Explaining 'Best Possible World'
Philosophers reflect on whether our world is the best it could be. But this is more than a thought experiment. It's tied to a recurring concern in theology: would a morally perfect being create anything less than the best possible world?
Hud Hudson explores this idea in his essay "Best Possible World Theodicy."1 He avoids general phrases like "the problem of evil" and instead frames three specific puzzles, each as an inconsistent triad (a group of three statements that can’t all be true at once). Each triad ends with "God exists," which creates problems for the theist who wants to accept all three.
Here’s one of the triads that focuses on the idea of the best possible world:
If God exists, the actual world is the best possible world.
The actual world is not the best possible world.
God exists.
If all three are true, they contradict each other. So at least one must be false. For atheists, the solution is simple: deny that God exists. But if you believe in God, you have to reject either statement (4) or (5). Hudson writes, “[T]he theist must battle on three fronts, and victory in just one battle will lose the war" (p. 237). That is, the theist has to find a way to respond to each puzzle.
Meaning of 'best possible world'
The phrase means a world that is better than all others. The word "world" doesn't refer to just our local planet, but to a total way reality could be, from people, events, laws of nature, moral facts, and so on. The assumption is that if God is all-knowing and perfectly good, then God would know what the best world is and would be motivated to create it.
"If God exists," Hudson writes, "God would know which item in the plurality of possible worlds outranked all others in value … [and] would be sufficiently motivated to actualize that best of all possible worlds unless there were nonconsequentialist morally justifying reasons to create less than the best" (p. 238).
But is our world the best? Hudson points to horrors like genocide, torture, disease, and natural disasters. He writes, "No one should take seriously the suggestion that things could not have been in any measure better" (p. 239). If even a small improvement is possible, then our world is not the best. This makes statement (5) above seem plausible.
Theodicy and God’s motivation
A theodicy tries to explain not only how evil and suffering can exist in a world created by a good God, but why evil and suffering is more expected than not under theism. One common version is the free will theodicy: that God allows evil because free will is a great good, and removing evil would remove freedom.
But this approach struggles when you look at natural evils (like earthquakes or cancer) or horrific events that seem to serve no good purpose. "Theodicies are bankrupt," Hudson says, quoting A.E. Housman. “Malt does more than Milton can to justify God’s ways to man" (p. 238).
Hudson notes that even if you find some theodicies plausible, it still seems obvious that our world is not the best. So how can a believer respond?
The multiverse hypothesis
Hudson proposes an answer, the idea of a multiverse. If God created not just one world but many with different features, then the problem changes. We might live in one "partition" of this larger multiverse, which might contain all good possibilities above a certain moral threshold.
"God need not choose between such goods but can have them all," Hudson writes (p. 244). In this model, our world doesn’t have to be the best in isolation. It just has to be good enough to be part of the best overall system. A bad neighborhood might be part of a great city.
This idea helps defend against statement (5) in the triad (that the actual world isn’t best) and also undercuts the claim that no morally justifying reasons exist for evil. If the evil in our world is part of a larger good in the multiverse, then it may be justified after all.
Hudson puts it this way: "Even if a particular evil would have been gratuitous if the local environment … were the whole of the universe, it may yet be compensated for once located in a mere portion of that whole" (p. 246).
Skeptical theism
Another part of Hudson’s approach draws on skeptical theism, which is the view that we are not in a good position to judge whether God has good reasons for allowing evil. He challenges the assumption that if morally justifying reasons existed, we would know about them.
He compares this to recognizing pain or seeing a tiger in a room. Both are easy to notice. But suppose someone said, "If there were a dietary reason for the presence of these twenty-six coils in the recovered alien spacecraft, we would be aware of it." That seems far less plausible. So why think we would understand God’s reasons?
"We have no good reason to think that if there were such a compensating good … we would be aware of it," Hudson writes (p. 248). The multiverse only strengthens this point, because it adds complexity and limits what we can observe.
Unsurpassable worlds
In the debate over whether God created the best possible world, philosophers have pointed out a potential flaw: maybe there is no single best world. Instead, there could be many worlds that are all each excellent in different ways, but none better than the rest.
He writes: "We can qualify (4) and (5) by replacing 'the best possible world' with 'among the unsurpassable worlds' and thereby face a refined inconsistent triad just as challenging as its predecessor" (p. 240).
This matters because if there is no unique best world (only a set of incomparable but unsurpassable ones), then God may not have failed to create the best world. Instead, He may have created one of several equally great options.
This distinction weakens one key part of the atheist argument. If no world is the best overall, then it can’t be a failure on God’s part to create this one instead of a better one because there is no better one. Or, as Hudson puts it, the "title of 'best' will be unawardable, if it should turn out there is an infinite hierarchy of worlds where every world is bested by some other" (p. 240).
Best possible kind of world
An alternative to the "best possible world" theodicy is the idea that God did not aim to create the best world in an absolute sense, but rather the best kind of world, where the highest values are attainable by creatures like us.
As Patrick Flynn puts it, "a best kind of world … would be a world where the highest values are attainable — namely, the highest virtues, the most preeminent of which is love, which itself is often expressed or exemplified through courage, compassion, empathy, forgiveness, generosity, kindness, trustworthiness, responsibility, mercy, helpfulness, gratitude, and so on."2
These are not goods that can exist in a vacuum or be created directly by divine fiat. They require the slow, often painful process of forming habits over time. That process demands an environment that supports virtue formation. It must contain risks, challenges, and real opportunities for good and evil. According to Flynn, "because habits are stable dispositions, they take time to acquire (at least for beings like us), and thus demand a particular environment, particularly one suited for the development of the respective virtue."
This shifts the focus away from whether the actual world outranks all other possible worlds on some total scale of value. Instead, it asks if this is the kind of world that best enables the growth of moral beings into fully mature agents of love.
Suffering, under this view, is not a defect that disqualifies the world from being best, but a necessary condition for the cultivation of virtue. Too much suffering would crush us. Too little would leave us morally undeveloped. "If God is going to create a world," Flynn writes, "it must be of the type where suffering is of both the right frequency and right intensity; and that, it seems, is just the sort of world we live in, evidenced by the fact that all the above virtues are, in fact, manifested."
This approach avoids the problematic assumption that there is a single "best" world God must create. It also avoids the infinite regress posed by the idea of an ever-better hierarchy of worlds. Instead, it proposes that God chose to create a type of world aimed at producing morally significant creatures, even if this kind of world is messy, painful, and imperfect by other standards.
I think this is a serious idea to consider, but I think it needs more fleshing out to avoid a rejoinder that God requires evil to bring about good.
What kind of 'possible'?
Just to flag a point, discussions of possible worlds typically involves what is logically possible. Logical possibility concerns what is conceivable without contradiction, while metaphysical possibility adds the additional constraint of conforming to the natures of things, including God’s nature, purposes, and relational dynamics.
A world without moral error, while logically possible, would be seemingly metaphysically impossible because it contradicts God’s purpose of authentic freedom, His rational and orderly nature, and His relational dynamics with creation. These factors highlight why metaphysical possibility is a stricter standard that requires not just logical coherence but alignment with the essential characteristics of reality having to do with God’s nature.
What the best possible world debate reveals
Whether you believe in God or not, the debate over the best possible world raises important questions. Is it fair to expect a perfect world if God exists? Can some suffering be justified if it contributes to a greater good? Are we even able to tell what "better" means when evaluating whole worlds?
Hudson admits he doesn't solve these puzzles completely, but it expands the debate. The multiverse idea, skeptical theism, and the idea of unsurpassable rather than strictly best worlds all challenge common assumptions. As he writes, "The multiverse enhances that environment considerably … [and] the range of candidates for morally justifying reasons may be both far too large and far too opaque" (pp. 246–249).
Whether or not you accept his argument, Hudson shows that the question of the "best possible world" is central to the problem of evil and far more complex than it first appears.
Image credit
Hud Hudson, “Best Possible World Theodicy,” in The Blackwell Companion to the Problem of Evil, ed. Justin P. McBrayer and Daniel Howard-Snyder (West Sussex, England: John Wiley & Sons Inc., 2013), 236–250.
Patrick Flynn, The Best Argument for God (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 2023), 293, Kindle Edition.