The Problem of Evil

The Objection

The argument runs as follows: if God is all-powerful, He could prevent evil. If God is all-merciful, He would want to prevent evil. Since evil exists, either God lacks power, lacks mercy, or does not exist.

This is a serious objection and deserves a serious answer, not dismissal, not platitudes, and not the pretence that suffering is not real.

The Egocentrism Problem

The argument begins with an assumption that is rarely examined: that the human perspective is the correct one from which to evaluate whether God is acting justly.

This is a form of egocentrism, the cognitive error of assuming that because you cannot think of a good reason for something, no good reason exists. Ibn Taymiyyah and other scholars note that this is equivalent to seeing one piece of a puzzle and concluding the puzzle makes no sense. God is al-Alim, the All-Knowing. His knowledge encompasses what we see and what we do not see, what happens and what its consequences are across time and eternity. A human being evaluating divine wisdom with human knowledge is like a child evaluating a surgeon's decision to cause pain during a procedure.

The Quran addresses this directly: "Perhaps you dislike something that is good for you, and perhaps you love something that is bad for you. God knows and you do not know." (2:216)

The Question of What Evil Is

Islamic theology distinguishes carefully between God's creation of all things and the moral status of human acts. Everything that occurs is by God's decree: qadar khayrihi wa sharrihi, the good of it and the evil of it. But evil, when traced to its roots, attaches to the acts and conditions of created beings, not to the wisdom of the One who decreed them. Ibn al-Qayyim and others have noted that sharr is relational; it attaches to the acts of creation, not to God's decree considered in itself. From the human perspective something is evil; from the standpoint of divine wisdom, every decree contains a hikmah that we do not always perceive.

The Necessity of Free Will

God has given human beings iradah and ikhtiyar (a real capacity to choose, for which they are accountable) without that capacity standing outside God's knowledge or will. Sunni theology holds both: human acts are genuinely the acts of human beings, who deserve reward or punishment for them, and every act occurs by God's decree. This is the position of the ahl al-sunnah against both the qadariyyah (who deny the decree) and the jabriyyah (who deny human responsibility).

A world without free will is a world without moral meaning. If God prevented every evil choice the moment it was made, human beings would be sophisticated puppets, and their acts of love, sacrifice, generosity, and courage would mean nothing, because they could not have done otherwise.

As the philosopher's thought experiment puts it: if someone holds a gun to your head and forces you to donate to charity, the act has no moral value. Moral value requires the genuine possibility of choosing otherwise. God's gift of free will is inseparable from the permission of evil, because preventing all evil would require eliminating all free choice.

The Duality of Suffering and Pleasure

Suffering and pleasure are not independent phenomena; they define each other. A state of unending pleasure with no suffering, no challenge, and no loss would not be experienced as pleasure. It would be the new baseline, and any deviation downward from it would be experienced as suffering.

More practically: the most profound human virtues (courage, patience, compassion, sacrifice) are only possible in a world that contains suffering. A world without suffering is a world without courage, because there is nothing to face. It is a world without compassion, because there is no one in need. It is a world without the particular depth of love that comes from choosing someone through difficulty.

The Prophet ﷺ said: "The greatest reward comes with the greatest trial. When God loves a people, He tests them. Whoever accepts that wins His pleasure, and whoever is discontent with that earns His wrath." (Tirmidhi)

Suffering as Test and Expiation

The Islamic framework gives suffering a specific meaning, one that transforms it without minimising it. Suffering is a test of patience and gratitude, an expiation of sins, and an occasion for drawing closer to God.

The Prophet ﷺ said: "No fatigue, illness, anxiety, sorrow, harm, or sadness afflicts a Muslim, even the prick of a thorn, without God expiating some of his sins thereby." (Bukhari)

This is not toxic positivity. It is not the claim that suffering does not hurt. It is the claim that suffering is not purposeless: that it is metabolised within a larger framework of meaning that the human being cannot fully see from within the experience.

The Hereafter as the Completion of Justice

Perhaps the most important Islamic response to the problem of evil is the one that addresses its emotional core directly.

Many people who reject God on the basis of evil are not making a philosophical argument. They are making a moral protest: how can there be a just God when perpetrators of atrocities live and die unpunished, when children suffer for no apparent reason, when the wicked prosper and the righteous are crushed?

This protest contains within it an implicit belief in objective justice: that things should be a certain way, that evil should be punished, that innocence should be vindicated. Where does that standard come from, in a purely material universe? If there is no God, there is no objective justice, only the preferences of the powerful.

The Islamic answer is that justice is not complete in this life. The Hereafter is where the accounting is settled. Every act of cruelty, every unpunished atrocity, every tear shed without justice: all of it will be addressed before God. Many people across history have arrived at belief in the Hereafter precisely through witnessing evil: the intuition that there is no way a person can massacre thousands and live a comfortable life, die peacefully, and have that be the end, is itself a pointer toward divine justice.

The Quran says: "So whoever does an atom's weight of good will see it, and whoever does an atom's weight of evil will see it." (99:7-8)

Nothing is lost. Nothing is forgotten. The books will be opened.