Voltaire vs. optimism

In 1755, after a terrible earthquake in Lisbon, Portugal, Voltaire wrote a poem.  The first lines from translation here:

 

Oh wretched man, earth-fated to be cursed

Abyss of plagues, and miseries the worst!

Horrors on horrors, griefs on griefs must show,

That man's the victim of unceasing woe,

And lamentations which inspire my strain,

Prove that philosophy is false and vain.

Approach in crowds, and mediate awhile

Yon shattered walls, and view each ruined pile 

Women and children heaped up mountain high,

Limbs crushed which under ponderous marble lie;

Wretches unnumbered in the pangs of death,

Who mangled, torn, and panting for their breath,

Buried beneath their sinking roofs expire,

And end their wretched lives in torment dire...

 

 The poem about the Lisbon earthquake is considered by some to be a precursor

to his most famous work Candide.  Like the Lisbon earthquake poem which

showed Voltaire's humanity, both Lisbon and Candide are pointed pokes

at optimism and to some degree the naivete of Candide's Doctor Pangloss.  Both are

direct attacks on Leibniz who suggested that an all-powerful God had

created the world and that, therefore, the world must be perfect.

 

It is not.  We live in a universe 13 billion years old and stretching for tens

of billions of light years with what scientists think are billions 

upon billions of galaxies with trillions of stars and untold planets.

 

None of which are perfect but expanding and evolving still.

Darwin, not Dr. Pangloss, was right when he wrote:

 "If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, 

but by our institutions, great is our sin."