Meaningful Choice: A lesson in Design from Leibniz' God
One topic in the heated letter exchange between the theologian Samuel Clarke – acting as a stand-in for Isaac Newton – and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz are atoms. Fresh off their dispute about the discovery of calculus, Leibniz presents a very interesting argument against them existing (at least how Newton conceives of them), a personal favourite of mine as far as arguments in the history of philosophy go.
In Newtons view, atoms are solid particles of the smallest possible mass. They are a-tomon (Greek ἄτομον, uncuttable) and although they are all the same, they make up everything. Both Leibniz and Newton agree that the universe is too complex to not have been designed by an omnipotent being (the so-called cosmological argument for the existence of god). But adopting both these premises, Leibniz maintains, will end in contradiction – which is why he rejects the atomic hypothesis, the existence of atoms as the fundamental building block of all matter.
How would such an act of creation go about? asks Leibniz. For him, God must create the best of all possible worlds, but he wants to be bound by laws of logic, for instance, since an illogical world would be worse than what we get otherwise. The creator cannot make a perfect world, only the best possible one. That is also why there is still evil in the world. It follows that in every choice that god makes while creating the universe, he chooses the best option at his disposal, thats how the good will end up being absolutely maximised. Leibniz thinks that for every a real difference in goodness, there must be a reason why that is so. Leibniz is also quite the optimist regarding our skill to acquire knowledge: He believes that all these reasons are knowable to us.
Returning to the atoms, we are now confronted with the fact that if we assume the world is made out of identical atoms, then it does not matter if I switch two atoms around when I'm "putting together" a chair. If I have a space for two atoms left to put I could put the first one left or the first one right – since they are identical there is no good to maximise here through the smart choice. Both ways have the exact same result! That means there is at least two best possible worlds. And god can only build one. This is inconceivable for Leibniz because it contradicts the very concept of omnipotence. God can't let a best possible world go uncreated (since that is what he wills), if he did, he wouldn't be all-powerful. So, there cannot be any meaningless choice involved in creating the universe. Atoms in the sense of Newton, concludes Leibniz, do not exist.