10 On November 1, 1755, two hundred and seventy years ago, Lisbon was nearly wiped off the map by a powerful earthquake. This seismic shock had a significant aftershock in the European intellectual world. No thinker, starting with Rousseau, Kant, or Voltaire, did not speak of this event and its consequences. In the previous century, Leibniz had established that, nevertheless, we lived in the best of all possible worlds, exonerating God from the problem of the existence of evil. But after witnessing the destruction of Lisbon, Leibniz's thesis seemed ridiculous, and some wondered, ironically, if God could not have tried a little harder.

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