Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was born on 1 July 1646 in Leipzig, in the Holy Roman Empire, and trained in law and philosophy before entering a long career of court and diplomatic service, chiefly to the House of Hanover, alongside his independent work in mathematics, logic and metaphysics. His most influential contribution to religious thought is the concept of theodicy, a term he himself coined for the systematic philosophical defense of God's justice and goodness against the existence of evil, argued at length in his 1710 work Theodicy.

Leibniz's central theodicean claim, that this is the best of all possible worlds a perfectly good and rational God could have created, reasoned that any evil present is a necessary consequence of a greater overall good rather than a flaw in divine planning, a position that became famous partly through Voltaire's later satirical attack on it in Candide. He died in Hanover on 14 November 1716, working until near the end of his life on the Chinese material that occupied his final major treatise.

Leibniz developed his theodicy in explicit dialogue with the skeptic Pierre Bayle, who had argued that the coexistence of a perfectly good, all powerful God with the world's evident evil was philosophically indefensible; Leibniz's Theodicy is structured throughout as a direct, systematic answer to Bayle's challenge rather than an independent treatise, making it as much a work of philosophical argument as of theology, aimed at a specific, named opponent's specific, published objections.

Leibniz developed binary arithmetic, representing all numbers using only 0 and 1, publishing his explanation in 1703. Corresponding with the Jesuit missionary Joachim Bouvet, who was stationed in China and sent him a diagram of the I Ching's sixty four hexagrams, Leibniz recognized that the classic Chinese text's broken and unbroken lines formed a binary pattern matching his own system, and concluded, crediting the insight to ancient Chinese thought rather than claiming priority for himself, that the I Ching's legendary originators had anticipated binary mathematics millennia earlier.

That exchange fed directly into Leibniz's final major work, Discourse on the Natural Theology of the Chinese, written in the last year of his life and published posthumously, which argued that classical Confucian thought, properly understood, already contained an implicit monotheism compatible with Christian natural theology rather than being the atheistic system some contemporary European critics claimed. The work positioned Leibniz among the more sympathetic European readers of Chinese religious and philosophical tradition in his era, using it to argue for common rational and theological ground rather than treating it as something to be corrected or dismissed.