Islamic Theology and the Problem of Evil

Safaruk Chowdhury

• Editorial: The American University in Cairo Press
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781649030559
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Islamic Theology

A rigorous study of the problem of evil in Islamic theology
Like their Jewish and Christian co-religionists, Muslims have grappled with how God, who is perfectly good, compassionate, merciful, powerful, and wise permits intense and profuse evil and suffering in the world. At its core, Islamic Theology and the Problem of Evil explores four different problems of evil: human disability, animal suffering, evolutionary natural selection, and Hell. Each study argues in favor of a particular kind of explanation or justification (theodicy) for the respective evil. Safaruk Chowdhury unpacks the notion of evil and its conceptualization within the mainstream Sunni theological tradition, and the various ways in which theologians and philosophers within that tradition have advanced different types of theodicies. He not only builds on previous works on the topic, but also looks at kinds of theodicies previously unexplored within Islamic theology, such as an evolutionary theodicy.Distinguished by its application of an analytic-theology approach to the subject and drawing on insights from works of both medieval Muslim theologians and philosophers and contemporary philosophers of religion, this novel and highly systematic study will appeal to students and scholars, not only of theology but of philosophy as well.

1

The Problem of Evil: Outlines

In this chapter, I outline a number of issues related to the study of theodicy. First, I summarize the current state of the problem of evil within the analytic philosophy of religion. This is followed by examination of the concept of evil in the Qur’an, the thought of Ibn Sina, and major theological denominations in the formative development of Islam. I then conclude with a survey of key areas that link to the topic of theodicy such as its definition, core questions, criteria, types, and detractors.

The Current Situation

The problem of evil broadly conceived is the challenge of attempting to reconcile the existence of evil and imperfection in the world with commitment to the positive existence of justice, goodness, and harmony. In its narrow (theistic) conception, it is more specifically the problem of reconciling the existence of an absolutely perfect being with the evil of sin and suffering.¹ The brief outline I give here in this section is that of the contemporary treatment within the tradition of analytic (Anglo-­American) philosophy of religion because it has defined much of the scope and parameters of how this problem is understood and addressed by current theologians and philosophers across the three theistic traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The standard approach of the analytic tradition is as follows:² God is conceived in a particular way, namely that He is one and exists uniquely. This God is a personal being and must be characterized as the proper object of religious worship. The grounding for this proper religious worship is God’s perfection, where perfection is conceptualized as maximal greatness: a being than which there is no possible greater one. This bare or minimal conception of divinity constitutes a common departure point for all the Abrahamic theistic traditions and is often referred to as “perfect being theology.”³ From the idea of God’s maximal greatness, a set of necessary core or essential attributes are deduced that are constitutive of God’s nature because such attributes are great-making properties and, combined, would entail there is no other type of being greater. These great-making properties or essential attributes of God (which He would have to a maximal degree) include:

1. Omnipotence: the power to bring about any state of affairs that is logically possible.

2. Omniscience: knowing everything that is logically possible to know.

3. Perfect goodness: the supreme source of morality and what is good.

4. Aseity: ontologically independent, self-subsistent, and sovereign over everything.

5. Incorporeality: possesses no body or finite dimensions.

6. Eternity: is either timeless or everlasting.

7. Omnipresence: wholly present in all space–time.

8. Perfect freedom: nothing external to God determines His actions.

This conceptualization of God (call it ‘standard theism,’ or ST for short) is then challenged by bringing it into conflict with certain formulations of or ideas about evil. This is done in order to cast doubt over God as a perfect being. However, as we will see in the subsequent chapters, it is primarily 1 and 3 from the attribute list above that were the sites of contention most heavily played out within Islamic theology.

A distinction is commonly made between, on the one hand, evil in relation to God as an experiential problem and, on the other, its relation to God as a theoretical problem. The former problem generally concerns itself with how individuals face personal and practical difficulties in knowing and experiencing suffering or are victims of events and acts of evil. It may also involve the practical modalities of combating and eliminating injustice and evil from society. On a specific level, the experiential problem may relate to personal crises of faith in religious adherents in how evil becomes a factor that undermines love, confidence, and trust in God because of one’s inability to process and compute the complexity and disturbing effects it generates. This category of the problem is often excluded by philosophers who see it more as the domain of work reserved for religious leaders, social workers, and health professionals.

The latter problem by contrast is a purely discursive and intellectual engagement that examines the impact the existence of evil may have on the truth-value or epistemic validity of God on ST. This theoretical problem of evil is generally subdivided into two types: (1) the logical problem, also labeled as the deductive problem, and (2) the evidential problem, also labeled as the inductive problem. Trakakis explains the difference:

The logical problem consists in removing an alleged logical inconsistency between certain claims made by ST and certain claims made about evil (e.g., that the existence of the God of ST is logically incompatible with the existence of certain kinds of evil). The evidential problem, on the other hand, takes it as given that the question of logical consistency has been or can be settled, and focuses instead on relations of evidential support, probability, and plausibility: the question here is whether the existence of evil, although logically consistent with the existence of God, counts against the truth of ST insofar as evil lowers the probability that ST is true.⁴

Philosophers like J. L. Mackie⁵ and H. J. McCloskey⁶ set out formal arguments attempting to demonstrate the logical incompatibility between God and evil, meaning neither can coexist, but it is generally held by contemporary philosophers that this attempt was unsuccessful and that there is a plausible internal consistency between ST and formulations of evil. A pivotal point that marked the transition from the logical to the evidential problem was the seminal paper written by atheist philosopher William Rowe published in 1979⁷ that advanced an “intuitively appealing argument” that was “crucially predicated on the inductive step that, given the countless instances of apparently pointless suffering found in the world, it is highly likely that at least some of these are in fact instances of pointless suffering.”⁸ Theistic responses to this evidential problem consisted of two maneuvers. The first maneuver was to construct theodicies and the second was to retreat into a view known as skeptical theism.⁹ Theodicies involve vindicating God’s justice and goodness by offering plausible reasons or justifications of why God allows evil in the world. Skeptical theism is the view that “the limitations of the human mind are such that we are in no position to be able to discern God’s reasons for permitting evil—and hence, the fact that we cannot identify such reasons should not surprise us and should not count against the truth of ST.”¹⁰ Both maneuvers characterize the current state of play within the philosophical literature on the problem of evil, and the disagreement among philosophers of religion has assumed a hardened and entrenched form with little possibility of moving beyond mere adaptations, nuanced reformulations, and reiterations of already existing arguments, although recently there has been a move toward a more imaginative and innovative redirection of the problem with a whole new set of parameters and presuppositions guiding the discussions.¹¹ I have tried to appropriate to some degree these imaginative insights in this book that also build on from earlier works in theodicy within Islamic studies.

Evil in Islamic Theology and Philosophy

This section will situate the term ‘evil’ and its related topics specifically within the Islamic context. First, the concept will be presented generally, then as it occurs in the Qur’an before sketching Ibn Sina’s view because it encapsulates much of the direction and thinking of theologians who came after him. Thereafter, a summary of the main theological contours of God and evil as expounded in the major Muslim theological schools will be given.

There is clearly a reality to evil. Despite knowing, experiencing, and recognizing its reality, the word is notoriously difficult to define with any precision. There is no single statement or meaning that captures the entire range of uses and cases and no description that reflects all its complexities. Muslim theologians did not offer technical definitions for evil but gave extended lists of examples that included broad notions like maleficent acts, pain, and suffering. Evil used in this sense will be generally intended throughout the book.¹² In addition, the standard classification of evil into moral and natural will be assumed as they are reflected in the Islamic theological and philosophical literature. The former type of evil is that which results from the actions of a person held to be morally accountable or blameworthy that harm others and oneself such as acts of terror and torture or defects in one’s character like dishonesty and vanity, whereas the latter type does not relate to moral agents but naturally occurring events or disasters like floods, hurricanes, illnesses, diseases, and disabilities that are not due to the choices and actions of a moral agent. What both types have in common is that their token instances bring about suffering, harm, or adverse states of affairs in creatures.¹³

Turning to the Qur’an, the key Qur’anic passages that give us an idea of the core notion of evil within Islamic belief include: (1) al-Baqara, verses 30–34: creation of Adam and Iblis’s refusal to obey God’s command to prostrate; (2) al-Hijr, verses 32–42: Iblis’s recalcitrance manifested in his arrogant disobedience of God’s command to prostrate before Adam. He is then pronounced accursed but is granted powers by God to misguide humanity; (3) al-Baqara verse 36: Adam and Hawwa disobey God’s command not to approach the tree. The Qur’an thus offers a prehumanity historical account that indicates a few things for us about the nature and etiology of evil including:

1. Evil is not a directly created entity by God but a secondary outcome from the free agency of Iblis and subsequently post-Adam—humanity in general.

2. Evil is not destroyed by God (as Iblis is allowed to persist) but is integrated into His total providential plan and governance of the world.

3. Evil is caused by a metaphysical agent like Iblis.

4. Evil is caused by the exercise of free will or choice.

5. Evil’s purpose is to test humanity—whether they will obey God and be faithful to His commandments and covenant (mithaq) or follow Iblis and his cohorts.

6. Evil is suggested to be whatever is contrary to the Divine will and command.¹⁴

Ozkan has extensively surveyed the semantic field of the Qur’anic term “sharr” from the root sh / r / r /—often translated into English as ‘evil’—and has shown the diverse contextual range of meanings. Her list includes the following:¹⁵

1. Parsimony (bukhl): withholding in miserly fashion from God’s bounty and gifts as an e...

Índice

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Problem of Evil: Outlines
• 2 Disability, Suffering, and Four Theodicies
• 3 Nonhuman Innocents: Theodicies for the Problem of Animal Pain and Suffering
• 4 Toward an Islamic Evolutionary Theodicy
• 5 Flames of Love and Wrath: Hell and the Problem of Everlasting Punishment
• 6 Concluding Remarks
• Appendix: Four Texts on the Problem of Animal Pain and Suffering
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index