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“I was in a difficult period of my life in which I struggled with a dilemma that constantly bothers me and puts pressure on my nerves, which is the “problem of evil in the world.” This particular problem was the cause of my agnostic and agnostic experience for two consecutive years, after which I was able to organize my thoughts and reach peace with my mind, heart and surroundings.
(Nidal Rabadi)
In 2010, on the seventeenth of December, a young man in his twenties, brown (Mohamed Bouazizi) stands in the middle of the market, after the municipality confiscated his goods, shouting at the policewoman who slapped him - seconds ago - with a broken heart: “Why are you doing this to me? I am a simple person I just want to work."
Then!
Nothing happens..no merchandise returned and no dignity to be recovered. The young Tunisian finds nothing but his slender body to set it on fire, and the fire finds no escape from going to the palace of President Ben Ali to uproot it after less than a month[1] and then goes east with the Arab Spring to Egypt Libya, Syria, and Yemen;
To begin years of revolution, war and suffering.
In September of last year, the Syrian “Aleppo” was breathing its last under the bloody bombardment of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, in the underlining of one of the ugliest chapters of the spring novel that Tunisia started six years ago[2], and after that, and before him, a question rises The Disabled Youth: Why Was This Evil Created?
Why does all this happen?
That question, behind which atheism leaks an emotional tremor, was monitored by an American study that found that 17% of the causes of atheism stem from this question[3]. Morocco, for his atheism because of what happened at that time to the oppressed [3].
Where did the question begin?
This is what the researcher Sami Amiri answers in his book “The Problem of Evil and the Existence of God”[4], as he returns the matter to something deeper than evil itself, and sees that the vision that was formed in Western thought in the aftermath of the French Revolution, had the greatest impact in formulating that Denial, which is confirmed by the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor[5], who believes that man's sense of divine order against the background of this thought has faded, and that the sense of our ability to coordinate the cosmic order ourselves has begun to emerge, which eventually led to the desire for a world without suffering.
Against the background of this Enlightenment era of Western thought, the face of life in the West was sculpted by Nietzsche’s nihilism, Sartre’s meaning, and Camus’s fatalism, and the matter eventually eroded the purpose of existence, so that materialism pushed life in the same direction, to lose any meaning from perceptions (religious/metaphysical) ) from beyond our world, and then “evil, pain and suffering became a manifestation of the absurdity of existence” [6].
The sensitivity towards it intensified due to the continuous modernization, the birth of individualism and the disintegration of societal structures. Evil lost its value “as a justification for showing group cohesion and the emergence of the meanings of brotherhood, solidarity and mercy”[6], and the divine order was replaced by the centrality of man seeking to formulate a new world that does not contain pain.
That Firdawsian conception, the hope for the world, which John Heck saw as the ultimate creation in the conception of anti-belief writers[7], did not arise on its own without introductions. Perhaps the distorted conception of God in the Old Testament was the most prominent of these introductions;
For his expression in “the image of a god who orders the killing of children and the extermination of entire societies”[8], in addition to the repressive policy of the Church, which in turn affected the direction of thinking in the system of Western atheism, and made a strong conflict with the idea of religion.
This quarrel was soon ignited by war disasters, especially after the two world wars and the annihilation of millions of people. Then the question of evil was raised as a psychological concussion and an angry protest that was unable to balance belief in God on the one hand, and accepting this vast amount of calamities and trials on the other.
It is the same question that moved to our Arab societies and was reinforced by the catastrophes and bloody tyrannical massacres in the post-Arab Spring period. Then the problem of evil emerged, protesting against divinity and rejecting faith in the wake of this abundant affliction, which prompted the phenomenon of atheism to emerge clearly in Arab societies. At that time, as a kind of protest against all those evils, bloodshed, torture and rape, putting a blindfold on the eyes of the disaffected;
Don't make them see the divine wisdom of all that.
Linda Zjazebsky, a lecturer in religion at the University of Oklahoma says;
Many atheists have come to denounce the overwhelming existence of evil, annoying and painful, and not the existence of evil itself, without trying to delve into the wisdom behind it [9], and atheism has also caused a high degree of sensitivity towards the problem of evil, due to the lack of a belief system through which one gropes solace, through which he feels wisdom and is reassured about the justice of heaven[6]. The denial of God resulting from the existence of evil was the same reason for the continuation of suffering;
To not sense the value behind it.
Evil and God .. Why was the dilemma?
In his dissection of atheistic thought, researcher Sami Amiri sees that the crisis of the existence of evil has become a real dilemma in achieving faith in humans[3], which was confirmed by many imams of atheism, led by Anthony Flew, the atheist theorist who receded from his secularism, and who saw that The suspicion of evil was the first reason for their atheism and denial of the existence of a Creator God [10].
The same case is demonstrated by the debate of the atheistic philosopher Stephen Lau with his counterpart William Lane Craig about the existence of God. Central to atheism is the argument for evil.”[3]
By asking about the authenticity of the dilemma, the “theodic” study [a] shows the real link between “God’s justice” and the existence of evil in the world, and the logical extent of the inference that attaches the first truth “belief in God” to the second problem “evil and affliction,” Sami Ameri sees That evil, in fact, is a problem for both sides of the debate: for the believer who searches for the rationale of evil and its explanatory position in his conception of divinity, and for the atheist who searches for a place that satisfies him in a world that he himself describes as absurd.
The religious interpretation of evil always refers to it as “affliction,” which differs from “evil” in that it contains a religious meaning that justifies the benefit behind the calamity.
However, he also sees that the divine revelation did not deny evil so that atheism might justify its existence against God. On the contrary, it affirmed the wisdom behind the affliction in more than one place, putting faith in the foreground and explaining through it the wisdom of the existence of all these evils.
However, in the same context, Amiri confirms that the Qur’an’s recognition of evil and the reality of its existence does not mean that the universe is transparent in the form that explains the wisdom of every affliction. The answer and its ability to refute the evidence of suspicion to deny the existence of the Creator without being obligated to provide a detailed answer,” just as “the difference between touching wisdom from the inevitability of death in the human race and the death of a particular individual close to us” [6].
Also, the religious interpretation of evil always bears the name “affliction”, which differs from “evil” in that it contains a meaning of faith that justifies the benefit from the calamity, if the person is unable to pay it, which was not established in the minds of the skeptics when they doubted, which leads us to search. On the rationale for the existence of evil and the wisdom behind it;
Let us separate the teleological view of evil, and those who see it as mere absurdity.
By contrast, things are known
He who does not have God in his heart cannot feel his absence.
(Simon Weil)
Do fish feel wet?
So asks C.
S.
Lewis on the reason for our sense of evil, he says that if we suppose the absence of light and the obliteration of the eyes of beings, then the word “darkness” will be meaningless [11], and the listener will not come out of it with any meaning. Therefore, in order for a person to describe a line as crooked, he must be aware of what a straight line is;
Because - according to Lewis, who carries the question to himself - if we consider that "the whole show is bad and trivial from A to Z (meaning the life of this world), why did I find myself in such a violent reaction to him, even though I am supposed to be part of the show?"] 11].
This question by which Lewis retreated from his atheism, which was based before that on the problem of evil, allows him to refute his previous atheistic argument, saying that if we could abandon the concept of justice[11], as a mere illusion of our brainchild, to avoid believing in a just God, we would By doing so, we demolish the objectionable objection to this deity;
Because it did not arise mainly because we consider the world an unjust place. If the world is an unjust place: from where did the idea of justice come to us, and if the idea of justice was a pure illusion: why do we object to the existence of evil?
Irish writer and researcher C.
S.
Louis (1898-1963 AD) (networking sites)
That "Louissi" denunciation would not last long;
Because William Craig would have an answer that tells us that although suffering on a superficial level doubts God’s existence, “on a deeper level it proves his existence; for in the absence of God suffering is nothing ugly, if an atheist believes that suffering is a bad thing, that is, it is something that must be Is it not, then he presents moral judgments that can only exist if God exists”[12].
Asking the question about the problem of evil contains an indication of a moral sense, according to Amiri, which contradicts the goal for which the suspicion was raised, which is to deny the existence of God and portray the universe as mere matter.
Because the human mind that reacts to this question “is a non-material whiff and sees that life has value and meaning”[6], because “if atheism was true, we would not have expected good to be the chief or more original than evil.” Rather, we would have expected In fact, “there should be no division of good and evil at all”[13].
Good is the law of the universe that is stable in all systems, and evil is always disorder and disorder[3], disease is a departure from wellness that is the origin, and the second law of thermodynamics indicates that “systems always tend to corruption, not order and finality”[6], which means That goodness in it is the origin, which explains man's high sensitivity to goodness and considers it a scale for life, and explains in a contrast the inability of scientific explanation to understand this feeling, which Randy Alcorn sees transcends laboratory observation.
According to Alcorn, the lust for power may explain injustice and corruption in the earth, but meanings such as mercy, altruism and sacrifice for the sake of a noble idea, cannot find a place for it in the atheistic world of matter that does not recognize anything other than matter, its laws and secretions [14], which is what Ibegovic agrees with] 15], and adds a verse of poetry to it, saying that we may find a moral atheist, but we will never find a moral atheism, or a coordinating atheistic system for good;
This is because the good is a moral matter that is not understood by matter, and knowledge is not legitimized for it in an absolute manner, regardless of the benefit derived from it.
Therefore, the existence of God is not refuted by evil;
Because evil is the second aspect of goodness, and because “there are good things that do not come without the crop of evil, so how can virtue be achieved, for example, without temptations and obstacles, and then without evil, even in the form of pain and obstruction?” [6] Which is expressed by Ninan Smart that “ The concept of the good thing in its relation to man is linked to other concepts, such as sedition, courage and generosity,” those concepts that will lose their existence “if man is created complete without imperfection”[16].
The book "There is a God" by Anthony Flew (1923-2010 AD) (communication sites)
From this and that, Anthony Flew concludes in his book There Is a God that the existence of evil and pain is philosophically separated from the question of the existence of the Creator, and that it is all related to the attributes of this Creator and the philosophical purpose of the existence of evil.
Therefore, based on this inference, Ameri believes that the atheistic proposition based on the suspicion of evil suffers from the inability to build a coherent and complete existential vision of the world;
“Because it proceeds from the unknown (the purpose of evil) to establish the known (the existence of God), and from a simple, reductive idea to a quick and light inference that jumps to the claim that this universe is without God” [6].
And this matter contradicts the faith logic “which proceeds from the known and the universally understood (the existence of God) to establish his great system, with the help of rational consideration and the extensions of revelation” that is aware of wisdom in everything. Interpretation of the unknown”[6], because faith sees affliction as a complement to life, which would lose its meaning without it, and not contradict it. same time.
Evil as a tool.. because wisdom is broader than anger
How do you spoil the results?
It's simple, just make rotten premises to infer something that isn't true.
With this preamble, Amiri explains the atheistic vision of the attributes of God, with regard to the issue of evil, and the erroneous conclusions based on it regarding God.
If the rational proof was for Anthony, then he did not see a contradiction between the existence of God and the occurrence of evil, then the suspicion of evil tries to avoid this matter by showing the contradiction between the attributes of God, the “Able, the All-Knowing, the Merciful” and evil.
According to Amiri, this view seems to be deficient in two ways: the first aspect manifests itself in ignoring the “comprehensive view that does not neglect anything from the attributes of God,” by limiting it to the three mentioned attributes, and ignoring the consideration of the rest of the attributes that “reach with their broad horizons the realization of existential harmony.” between the perfect existence of God and the existence of evil”[3] because the god, in order to achieve faith in his being a god, does not act according to earthly standards, but rather he is an owner who possesses much broader rights than the rights of the possessed “He sustains the creatures and may prevent them, commands and forbids them, afflicts them and tests them with disease or death.” Or loss or pain, and punishes them for disobedience in a way that achieves the mandated purpose of their existence” [6].
As for the second view, which sees the existential contradiction between God and evil, Ameri sees its shortcomings from another aspect related to the centrality of God in his universe.
God, in the atheistic conception, “does not have the will to create a world less than perfection, in which He creates creation without mandate or purpose, and prepares the universe for them so that it achieves the maximum possible happiness and pleasure.” based on a rational necessity”[6], and an inferential arrangement based on a primary fallacy “claiming that the existence of the perfect God requires that his creation be complete in his individuals, and the side of the fallacy is the assumption that the perfection of God contradicts his will” [3], so this view places man at the center of the universe To achieve his pleasure, instead of God transcendent by His will, faith in God’s perfection is attached to His creation of perfect creatures without deficiency or suffering.
This objection that links wisdom to perfection of craftsmanship in creatures, Amiri considers it to be an obligation without an obligation, “since the gates of wisdom are greater than that,” so it may actually be fulfilled “by creating the imperfect and executing the good” [3].
Wisdom “is only accomplished by creating opposites and opposites, such as night and day, high and low.”
Which justifies their creation to be “the location of the emergence of brilliant wisdom, compelling power, powerful will, and perfect and complete kingship.” Hence, “the illusion that the creation of these antagonists would be disrupted by the necessities of these Attributes, their rulings, and their effects... its requirements and obligations” [17].
Hence, “if all of creation were obedient, worshiping, and pious, the effect of many of the lofty attributes and the most beautiful names would be lost,” as how would “the effect of the attribute of pardon, forgiveness, forgiveness, transgression, revenge, honor, oppression, justice and wisdom in which things descend their places would appear”?
If all people were on one level of coercive charity, “the judgment, verses, lessons, and praiseworthy goals of their creation in this way would have passed away, and the perfection of kingship and disposition would have passed away”[17].
Evil, as a tool in the faith perception, carries a strong justification that justifies its existence. On the one hand, it is a scourge that works to expiate sins for the believers and compensate the oppressed for their grievances in the hereafter, [b] on the other hand, it represents the actual test of the believers against the trials of this world and its resistance;
Either by repelling it when possible or by being patient with it when incapacitated,[c] because “God’s justice is not related, as in the human sense, to benefit and harm, but rather to putting everything in its place,”[3] which calls for dimensions of judgment that are not among the dimensions of justice in its human sense. It is one thing for a person to be harmed, and to measure divine wisdom on the scale of his human anger is another thing.
Free evil.. what about nature?
Evil makes worldly test?
But what about Anthony Flew, who believes that free will does not always require a person to choose between good and evil[18]?
Do not go too far, then, for Alvin Plantinga will refute this theorizing: the fact that there are free creatures that sometimes err does not count against the existence of God's omnipotence or his goodness;
“Because it is not possible to prevent the occurrence of moral evil except by preventing the possibility of moral good.”[19]
Amiri also believes that Flo has neglected in his presentation an important fact, which is that God has granted free will to humans to test them, and therefore it is not rationally correct that this test corresponds to concealing the choice of evil and highlighting the correct choice every time;
Because just as God created "Iblis", he also sent the prophets[3].
But what if evil is outside the realm of man?
Or in other words: What if evil does not benefit a moral interest, such as a lion's prey on a deer, or is not related to human choice, such as earthquakes and volcanoes?
Is evil here free without moral or philosophical return?
That is the question that calls for another question before answering it. When Linus Pauling, the Nobel laureate in chemistry, tells us that the God who created the super-complex living cell of New York City is the same who created in man the susceptibility to disease, we will ask ourselves: Can we Here is the denial of the beautiful, orderly, and teleological structure just for the possibility of failure in a world that God wanted something behind and did not create it in vain?
Therefore, this “free” evil is linked, in one way or another, with the free good in return, that is, the holistic view of natural disasters, epidemics and the animal jungle cannot neglect the good creativity in the beauty of nature and the orderly structure of vital bodies[3].
But what if this good is missing from the monitoring of some?
As William Roe sees, for example, that free suffering in the world creates useless evils, and God can prevent them, and as long as this does not happen, he - that is, Roe - will deny the existence of God because of the freeness of this evil [21].
Is this sequence correct?
Jean-Marie Trou does not agree with this, saying that free evil does not represent any denial of the existence of God, and that those who say this "replace argument with an illusory axiom that needs to be considered"[22] because the requirement of mental discipline, according to Marie, requires first proving the existence of God and then discussing about Free or not natural evil, not to assume that this evil is free from ourselves and deny any goodness behind it, then deny the existence of God, because proving the existence of God or not requires external evidence.
Accordingly, according to Fitzpatrick[23], if the atheist supposes the existence of a god, the rational conclusion of the wisdom behind natural evil will not be impossible, while if he denies this wisdom in the beginning, he is required to prove his atheism first, and then we talk after that about the freeness of evil or its price Wise.
What Mary did here, and what Fitzpatrick affirmed, was no superstition;
Because there is a famous philosophical deviation founded by the English philosopher J.
Which.
Moore, postulates an arrangement other than that assumed by William Roe regarding the relationship between the existence of natural evil and the existence of God. In the universe and in mental abstraction definitively the existence of a God, and accordingly, the freeness of evil is a hypothesis that needs research, and from our certainty in the truth of God, we will believe in his ability, knowledge and mercy, and then the wisdom behind evil, all evil, will remain present, and from here we can search and meditate] 24].
Peter Van knew this, and then wanted to tell us what his contemplation led to, saying: [25] The world in which the laws are broken and the angels penetrate it to save the deer from the danger of fire or to miraculously hide the sheep from the front of the lions is a flawed world, and the fault is similar. for the scale of the blemish resulting from suffering and evil;
Because - according to Daniel Spider-[26], it will become a chaotic world in which the permanent and regular relationships between successive events are absent, and the continuous natural law is missing, which will prevent us from predicting the fate of our movement and actions, and it is also a world in which there is no meaning for will, choice and freedom, but a world in which there is no being Ethical “Because good, as well as evil, is not expected of a person unless he has a special intention to produce a specific effect”[6] because “Sunni obligation is a prerequisite for the world to be a moral theater[27].
On the other hand, William Alston visits us with his analysis of the dilemma,[28] as he sees that the main reason for making it is the discrepancy between our human awareness and the divine wisdom of the disaster, which he attributed to the lack of our certain information about the universe and our inability to visualize the past and imagine the future in a way It is indisputable, and it is the same deficiency that affects our ability to determine the necessary and useful things of this world, which, in its complexity, are outside our human perception. Action, which we are cognitively incapable of, as Alston explained, so how can we, if we are cognitively deficient, deny wisdom in this way?
The incomplete building block and the complete structure
: “The best of beauty is the potential beauty , and imperfection is
closer to perfection than perfection
.
(Tamim Barghouti)
How is utopia achieved?[d] The answer is simple;
Because it will not be realized in the first place.
It may be shocking, but it is the truth that Izetbegovic sees through his theory of drama and utopia/material idealism.
To explain this, it stems from the reality of evil, and is it the result of external circumstances, or does it stem from purely subjective motives?
Then it deals with the answer in which the believer separates from the materialist;
To tell us that the first assumes the existence of evil and good in himself, and believes in the necessity of piety in its rectification, while the second refers the matter to circumstances outside of himself, with which man becomes just a future thing without freedom[15].
Hence, the “drama” that deals with man in its intertwinedness, as a religious idea in which man is free and believes that life may be a sedition for him, so that the eternal struggle begins within him between good and evil, and it was also “utopia,” or the utopia, which sees evil far from man. It aspires to remove it and establish a society in which the human being is annihilated and fused into the whole, and man is a social animal with a function related to production, distribution and reason, so there is no freedom and individual will, and the matter of excluding the sick and fools remains a normal issue in light of the utopia that finds people who worship it.
If “our experience of developing our own personality becomes an illusion, so that we do not feel a twinge of pain, then our world would be too narrow and devoid of all real contact with others.”
This overlap and that drama in the structure of man and the world is what is denied by the atheist, who imagines evil only as a result of a linear, dimensionless development, while the dramatic conception of life requires a dynamic explanation of evil in three aspects: The first appears in the enormous interconnection between the individuals of the universe and its events (prev. and the following) and the second one is reflected in the future influence of all evils, no matter how small it seems, to lead us to the decisive third axis of our inability to release firm and certain prophecies regarding the future after evils[29].
This complex network of premises and conclusions naively interrupts the Platonic world devoid of evil, because “the self-making cannot be in a passive reality without influence or options.” [30] This reality, which Sonbrunn compares to the toy world, which is insignificant and devoid of will against Evil or the effect for the sake of good, cannot be a real world, but it is just an illusion that does not leave our selves until we become like it.
And by mentioning illusion, the question may arise: Why was the world not created with an illusory human without pain?
This was the objection that Daniel Snyder refuted, saying, "To transform this evil from an objective existence into a mere programmed autosuggestion, may give us its character in itself, but it will lose the world much good, in this world no one will help anyone, no one will sympathize with anyone, and I will not No one will forgive anyone, and no one will compensate anyone, and no one will glorify anyone because he pursues a noble goal, and no one will give anything of his money, time, or talent to the needy.” In this case, he will be very narrow and devoid of all real contact with others”[26].
Hence the wisdom of imperfection, and man knows that “there is good that equals or exceeds this harm” (6). Evil, as a symptom of corruption in the origin of things and not an origin in itself, is unimaginable for the universe without it. Therefore, the claim that supposes that evil It represents something in itself, which is nothing but a kind of logical fallacy, because, according to Jane Marie True - in his book "The Positive Value of Evil" - evil does not prevail in terms of an intrinsic value in itself. It makes it one of the acts of wisdom that does not conflict with the knowledge, ability and mercy of God.
From all this, evil seems to be the pivotal building block, which, no matter how flawed it appears, will still bear witness to the fact that this imperfection gives way to perfection on the other hand;
Because the utopian (ideal) world free of evils would be a monolithic world "with no shortage or growth...there are no boundaries between a person and his brother", which leads us to ask about the feasibility of a world in which copies are repeated in the billions!
A world like this “is a world in which there is no injustice, there is no vice or virtue, because the virtuous person is the person who does good even if he is wretched, and avoids evil even if his abode is good.”
If this is the case, what advantage does the good have over the evil when he does good, seeking immediate bliss and escaping from swift torment?
What wisdom will a person gain from a world in which he does not strive for good and does not resist evil?
A world like this, according to Abbas Al-Akkad - in his book “On the Emergence of the Divine Doctrine” - will possess more injustice than human injustice in our current world;
Because it eliminates the difference between a fleeting moment and a long eternity. If every reward and punishment is witnessed in its moment, by what logic would a person sacrifice for the sake of his higher values?
And for what reason will he wait for the Hereafter when he sees the good in this world with quick reward, and the punishment of evil as well?
If, as previously, evil is a tool to show goodness in the souls, and hatred for it is evidence of love for this good, and then belief in moral values that only come from a god, then can we arrange the image anew, so we see, instead of the absurdity of evil and denial of God, an apparent wisdom It makes us wonder, in turn: Does the possibility of evil in the world oppose the existence of God, as atheism claims, or does it, in fact, as previously stated, prove the wisdom of God subordinate to His existence?
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Footnotes:
[a]: Theodisia is the theory of divine justice associated with the dilemma of evil.
[B]: On the authority of Abu Saeed Al-Khudri that the Messenger of God - may God’s prayers and peace be upon him - said: “No fatigue or illness afflicts a Muslim, nor anxiety, nor sadness, nor harm, nor distress, even a thorn that pricks it, but that God expiates his sins by it.”
[Narrated by Al-Bukhari].
[C]: The Almighty said: "I figured people to leave that they say safe and they do not miss (2) and have seductured those who are before them."
[D]: Utopia: The utopia according to "Plato", or the Republic of God in the term St. Augustine, and it is an ideal state in which goodness and happiness for people are achieved, and there is no trace of evil.