1. God’s Attorney
By Madison Gable

2. What I did
I read The Courtier and the Heretic by Matthew
Stewart
The book is about the philosophers Baruch Spinoza
and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Stewart describes both men and their lives.
Stewart makes their philosophies very accessible by
discussing various works, and he makes it easily
understandable.

3. What I Learned
Spinoza’s views promote a secular state that is
democratic and above all tolerant
Leibniz’s views support theocracy
He thought that reuniting the church and creating
a church welfare state would be the best for
humanity.
Saw Spinoza’s views as ruining the divinity of
God.
After their meeting his work mostly reactive to
Spinoza’s.

4. What I Argued
In order to support orthodox Christian beliefs,
Leibniz attempts to prove God is transcendent,
good, and that the soul is immortal but fails.

5. God’s Transcendence
Leibniz says God resides in a “higher” world from which he
makes the decision to make our world.
Then in Discourse on Metaphysics, Leibniz says, “… it is
the highest freedom to act perfectly, in accordance with
sovereign reason.”
So God acts perfectly by choosing to create the best
possible world.
But if our world is best how can there be a higher world?
There could not be a world higher than the best so it would
have to be only one world through God. Spinozism.
If the higher world preexists God then he is a “creature” of
that world. Atheism.

6. God’s Goodness
“God must have a choice, according to Leibniz’s way of thinking,
because otherwise he would not have a chance to be good”
(Stewart 235).
God’s perfection=containing all positive reality.
Moral goodness follows from this metaphysical perfection.
Badness cannot be positive or it would be involved in God’s
perfection
Evil is not something that works in degrees but simply a limit on the
amount of good you have.
“Hence evil was regarded as the mere negation of good, though it
would have been equally logical to regard good as the mere
negation of evil”-Bertrand Russell
Badness works in the positive, so God would have badness.
Therefore, metaphysical perfection cannot be translated into only
moral goodness because God’s perfection containing all positive
reality would include not only infinite goodness, but also infinite

7. Immortality of the Soul
Simple substances, or monads, that have perception
and memory are souls (Monadology 19).
God sets up mind monads to act parallel with body
monads through pre-established harmony.
“As a consequence of his commitment to a form of
parallelism, Leibniz is forced to acknowledge that even
in its before- and after-lives, the mind-monad remains
tied to some parallel manifestation of body-monads”
(Stewart 287).
The soul does not completely separate from the body at
death which is incompatible with Christian dogma.

8. My Conclusion
Leibniz and Spinoza lived during a scientific
revolution when discoveries were undermining
the foundations of belief. The effort Leibniz took
to establish harmony for science and religion
shows how much this revolution would change
the entire world system. Leibniz stepped up to be
God’s attorney and lost his case. A possible
implication is that the world today, for the most
part, looks more like Spinoza’s desired secular
system than Leibniz’s longed for theocracy.