Today, we’d call Leibniz a mathematician, a physicist, and a philosopher. As a mathematician, Leibniz turned calculus into something his contemporaries could actually use. As a physicist, he championed a doomed theory of gravity. In philosophy, he seems to be most remembered for extremely cheaty arguments.

I don’t blame him for this. Faced with a tricky philosophical problem, it’s enormously tempting to just blaze through with an answer that makes every subtlety irrelevant. It’s a temptation I’ve succumbed to time and time again. Faced with a genie, I would always wish for more wishes. On my high school debate team, I once forced everyone at a tournament to switch sides with some sneaky definitions. It’s all good fun, but people usually end up pretty annoyed with you afterwards.

People were annoyed with Leibniz too, especially with his solution to the problem of evil. If you believe in a benevolent, all-powerful god, as Leibniz did, why is the world full of suffering and misery? Leibniz’s answer was that even an all-powerful god is constrained by logic, so if the world contains evil, it must be logically impossible to make the world any better: indeed, we live in the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire famously made fun of this argument in Candide, dragging a Leibniz-esque Professor Pangloss through some of the most creative miseries the eighteenth century had to offer. It’s possibly the most famous satire of a philosopher, easily beating out Aristophanes’ The Clouds (which is also great).

Physicists can also get accused of cheaty arguments, and probably the most mocked is the idea of a multiverse. While it hasn’t had its own Candide, the multiverse has been criticized by everyone from bloggers to Nobel prizewinners. Leibniz wanted to explain the existence of evil, physicists want to explain “unnaturalness”: the fact that the kinds of theories we use to explain the world can’t seem to explain the mass of the Higgs boson. To explain it, these physicists suggest that there are really many different universes, separated widely in space or built in to the interpretation of quantum mechanics. Each universe has a different Higgs mass, and ours just happens to be the one we can live in. This kind of argument is called “anthropic” reasoning. Rather than the best of all possible worlds, it says we live in the world best-suited to life like ours.

I called Leibniz’s argument “cheaty”, and you might presume I think the same of the multiverse. But “cheaty” doesn’t mean “wrong”. It all depends what you’re trying to do.

Leibniz’s argument and the multiverse both work by dodging a problem. For Leibniz, the problem of evil becomes pointless: any evil might be necessary to secure a greater good. With a multiverse, naturalness becomes pointless: with many different laws of physics in different places, the existence of one like ours needs no explanation.

In both cases, though, the dodge isn’t perfect. To really explain any given evil, Leibniz would have to show why it is secretly necessary in the face of a greater good (and Pangloss spends Candide trying to do exactly that). To explain any given law of physics, the multiverse needs to use anthropic reasoning: it needs to show that that law needs to be the way it is to support human-like life.

This sounds like a strict requirement, but in both cases it’s not actually so useful. Leibniz could (and Pangloss does) come up with an explanation for pretty much anything. The problem is that no-one actually knows which aspects of the universe are essential and which aren’t. Without a reliable way to describe the best of all possible worlds, we can’t actually test whether our world is one.

The same problem holds for anthropic reasoning. We don’t actually know what conditions are required to give rise to people like us. “People like us” is very vague, and dramatically different universes might still contain something that can perceive and observe. While it might seem that there are clear requirements, so far there hasn’t been enough for people to do very much with this type of reasoning.

However, for both Leibniz and most of the physicists who believe anthropic arguments, none of this really matters. That’s because the “best of all possible worlds” and “most anthropic of all possible worlds” aren’t really meant to be predictive theories. They’re meant to say that, once you are convinced of certain things, certain problems don’t matter anymore.

Leibniz, in particular, wasn’t trying to argue for the existence of his god. He began the argument convinced that a particular sort of god existed: one that was all-powerful and benevolent, and set in motion a deterministic universe bound by logic. His argument is meant to show that, if you believe in such a god, then the problem of evil can be ignored: no matter how bad the universe seems, it may still be the best possible world.

Similarly, the physicists convinced of the multiverse aren’t really getting there through naturalness. Rather, they’ve become convinced of a few key claims: that the universe is rapidly expanding, leading to a proliferating multiverse, and that the laws of physics in such a multiverse can vary from place to place, due to the huge landscape of possible laws of physics in string theory. If you already believe those things, then the naturalness problem can be ignored: we live in some randomly chosen part of the landscape hospitable to life, which can be anywhere it needs to be.

So despite their cheaty feel, both arguments are fine…provided you agree with their assumptions. Personally, I don’t agree with Leibniz. For the multiverse, I’m less sure. I’m not confident the universe expands fast enough to create a multiverse, I’m not even confident it’s speeding up its expansion now. I know there’s a lot of controversy about the math behind the string theory landscape, about whether the vast set of possible laws of physics are as consistent as they’re supposed to be…and of course, as anyone must admit, we don’t know whether string theory itself is true! I don’t think it’s impossible that the right argument comes around and convinces me of one or both claims, though. These kinds of arguments, “if assumptions, then conclusion” are the kind of thing that seems useless for a while…until someone convinces you of the conclusion, and they matter once again.

So in the end, despite the similarity, I’m not sure the multiverse deserves its own Candide. I’m not even sure Leibniz deserved Candide. But hopefully by understanding one, you can understand the other just a bit better.