Originally published: New York: Farrar. Straus, and Giroux, 2008.

Optimists believe this is the best of all possible worlds, and pessimists fear that might really be the case. There was a time, during the 17th and 18th centuries, when scientists and mathematicians felt they could provide the answer. This book is their story.

A proud and reserved alien society finds its homeland destroyed in an unprovoked act of aggression, and the survivors have no choice but to reach out to the indigenous humanoids of their adopted world, to whom they are distantly related. They wish to preserve their cherished way of life but come to discover that in order to preserve their culture, they may have to change it forever. Now a man and a woman from these two clashing societies must work together to save this vanishing race, and end up uncovering ancient mysteries with far-reaching ramifications. As their mission hangs in the balance, this unlikely team - one cool and cerebral, the other fiery and impulsive - just may find in each other their own destinies . . . and a force that transcends all.

The first comprehensive survey of the criticisms of Leibniz's philosophical optimism in the first half of the eighteenth century, when what has been called the ‘debacle of the perfect world’ first began.

John O'Loughlin's aphoristic philosophy e-book brings his element-based comprehensive exactitude to bear on morality, not just on one kind but on all the different kinds of morality, and shows that morality only exists because it is hegemonic over a correlative unmorality corresponding, in whatever class/element position, to the subordinate gender, but that such a hegemony dare not risk an immoral backlash from below on account of its own amoral failings - something which the author goes into in some detail with the help of analogous contexts and examples, whether sartorial, social, literary, or whatever. But John O'Loughlin, whilst he may be comprehensively exacting in his outlining of the different kinds of morality, is not impartial. On the contrary, he makes a case for only one type of morality (and its corresponding unmorality) - a case that, in his view, would result, if politically and religiously implemented, in the best of all possible worlds - the goal towards which his entire philosophy points.

Worthing describes the critique of traditional arguments for God's existence by physicists. He then examines three Christian doctrines in light of theoretical physics--God and creation out of nothing in relation to the Big Bang Theory; God and continuing creation in relation to field theory, Bell's theorem, providence, entropy, and theodicy; and God and the consummation of creation.

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