other, is capable of being sat upon in moral judgment; the author is to be judged by his work, the world passes judgment on God. Well, as evil and immorality in the universe, with the progress of the moral sense, become more shocking, it seems that to admit the creation hypothesis is to centralize, to concentrate, all the immorality of the world in one being, and to justify the paradox: “God is evil.” To admit the doctrine of a Creator is, in a word, to banish evil from the world to God, its primordial source; to absolve men and the universe and accuse the author of both.
Evil of denying the existence of evil to exculpate God.
There is something still worse than referring the source of all evil thus to a creative will, and that is, for the purpose of exculpating the Creator, to deny the evil itself, and to declare that this world is the best of all possible worlds. Such is the choice that Leibnitz and the theologians made. Religions are obliged to apologize for the universe, to profess an admiration for the divine plan; they hold in reserve excuses for the existence of injustice, and labour unconsciously to falsify the moral sense, in order to relieve God of his responsibility.
Doctrine that physical or intellectual evil are conditions of well-being.
Many hypotheses have been devised in the service of optimism to excuse the Creator, without compromising the moral sense, and mankind’s instinct for progress. Physical evil (suffering), intellectual evil (error and doubt), have been declared to be a condition sine qua non of moral good; which would justify them. Moral evil would thus remain the sole verifiable evil in the universe, and as moral evil consists simply in evil intentions on the part of men, men alone, on this hypothesis, would be responsible. The universe itself, that is to say, would contain no evil except in the person of the man who is purposely evil by his own free choice, and the possibility of moral evil might be considered as a supreme condition of moral goodness, the latter presupposing freedom of choice, a selection by the will, and an alternative to be refused. The evil in the universe would thus be compensated for by morality, suffering would be compensated for by virtue, mistakes by good will. The world itself would be simply a means of producing morality and, in its apparent imperfection, it would be the best world possible, because its apparent imperfection would be necessary to produce what is best in it.
Doctrine that the dignity of the world lies in its spontaneity.
The world, it has been said, cannot be in every respect absolute, for it would then be God; it must always be in the position of a recipient; the less it receives—the more it acts in independence of external aid, the more it develops from within, and the more it approaches the Absolute, insomuch that the very poverty of the earth constitutes its grandeur, since it is the condition of its real wealth, a wealth not borrowed from another but acquired by its own effort. Everything, therefore, becomes transfigured according to this hypothesis, every suffering becomes a merit; God wished to create the most spontaneous world possible, that is to say at bottom to create as little as possible, to leave as large an initiative as possible to his creatures. Laissez faire is God’s device, as it is the device of all good government. A small result, but obtained by spontaneity, is superior to a greater result obtained by mechanical artifice. “Divine art,” says a philosopher, in commenting on some doctrines of Plato, “is infinitely superior to human art; it creates individuals who are ends unto themselves and self-evolved. These individuals are not, as Leibnitz believed, automata ... true perfection is autonomous. If God is only a demiurge, he may be accused, and ought to be accused, of being a bad workman. Is the world not full of unsuccessful attempts, of unfortunate combinations, of ends either missed altogether or ill achieved? The critics of Providence will always have enough to say, but these unfinished sketches are the work not of God but of his creatures, of the forces and individual souls that he has set in operation. In a word God is not a workman who produces works, but a workman who creates workmen.”[131] This formula sums up in a striking manner what may be called transfigured optimism. The new hypothesis does not deny evil, but, on the contrary, hastens to admit it; but by converting evil into a consequence of spontaneity, it subordinates it to good itself, makes it labour in the service of its opposite; the most fragmentary sketch becomes respectable when it is a step, and a necessary step, toward a masterpiece.