Explaining evil in a world made by God perplexed theist philosophers for centuries. When Schopenhauer confronted his ‘honest atheism’, and faced the possibility that existence has no meaning, the question was no longer a choice between optimism and pessimism, but how one can live as a pessimist, writes David Bather Woods.

When dividing one number by another, sometimes we are left with a remainder. This is how Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) viewed theistic optimism. No matter how much we try to make sense of the world as being created by a supremely wise, powerful, benevolent entity, there is always an unresolved leftover, something that just doesn’t make sense in those terms. Examples might include poverty, famine, or a deadly pandemic.

For centuries before Schopenhauer, philosophers had been trying to resolve the contradiction between the goodness of God and the misery of the world. Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) represents a high-water mark in this tradition. He even gave a name to its central task: theodicy, meaning a judicial defence of God. The word optimism originally referred to the defence of God that Leibniz tried to make, namely that God selects the best – that is, the optimal – of all possible worlds.

Schopenhauer was not the first philosopher to note that, contra Leibniz, our world doesn’t seem like the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire (1694–1778) made this point in his satire Candide, or Optimism, the story of a naïve protagonist, Candide, who doggedly clings to the doctrine of optimism which he was taught by his tutor Pangloss, a cipher for Leibniz, despite facing non-stop adversity, including earthquakes, tsunamis, slavery and torture.

No matter how much we try to make sense of the world as being created by a supremely wise, powerful, benevolent entity, there is always an unresolved leftover.