Infinite Minds, Determinism & Evil A Study of John Leslie’s Infinite Minds, A Philosophical Cosmology

John Leslie’s Infinite Minds is a refreshingly daring book. Leslie argues that reality consists of infinite minds — an infinity of infinite minds in all likelihood — which may be presided over by something like Leibniz’s God but may consist of many minds each of which has its own claim to divinity. The things we find in the world — atoms, rocks, and stars included — are thoughts in this mind, a mind activated by the principle that what exists is what is ethically required. God stayed in the background in the original book, and the dust jacket said such a being might “not be a person but a Principle.” In the new book God plays a much larger role. Indeed God expands to include everything, for this is a pantheistic book — though the pantheism is not quite standard. Its outcome is a kind of pantheism in which the world likely consists of an infinity of infinite minds “each worth calling divine” (p. 2). Reality is literally Malebranchean, though Malebranche and his British disciple John Norris do not figure in Leslie’s book. Stones and stars are literally structured by the thought of the divine mind, though as Malebranche believed, this leaves them as “real” and as solid as anyone ever thought they were. Immortality is now a central issue. The unity of the world is the dominant feature of the world’s nature. Leibniz thus implied a thesis to which it was not obvious that he really subscribed : Some people had always thought that God chose to create the world because it was good, and others that the world was good because God chose it. Leibniz seemed to picture God contemplating all the possible worlds and choosing one — implying that he might have chosen a worse one, though in Leibniz’s own view this would hardly been compatible with God’s nature, for God was a rational being and no rational being would ever choose the worse rather than the better. But if God’s nature determined the choice then in some sense God didn’t really choose in the way that you might choose grey socks rather than black ones. And since God thereafter appears only through pre-established harmony and through strongly patterned predictable events like transubstantiation, he becomes, like a dean who has delegated all his work to committees, redundant. In his earlier book Leslie sorted all this out by urging that though there might be a God, this was because a benign God is one of the things one might find in a world in which things exist because they ought to. Behind this doctrine lay something much like the theory this reviewer put forward a little later : If one asks “why is there something rather than nothing ?”, the answer must be framed in terms of something that does not itself need explanation. Children ask “who created God ?”. They don’t ask “who created goodness ?”, for they know instinctively that goodness, as such, cannot come into or go out of existence. God was never abolished in Leslie’s original book and in this new book comes forward full-bloodedly. The theory now seems to be that intelligible principles embodying goodness imply minds. The moral requirement of the reality of goodness simply has to be instantiated in something capable of thought and action. But how does the world come about ? Must there not be causal problems involving an infinite regress ? Leslie understands the problem but he now tends toward the view that God created himself. Logically it seems again that this is possible because God is good …