ABSTRACT
Christian theology has long disputed the extent to which emotional attachment is either sufficient or necessary for moral action. It is now normally treated as a boutique topic in philosophical theology that is concerned with how a perfect God could have made such a miserable world. The laws of probability were originally presented as a divine instrument for harnessing the unruliness of matter in aid of intelligent design. Such counterfactual insight was dubbed middle knowledge, since it appeared suspended between ordinary empirical knowledge and knowledge from first principles. In contrast, Leibniz's interlocutor Malebranche began by assuming that God acts 'unconditionally' in the radical sense of ignoring the feedback from the specific outcomes of his actions. Neither Lebiniz nor Malebranche makes God seem very approachable, let alone loveable, given the ease with which the deity's creatures are inconvenienced, if not outright sacrificed, for some higher design principle.
