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.

According to Schopenhauer, only one philosopher in this tradition had started to realise that we will always struggle make sense of misery and suffering if we start by assuming that God exists. This was Pierre Bayle (1647–1706). Bayle was not an atheist, but he did think that it is beyond the power of human reason to explain how we go from an all-loving, all-powerful God to plagues and forest fires. The remainder cannot be rationalised away, as Schopenhauer would put it, so if belief in God is to continue at all, then it must instead rest on the power of faith, not reason. Impressed by his scepticism about the powers of reason, Voltaire namechecks Bayle in his anti-optimistic ‘Poem on the Lisbon Disaster’: ‘[I] turn more hopefully to learned Bayle./ With even poised scale Bayle bids me doubt’.

According to Schopenhauer, then, Bayle was ahead of the curve. Chronologically, however, Bayle’s arguments came before Leibniz’s. In fact, one of Leibniz’s main aims in doing theodicy was to refute Bayle’s position. As a committed rationalist, Leibniz insisted that faith must coincide with reason: that is, anything that is revealed in scripture can also, in principle, be proved by a rational demonstration. Still, even Leibniz resisted the call to give a full and detailed account for every misfortune in the world:

‘M. Bayle ask a little too much: he wishes for a detailed exposition of how evil is connected with the best possible scheme for the universe. That would be a complete examination of phenomena: but I do not undertake to give it; nor am I bound to do so, for there is no obligation to do that which is impossible for us in our existing state’