Theodicy or the "problem of evil". I've seen /his/ make compelling arguments, yet you remain unconvinced. You turn your back on your Creator?Whatever good you possess comes from God, and when hardship afflicts you, it is to Him alone you cry out for help. yet when He relieves you of your hardship, you turn away from him.. It is God alone who sends water down from the sky and with it revives the earth when it is dead. (quran 16:53, 65)
Hesiod, Theogony: Ἦ τοι μὲν πρώτιστα Χάος γένετ᾽, αὐτὰρ ἔπειτα Γαῖ᾽ εὐρύστερνος. "Truly, first of all Chaos came into being, and then broad-bosomed Earth."The oldest theological text in the Greek language opens with Chaos. Not with a perfect God authoring a perfect world, but with primordial disorder from which the ordered cosmos is drawn. Before Zeus, before the Olympians, before Gaia herself, Chaos is. This single line of Hesiod, written centuries before any Abrahamic scripture, settles the so-called problem of evil in a way no Christian theologian has ever managed: evil, disorder, and resistance are structural features of reality itself, present before the Gods and independent of divine will.Christianity has no such resource. The religion painted itself into a metaphysical corner by claiming that a single all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God created everything from nothing. The moment that claim was made, the question of evil became an unanswerable contradiction, and the entire edifice has been leaking ever since. The argument we call the "Epicurean Paradox" is the most famous leak, and it's been leaking for 17 centuries.The paradox, in the form that has come down to us, is a four-horned dilemma. If God wishes to prevent evil but cannot, He is not omnipotent. If He can prevent evil but does not wish to, He is malevolent. If He neither can nor wishes to, He is both impotent and malevolent, and therefore not God. If He both can and wishes to, then whence evil, and why does He not remove it?The logical structure is a disjunctive exhaustion across two axes, ability and willingness, yielding four combinations. Three of the four contradict the classical tri-omni definition of God (omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent). The fourth, which preserves the attributes, is shown to be empirically falsified by the manifest existence of evil.
Cont. The conclusion is that no being satisfying the tri-omni definition can exist given the datum of suffering.This is a valid argument. Philosophically, it's airtight against its target. The target, however, is not what Christian apologists pretend it is.Lactantius, De Ira Dei: "God either wishes to take away evils and cannot, or He can and does not wish to, or He neither wishes nor can, or He both wishes and can. If He wishes and cannot, He is weak; if He can and does not wish, He is envious; if He neither wishes nor can, He is both envious and weak, and therefore not God; if He wishes and can, which alone is fitting to God, whence then come evils, or why does He not take them away?"The argument doesn't come from Epicurus. It comes from Lactantius, a Christian apologist writing around 318 CE, whose treatise De Ira Dei (On the Anger of God) contains the only surviving ancient formulation of the dilemma. Lactantius attributes it to Epicurus in a single line, provides no source, and then spends the rest of the treatise trying to refute it.The fraud serves two Christian purposes. It lends the argument the pedigree of a famous philosopher, making it easier to cite and refute. And it deflects from the embarrassing fact that the dilemma is generated by Christianity's own doctrinal commitments, not imposed from outside. A Christian apologist who attributes the argument to a pagan philosopher can pretend to be answering an external attack. A Christian apologist who admits the argument emerges from his own theology has to concede that the theology itself is the problem.
>>18754983>>18754989TLDR
>>18754969>You turn your back on your Creator?God of the bible is the god of Israel, not "the Creator". No point in believing biblical propaganda either, as it was written by followers of the god of Israel.
>>18754992>TLDRStop larping as a follower of some dead Jew and look into the history of what spiritual beliefs were held by your ancestors, before the bible.Do your ancestors come from Judea or Israel, anon? If not then you don't owe your loyalty to the bible.
>>18754997>>18754994I'm not christian, I'm muslim you didn't even read my opening.
>>18754969Vox Day already addressed this.
>>18755011What did he say
>>18754983>>18754989To establish the problem of evil/theodicy, a critic must invariably smuggle in two unexamined axioms,1. That the complete elimination of suffering is the highest conceivable good and that 2. evil, loss and transgression against self possess no indispensable role within his complete structural order.I'll tell you how Islam resolves this the way christianity and buddism (though I'm not well read on this) cannot. Catholicism, with it's absolute divine simplicity (ADS) of Aristotelian origin renders God's knowledge, will, mercy and action as nominal and indistinguishable. they invariably strip God of real and distinct attributes to preserve non-composition, reducing him to an impersonal static principle. For example pure-benevolence, as you already noticed.And Buddism with it's samsara and liberation functionally makes the problem meaningless.Muslims in general are attributionists.>God has ninety-nine names, one hundred less one; whoever enumerates them will enter Paradise. (al-Bukhari 7392)>There is nothing like unto Him, and He is the All-Hearing, the All-Seeing (42:11)Islamic "realism" (as articulated by Ibn Taymiyyah) rejects the abstract Neoplatonic "privation of evil" (privatio boni), which treats pain and suffering as conceptual vacancies (shadows) or causally inert absence of good. We generally insist this suffering, disease, and grief are real, positively instantiated experiences within the created reality. We do this by ontologically distinguishing between absolute/pure evil (sharr mahd), which is an event or state that is devoid of wisdom, benefit or purpose. This does not exist in God's creation. and relative/partial evil (sharr nisbi), which human beings experience as "evil" is relative and partial. which is painful relative to the finite subject experiencing it, yet good and rational within the macro-architecture of the system.
>>18755060Continued (2);This realism is part human volition (theological compatibalism), succinctly articulated in the corpus as:>Tell them, "All is from God." (4:78), while the next verse says: >Whatever good befalls you is, from God, and whatever ill befalls you is from yourself (4:79)Both verses describe the same event under distinct ontological levels: Brought into physical existence by the necessary causal substrate. an event is decreed by God (with his cosmic creational will, iradah kawniyyah) and when morally misdirected or harmfully actualized by a contingent agent, it is authored by human volition. God permits actions and outcomes contrary to His moral prescription (iradah shar'iyyah) because their instantiation is necessary for a higher systemic good.Unlike Zoroastrianism, Evil is not an independent rival ontological principle contesting divine power, but certain evil is a relational and necessary byproduct of a morally intelligible world:>He who created death and life to test which of you is best in deed (67:2)>The sons of Adam inveigh against the ups and downs of Time, and I am Time, in my hand is the night and the day. (al-Bukhari 4826) As said before, western theodicy reduces the divine nature to a single, abstract attribute (such as undifferentiated sentimentality, or passive love), rendering any temporal hardship as an irreconcilable paradox. Islamic theodicy of course rejects a flat, monochromatic Deity.We posit creation is the dynamic theater for the comprehensive manifestation of the entire spectrum of the Almighty's Divine Names (99 names) and Attributes (Al-Asma' al-Husna).To quote Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim, if creation were a static, frictionless realm devoid of need, trial, or transgression, then vast dimensions of the Divine Essence would remain eternally unexpressed.
>>18755079Continued (3);How could Allah's attribute of Al-Ghaffar (The Perpetual Forgiver) or Al-Tawwab (The Acceptor of Repentance) be realized without servants who stumble, experience remorse, and claw their way back? How could Al-Sabur (The Patient) or Al-Shafi (The Healer) be known without hardship, trial, and disease?How could Al-Adl (The Just) or Al-Muntaqim (The Avenger of the Oppressed) be manifested without the presence of tyranny and moral agency to balance and correct? Every trial, loss, and victory is experienced through a specific lens; the necessary "dark pigment" on the canvas that allows the radiant geometry of his divine wisdom/hikmah, justice, and mercy to become visible to us as finite contingent beings.This "relative evil" is baked into the world; it's a part of the empirical world which requires a uniform, predictable causal matrix. The same atmospheric, biological, and psychological structures that produces health, prosperity, and society also generates disease, disaster, and conflict. Why would God selectively suspend natural laws at every instance of tragedy, such as the suffering of children?when it is functionally equivalent to the abolition of causality?Without a uniform predictable order, empirical science, deliberation, and agency has no empirical intelligibility. But most importantly, God does not specifically instrumentalize the innocent;Children's suffering is not justified on the ground that their pain serves as a means to others' good. Suffering occurring within natural laws is non-punitive, and guarantees eschatological rectification. Ibn al-Qayyim (in Remedy for the Ailing) and al-Ghazali (in The Revival of the Religious Sciences) suggest every case of undeserved suffering, receives a precise positive counterpart in the afterlife, both for the sufferer and for those who endure it with patience.
>>18755093Continued (4);>And My faithful servant's reward from Me, if I have taken to Me his best-friend, from amongst the inhabitants of the world, and he has borne it patiently for My sake, shall be nothing less than Paradise. (al-Bukhari 6424)This undeserved temporal pain becomes eternal nearness to God, and an elevated spiritual status.>The child who dies young will draw his parents by his hand into Paradise. (Sahih Muslim 2635)>The miscarried fetus will drag its mother with its umbilical cord into Paradise, if she seeks reward for her loss. (Musnad Ahmad 20722)It can be argued creation is created to forge spiritual growth and maturity, as a test by te almighty.It's goods exist in hierarchy, where a world which sacrifices Instrumental Goods (pleasure, health, and material success) which are transient and dependent on contingent conditions, to cultivate enduring moral goods (virtue, justice, patience; which require struggle and opposition to manifest) and spiritual growth (knowledge of God, nearness) is the perfect world. Courage without danger, patience without trial, and gratitude without vulnerability are untenable to a contrastive human moral understaning. Without experiencing loss or pain, the human mind cannot form the categories necessary to comprehend safety, relief, or mercy.As Ibn Taymiyya says in Majmu al-Fatawa, were there no states disliked or opposed to His will, divine mercy and forgiveness would have no domain upon which to act, and >There is nothing in existence but that it contains a wisdom for which its creation was justifiedTo conclude, fragmentariness of earthly justice points to the meta-systemic resolution of theodicy. Take an analogy to Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem, which posits that any consistent system rich enough to describe arithmetic contains true statements that cannot be proven from within its own internal rules. >You prefer the life of this world, but the Hereafter is better and more lasting [complete] (87:16)
>>18755111Continued (5);The empirical world by design displays a lawful rational structure, but the transient world remains manifestly incomplete.It is also filled with un-punished injustice and un-compensated suffering. If reality is genuinely rational and moral, it cannot terminate in moral incompleteness. >The rights will be restored to their owners on the Day of Resurrection, even to the point that the hornless sheep will receive retribution from the horned sheep. (Sahih Muslim 2582)The temporal empirical world points towards the afterlife, the transcendent conclusion. where moral and ontological imbalance of this existence are resolved; triumph of justice and vindication of the teleological coherence of creation.>What can my enemies do to me? My paradise and my garden are in my chest/heart [wherever I go]; If you take me to jail, I will engage in the remembrance of Allah. If you exile me from my land, I will reflect upon His creation. If you execute me, I will be a martyr. What can you do with me?For I am not bound to this Dunya, I am living for Al-Akhirah.But also with the knowledge that>there is a Paradise in this world; whoever does not enter it will not enter the Paradise of the Hereafter
>>18755060>To establish the problem of evil/theodicy, a critic must invariably smuggle in two unexamined axioms,>1. That the complete elimination of suffering is the highest conceivable goodand that>2. evil, loss and transgression against self possess no indispensable role within his complete structural order.You don't need both of them. If you grant 1., then it's a given that suffering isn't indispensible for the goal of its own absence. There's nothing logically incoherent about there being no suffering by itself. God could've just decided not to create anything to begin with, and then the total absence of suffering, the proposed highest good, would be satisfied.2., contrary to 1., assumes that there is some higher conceivable good for which evil and suffering might be logically required. Then, in order to maintain the claim to benevolence, the elimination of evil still has to be on God's priority list somewhere, and, to avoid the charge of malevolence, the "good" God is trying to obtain by allowing the proliferation of evil has to be the good of his creatures, not some abstract "good" only he cares about. In this case, you might not be able to say with certainty that there's an absolute logical problem of evil, but there's still a really suspicious gap between expectation and reality.Could something like free will, something subtle enough that many people aren't even sure they have it, really be so important for our wellbeing that it justifies everything wrong with the world, and does it really *logically, necessarily* lead to everything wrong with the world (including diseases, natural disasters)?And then, for religions where many people are consigned to eternal hell, is that really logically required for the greatest wellbeing of those who don't go to hell, or is it gratuitous suffering, making God once again vulnerable to the charge of malevolence?
>>18755127I've already addressed all of this in the 5 posts, that you didn't even read.You gave me a standard response to western "free-will theodicy", but mine is a sophisticated articulation of Islamic theodicy.Like you argued this, for example,>really be so important for our wellbeing that it justifies everything wrong with the worldBut I will respond the below contention in a minute >And then, for religions where many people are consigned to eternal hell
>>18754983>Not with a perfect God authoring a perfect worldThis is how it is explained in the new testament as well.The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.
>>18754983>structural featuresChaos is not a structural feature. It is the absence of a structural feature, like atheism and anarchy. It is a privation. It is untapped potential.
>>18754983>evil isOh, so you believe in original sin. Got it
>>18755136I don't think you addressed all of it because my first point was purely a correction. You said two axioms are required, but in fact you don't need both of them. And you hadn't responded to the hell contention yet either. I admit that I went with free will as a placeholder because I was still writing before you finished your full set of posts. You seem to prefer instead what I believe I've heard called the "soul-building" theodicy, which imo is still questionable. For example, "Without experiencing loss or pain, the human mind cannot form the categories necessary to comprehend safety, relief, or mercy." Really? Who made it that way? Why can't God have made humans able to comprehend safety, release, and mercy without having to go to the trouble of experiencing loss and pain? And, considering the very uneven distribution of all the miserable aspects of existence and how often they actually don't seem to contribute to a person's moral development. Certainly brain damage most often hinders developement, difficult times are an occasion for moral evils just as they're an occasion for moral goods, and tragedies are liable to crush someone's faith in God, not affirm it. So it doesn't look much like there's an omniscient, omnipotent being carefully applying evils to his creatures to bring out their highest virtues.
>>18754983>beforeThere is no "before" in pure chaos. Pure chaos is nothingness and everything. It is the undefined. Dividing by zero is the mathematical formulation of pure chaos. When god appears, the first thing he does is start dividing. Division leads to definition.
>>18755157>>18755159>>18755169Evil is a tangible, active substance rather than a mere absence of goodness. Real-world suffering, sickness, and malice possess an aggressive, destructive presence that contradicts ordinary human experience, meaning they cannot be reduced to passive metaphors like darkness or blindness. If goodness exists as a distinct essence, its cosmic counterpart must also be a real substance based on the logic of co-equal opposites. Dismissing evil as a simple lack of good is as illogical as calling extreme cold a mere absence of heat while ignoring its physical power to freeze and destroy life.Furthermore, minimizing evil to "non-being" trivializes human suffering and makes an omnipotent God directly complicit in cosmic cruelty. If a single, all-powerful deity permits these devastating voids to exist, that god must either lack the goodness to fill them or have intentionally designed the universe with structural flaws. Establishing evil as an independent, uncreated substance preserves the moral perfection of a supreme creator, shielding them from any blame or responsibility for the agonizing realities of worldly torment.
>Christianity has no such resourceWrong. It does, in the New Testament and in TolkienAll evil ultimately leads to greater good and glorifies God
>>18755136>>18755127>for religions where many people are consigned to eternal hellTo understand this, you must let go of the augustinian doctrine of original sin.Islam posits every son of Adam is created on fitrah; a primordial purity, disposition and direct perception of God.Our soteriology is an indispensable part of our epistemology, which doesn't begin with enumerating catalog of presuppositions to first believe like "lord died for your sins, because eve sinned", and retroactive rationalizations (credo quia absurdum). Our epistemic framework appeals to one's rational faculties to awaken their fitrah, sincerely recognizing their Creator.quoting Ibn Taymiyyah (in "rejection of conflict between reason and revelation"), revelation (naql) doesn't oppose reason; it compliments what authentic reason (aql) can independently verify (through syllogisms, arguments, etc), and what the fitrah intuitively inclines to (this is why lay christians can't articulate their trinitarianism dogma without invariably falling into partialism or modalism; it's something neither their reason nor fitrah can intuit)western reformed epistemology treats their belief as "basic" via some abstract, isolated intuitions (plantinga made two models of PoR). But Islam ties the basicity of fitrah to concrete particulars (ayat) grounding knowledge in lived experience, guided by these facilities. Where fitrah is an innate disposition inscribed in the human soul. the "eye of the soul", veiled beneath (noetic corruption) accretions of cultures, habits and desires.>The similitude of His light is as a niche, within it a lamp; the lamp enclosed in glass (man's body), the glass gleaming like a resplendent star.[..] whose oil would almost glow forth, even though no fire touched it. Light upon Light (24:35 quran) Dynamically fine-tuned, as the believer observes signs within the self, and the cosmos>And on the earth are signs for those of assured faith, and in yourselves..do you not see? (51:20)
>>18755247Continued (2);(reflections by Golam Kibria) God shows Himself through His creation, One of His Names is Az-Zahir, which means The Manifest (The One who is evident). Another Name is Al-Batin, which means The Hidden. He is both Manifest and Hidden at the same time. We cannot see Him in His true form, but we can see signs of His existence everywhere in the world around us. Revelation implores you to reflect on this repeatedly;>He is the One who sends down rain from the sky, and with it He brings the dead earth back to life. Surely in this are signs for people who think (16:65) The epistemic 'warrant' therefore lies in the proper functioning of this fitrah alongside relevant cognitive faculties, within an epistemic milieu congenial to its operation (commentary by Ustadh Jamie). In some respects like Aristotelian first-principles these foundational truths are non-inferential, however unlike it not derived from sense-data.Also, rather than just another Abhrahamic religious institution, Islam fashions itself as a return to a pure and primordial monotheism (al-Din al-Hanif). The faith of Abraham and Adam. In our theology, God sent messengers across the world (16:36), throughout human history with their own Shari'ahs, tailored to their social-historical realities. People of Ethiopia, Greece, etc received these traditions and prayer from God. Their cultures spoke of the 'One' in different ways.>They are only names you and your fathers have named (53:23) and To each of you We have ordained a code of law and a way of life. If Allah had willed, He would have made you one community (5:48) but His Will is to test you with what He has given each of you.But same message was given to them; A call to worship the one True God (21:25). Traditional Islamic thought (like Al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyyah) argues glimpses of the divine were seen by the accomplished among the pagans, as guided insights or remnants of prophet knowledge preserved across ancient civilizations.
>>18755251Continued (3);This explains why early Muslims (paripatetic school) scholars (like Al-Farabi, Suhrawardi, etc) viewed Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle as Hukama (sages) who perceived glimpses of divine light (Hikmah) through purified intellects. Therefore, it necessarily follows within our paradigm, that the recurrence of monotheistic impulses throughout human history are understood as an awakening of man's fitrah; his innate orientation toward the Creator. These various cultures then distorted, obscured and institutionalized law. Ibn Khaldun argues in his Muqaddimah (historical sociology), that true monotheism inevitably decays into institutionalized ritualism, tribalism, and idol worship through cultural accretions, egoistic desire, and political consolidation.E.g Ismael and Abraham built the Kaaba as a house of worship for God, and their descendants slowly deviated and introduced idolatry, converting it into a pagan shrine. The same way the Israelites deviated and brought Idols of Asherah and Baal into the temple of Solomon.This is why we say you revert to Islam, not convert.With this baseline, our soteriology rejects the indiscriminate, sweeping condemnation; bound by the doctrine of epistemic proportionality. the foundational principle that moral accountability, culpability, and divine judgment are non-linear and bounded by knowledge (ilm), capacity, and the reaching of clear, uncorrupted >Messengers as bringers of good tidings and warners so that people may have no argument against God after the messengers (4:165)>And We never punish until We send a messenger (17:15)In Western secular law "ignorance of the law" doesn't excuse you. but we have opposite baseline, presuming non-culpability until proven otherwise, on two legal maxims:>epistemic proportionality (17:15);your responsibility scales with the clarity and credibility of evidence available to you.>The Principle of Capacity, i.e God does not burden a soul beyond its capacity (2:286).
>>18755258Continued (4);al-Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyya write that whoever lived in periods or places unreached by true prophetic message, i.e who never hear the message are not condemned; they are judged solely based on their innate fitrahAnd those reached by a distorted message; they argue that those who only receive a caricature or distorted version of Islam (e.g., through enemy propaganda or cultural hostility) are functionally less accountable, because the real message never reached them intelligibly. God's justice demands that no soul is judged by a standard it was never equipped or informed to meet.The quran states expressions of regret under coercion do not indicate real repentance, and would not alter the stance if the test of this life was repeated:>If they were returned, they would revert to what was forbidden to them, for they are liars. (6:28)>If they were returned, they would revert to what was forbidden to them. (32:12)In conclusion, judgment and consequence are applied where disbelief has become a fixed orientation of the will. Your accountability before the almighty is an exact and transparent reflection of your deeply chosen path.This is usually how we'd explain it.
>>18755168>You seem to prefer instead what I believe I've heard called the "soul-building" theodicyPartly. what i wrote is an articulation aptly called the "Manifestation of Divine Names (Asma' wa'l-Sifat) Theodicy".Things like soul-building, moral and causal intelligibility, heirarchal and partial nature of good/evil, eschatological rectification, etc are merely it's entailments within the contingent universe.I'll try respond to the rest of the contentions in this post later.
>>18755197Chaos is not evil. Chaos is infinite nothings. It's paradox.Evil is active and the result of free will. "Evil" was not there in the beginning. There was nothing and everything in the begining.
>>18754969The only moral way for a conscious viewpoint to exist, is as a sovereign and free God.In Christianity and probably Islam, it is proposed that the unborn are forced to be born here.The Unborn would in such a case be more innocent than himself and would not deserve to be born in such a place, subject to such a vile test. The only moral way for a conscious viewpoint to exist, is as a sovereign and free God.
Each religion has an answer to the problem of evil. It's not like there is a definitive "correct" answer to it.
>>18754999>I'm not christian, I'm muslimBoth are spiritually Jewish reformations of Abrahamic traditions. Yaweh, Allah, and the God of Israel all stem from the same ancient gods.
>>18754997The pic is completely wrong: firstly the Good is not the Monad, because a monad is the unitive factor at the start of a series, so that it is opposed to pluralitu, whereas the One is above all opposites. Then you have Ideal Numbers at the top which is wrong: they are the intermeduate between doxa and noēsis (dianoia). Then there's the table along the intelligible species (and NOT particulars), which is wrong: there are no Forms for artefacts. And the Dyad being at the bottom is also wrong: it is the second principle right after the One. It confuses matter and Dyad. I don't even know why I'm seething so much about this.Tldr the author of this pic hasn't read anything, or is AI.(I already posted this lol but you too)
>>18754969From a certain point of view, there is no evil, only good and non-good.
>>18755485Yet reality contradicts your statement. Evil is a substance, not a lack of anything, cope
Dear Muslim anon, thank you for your effortposts. I am especially interested by what you wrote in >>18755093. Which sources from Islamic theology should I read which expounds on this idea of the world as a manifestation of God's Sifat?
>>18756691There are plenty of youtube theology channels like blogging theology, petrit kola, etc that do these videos, and articles you can start with.You can go with the primary sources, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (Ibn Taymiyyah's student) is the guy, there's a translation of his "The ailment of the sick, concerning divine decree, predestination, wisdom, and causality" called "Ibn qayyim al-jawziyya on Divine Wisdom and the Problem of Evil", and "Ranks of Divine Seekers."There's also Al-Ghazali's "99 beautiful names of Allah" from a more antro-centric soul-building perspective, and his magnum opus "Revival of the religious Sciences" deals heavily with the best possible world problem.>There is nothing in possibility more wonderful than what actually is
