Blair talks of ‘breakthrough’ and ‘reform’ — but what if this is as good as Britain gets?

Voltaire was a superb polemicist but a cheat in debate. He never laid a finger on the Christian argument which in Candide he mocked as claiming that ‘all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. He showed that the world was a dreadful place. In a sparkling and brutal parody he demonstrated that life was cruel and unjust, and that millions of people were wretched. He scorned the idea that there was anything remotely pleasant about the world which Christians claimed God had made as pleasant as possible for us.

But the argument Voltaire parodies never did include the claim he mocked. He tilted brilliantly at the supposition that life was sweet, but Catholic theologians had never claimed life was sweet. They had confronted the awkward facts that (a) God is omnipotent; (b) God must surely aim to perfect His world; yet (c) sin, misery and natural disaster are all around us; and asked how (a), (b) and (c) could all be true?

Their answer remains the only one available to believers. If one starts from the premise that God has made for us the best world He can, and if that world contains, nevertheless, misery, catastrophe and tragedy, then one has to conclude that such horrors are a necessary part of even the best world imaginable. This is as good as it gets.

Pace Voltaire, this argument is not preposterous. To take two key examples (whether or not one believes in a benevolent deity), if humans are to be endowed with free will, then they must be able to make the wrong choices; and if they are to have the opportunity to surmount tragedy in life, then there must be tragedy in life. It is, in short, entirely possible that the world around us should be perfectly bloody, but that no better world can be constructed.