Through his work, Voltaire criticized religious figures and philosophers such as the optimists Alexander Pope and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, but endorsed the views of the skeptic Pierre Bayle and empiricist John Locke.
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In the poem, Voltaire rejected belief in "Providence" as impossible to defend — he believed that all living things seemed doomed to live in a cruel world.
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Polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and poet Alexander Pope were both famous for developing a system of thought known as philosophical optimism in an attempt to reconcile a loving Christian God with the logical problem of evil (made evident in disasters such as Lisbon).
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The phrase "what is, is right" coined by Alexander Pope in his An Essay on Man, and Leibniz' affirmation that "we live in the best of all possible worlds", provoked a hostile response from Voltaire.
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