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Divine Justice and the Problem of Evil Throughout the history of thought and action, the justice of God
has been a problem which has occupied the mind of nearly every philosopher.

The
most important reason for this attention is that they have been
aware of deprivation, poverty, exploitation and tyranny amongst human
societies.

Being aware of these bitter facts, some have been led to doubt
the justice of God, or even doubt the existence of God.

Others have tried to somehow justify this seeming
contradiction between God being just and the above mentioned
miseries.

This article is a small attempt to prove two points:

1. God's justice is a reality.

2.If God is just, it does not mean that individuals have to
accept their present social situations; but on the contrary, IT
MEANS THAT THE SHOULD CHANGE IT.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE PROBLEM If there is just God why is there so much evil.

There
is death, war,earthquake, hunger, bitter conditions of life ..
etc.

The
argument then follows that either there is no God or there is a
cruel God, who, like a monster, enjoys seeing us suffer!

This question has been answered in many ways in different ages.

Some
of them are as follows and we shall have a brief look at them:

1. God is the Perfect Being, and justice is part of perfection.

Therefore,God
is just.

So whatever of injustice we see in the world,
will berectified eventually.

In other words, He has no
needs, and injustice is either from ignorance and fanaticism, or
from need, and none of these areconceivable for the Perfect
Being.

Imam Husain, in the deserts of Arafat,before
being martyred by the enemy, said: O' God! you are so
needless that you yourself can not benefit yourself.

How
then, can we give anything to you?!

2. Evil is necessary for the greater good.

Refraining
from thousand goods for the sake of one evil, is itself a great
evil.

3. Man's freedom is the cause of evil.

Here freedom is
not in political sense.
It means being able to do good
or bad.
It is only mankind who hasthis ability.
He
can be kind or he can be cruel.
He can be a humanist
or he can be an oppressive tyrant and killer.

Leibniz,
the 17th century philosopher, is one of those who believe that
man's freedom is the cause of evil.

He wrote:
Free will is a great good, but it was logically impossible
for God to give freedom and at the same time decree that there
should be no sin.
So God decided to make man free
although sin inevitably brought punishment.
This view can explain wars and social injustices, but can not
explain earthquakes, death, illness, etc.

4.
Evil is a negative thing.

SUFFERING AND NOT EVIL Now, let us go bit deeper in the problem.
What we
should say at this point is that we commit a mistake by using the term evil.

We
should rather use:

suffering or hardship.

By doing this we have not done
anything against reality or any logical necessity.
In the term evil
there is a concept of injustice hidden.

We shall avoid using it, because it
is a loaded word.
LIMITLESS DESIRES Now, by looking at concrete experiences and the nature of
things, and also looking at our internal and external factors of life, we see
that they are not set in manner to always coincide with our desires and
wishes.

The limitlessness of our desires from one hand, and the mathematical
nature of the universe on the other, is the cause of our illegitimate
annoyance.
For example, we want to have absolute knowledge.

We want
to possess absolute ownership of the world without being disturbed.
We do
not want to get sick.
On the other hand, neither does our existential factors give
value to these desires, nor do the natural elements abide to these wishes.

And
since our internal nature and the world itself do not permit our limitless
desires, we raise our hands to the sky and say: O' God! what an evilful
universe!
But, somebody who knows that the paraffin in his lamp is
limited, will not complain after its extinction.

One who knows that this
lamp which he has lit, is not safe from winds, will not scream when the wind blows
it out.
The system of the natural world is the same, and one who lives
in it, can not come out of the flow of that system.

So, we are
obliged to accept that there is suffering.

The question to ask is that, is it
logical to say that these sufferings are against justice? (Note that we are not
talking about sufferings caused by human: wars, torture, poverty.
).

The
answer to the question is negative, since we have to understand the various
meanings of justice.
There is sentimental justice, like a mother
offering all her love for her child.

There is legal justice.
There
is also moral and philosophical justice.

I will try to define the last
two:

Philosophical Justice: Every subject and phenomenon should
travel in its appropriate line and flow towards its perfection.
Moral Justice: Do not inflict any suffering on anything else.

Philosophical justice means that even if the sick screams and
complains, we should give him the bitter medicine that he needs to take, and
do the surgery which is for his good.
VIEWERS AND PARTICIPANTS Those who have been in contact with mankind and nature from
close-up, and have not been mere viewers, have never doubted the justice of
God.

Socrates (The Philosopher), in the time of his prosecution, takes the cup
of poison from the guard and drinks it.
Since he had a great
message for all people of all times, he drank the poison with no fear.

Prophet Muhammad, the best of mankind ever, said: No
prophet has been suffered like me! If we also look at the life of Ali
Ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet Muhammad's miracle and his most beloved companion, we
find that his life was highly filled out with suffering and pain.
One
out of many, is that he was the best in knowledge and action among his society
after the prophet, yet he remained silent for twenty five years for the
sake of the people's ideological unity at that time.

He accepted
this psychological suffering for twenty five years.
Later, when the people realized who he was, and came to him and
chose him as their leader, he ruled the society with utmost justice, even
though he was continuously in war with so called Muslims during his short
period of ruling, and then he was killed shortly.

Ali's justice
was a kind of justice which has made the eastern materialist, Shibli Shumayyil, to say
about him:

The leader Ali, greatest of all, is the man who neither
the West nor East, neither yesterday nor today, have seen his example.
(Ali, The voice of human justice, by George Jordac).

Ali himself said:
If you give me all the world with everything in it, with a condition that I take a
husk of barley from an ant's mouth, I will not do so! (Nahjul
Balaqah, by Imam Ali).

For the just, this world is most painful, but nevertheless, Ali
never said that this world is evil.
He always said that it is the
world of suffering, be ready, be careful.

He also said: This world is the
best place for one who understands it well.

In fact when we believe in the justice of God, we try to see the
same justice in the society.
Because any injustice is
against the will of God and against the music of the universe.

This is why
belief in the justice of God has always been a great threat to the ruling powers.
You might say that very well, but it does not follow that since
some people like Prophet Muhammad, Ali have said and done so, the problem of
evil does not exist.

Very well, but where did the problem of
evil come from, anyway?
From the minds of some other people whose lives were quite more
comfortable than Prophet or Ali! Like Epicurus, Hume or Mill or even me and
you!
Looking at their biographies, none have suffered as much as the
first group.

The latter in comparison with the former, were
always viewers of life rather than participants.
So you can see how
subjective and relative the problem of evil and suffering is.

Let me repeat the question again.
Why do we have to go
through all these difficulties, created by God, in order to reach the developed
stage? To answer this question, we need to study the orders of existence.
ORDERS OF EXISTENCE There are two orders in the beings of the world.

We
can call them the longitudinal order and the transversal order.
The
longitudinal order is the place of things in the cause and effect chain of creation.

In
the language of religion, Angels, The Book(of Allah), The Distributors, The
pen and so on, all show of a certain order and arrangement in existence.

This
order is not formal but necessary.
In this order, the flame of
a match cannot compete with the Sun, and the change of a possible thing into
something necessary is not imaginable.
A cause cannot change its
place with its own effect (at the same time and place).

All the mistakes which we make that why 'this' couldn't have
been in the place of 'that' or why an imperfect being can't change its place
with a perfect being, is because we have not understood the necessary
and essential relations of things.
We compare the
existential order with conventional orders and social stratifications.

We
think that when we can replace a manager with his employee, or a landlord with his
tenant, then why could not have a sheep been a human being? It is impossible,
since the cause of being cause and the effect of being effect are not
conventional or formal.

If 'A' is the cause of 'B', it is because that
there is something in the nature of 'A' that has made it the cause.

Also,
the specification of 'B' has caused its relation to 'A', and this specification is
nothing but those attributes which have made 'B' exist.

Once you
take those specifications away from 'B', you are left with something else
and not 'B'.

These specifications are real and not conventional or
transferable.
Take the number '5'.
It comes after '4' and before '6'.

You
can not put '5' anywhere else without loosing its identity.
If you put
it before '4', it will be '3', even though you call it '5'.

You can not
change the reality of '3', though you can change its name.
There exists such a deep and existential order between all
creatures of the universe.

If you take anything out of its existential
place, it will loose its substance and will no longer be the same thing.
If
you give a triangle four vertices instead of three, it is not a triangle any more.

In
fact it is a square.
Ibn Sina has a nice sentence here.

He
said: God did not make apricots into apricots, but He created apricots.

What
he means is that there was no stage when all fruits were equal and then God
discriminated between them.
Each fruit is unique.

This
uniqueness applies to different beings and personalities as well.

Allah said in Quran:

Our Lord is
He who gave every thing its nature, then guided it aright.

(Quran 20:50).

In another place He said:

Our word for something that we
intend, is that to say to it: Be! and it will be.
(Quran 16:40).

Now let us go over the transversal order.
The
transversal order determines the temporal and material conditions of different phenomena.

It
is with this order that history takes definite and certain form.

Allah refers to this order of existence in this way:...
,
and you shall not find any change in the custom of Allah.
(Quran 33:62)

Some of these deterministic laws are mentioned in Quran like the
following:

Allah does not change the
situation of any group of people, unless they change what is in themselves.

(Quran 13:11).

Now to sum up this section:

1.
The universe has orders and necessary laws, and
every phenomenon is within that system.
For the universe to
be in order, there should be differences and stages in existence.

2.
Differences are necessary attributes of creatures,
and God has made no discrimination between the creatures.

3.
What is against the justice is discrimination and
NOT difference.
In the universe, there are differences among the creatures
and not discriminations by Allah.
Now that we have understood this section, we can answer the
previous question by looking at the benefits of suffering for
individuals.
BENEFITS OF SUFFERING It is only through suffering and difficulties that one can
attain true happiness and true prosperity.

Allah says:

Verily there is ease with
hardship.
There is ease with hardship.

So when you are relieved, still toil, and
strive to please your Lord.

(Quran 94:5-8).

Hegel says: Disputes and evil ('suffering' to be precise) are
not imaginary.
They are quite real and with open eyes they
are steps of evolution and goodness.

Struggle is the law of
progress.
Human attributes are evolved and made in the battlefield and riot of the world.

No
one can reach high perfection except through hardship, responsibility,
and distress.

Life is not for satisfaction, but for
evolution.
Ali (AS), in one of his famous letters to Uthman ibn Hanif, his
governor in Basra, wrote:

living in comfort and
delicateness, and avoidance of difficulties ends up to weakness and debility.

In
contrary, living in rough conditions makes human powerful and
agile, and transfers his existential essence towards
refinement.

He also denounced him in the letter, for his having had a dinner
with the rich who had allowed no poor to enter in their party.

He
then gave the example of trees in forests and compared it with the trees in
gardens.

Although constant care is given
to the garden trees, yet the deprived trees of the forest have better
quality.

(Nahjul Balaqah).

That is why when God is kind to somebody, he inflicts him or her
with difficulty and suffering.

This is exactly the opposite
side of what most people think! Imam Muhammad al-Baqir (the 5th Imam) said:

Allah helps His believer and
sends him hardships, like gifts that a man sends for his family.

Imam Jafar al-Sadiq (the 6th Imam) said:

When Allah loves His servant, He
drowns him in the sea of suffering.
Like a swimming tutor who throws his new student into water, and
makes him struggle and learn swimming, Allah does the same to develop his
beloved servants.

If one only devotes his whole life time to
read about swimming, he will never learn how to swim.

We have to go into
water and struggle with the danger of drowning to learn how to swim.

Imam
Sadiq said in another tradition:

The most difficult lives are
possessed first by prophets, and then those who come after them in
virtue.

Rumi, the philosopher and poet of 13th century, has a good
analogy:

They threw the grain on the
earth, then there came out branches.
Next, they crushed it in the mill, and
it became more expensive and useful in bread form.

Next,
the bread was grounded under the teeth, and after digestion, it became mind,
spirit and useful thought. Again, when the mind was bewildered with love,
what a surprise this cultivation had been!

Wassalam.