How do we understand the existence of evil in this world?

This concept has caused a number of people, people who profess to believe in God, to turn away from that belief; or people who nominally believed in God to give up their belief. In that when personal tragedy strikes people and they seek to find some reason or rhyme to this tragedy, they usually end up rejecting God. Many times if one sits and talks with an atheist, a person who denies God’s existence, you’ll find that they relate their rejection back to some personal experiences they had, their close friend, their mother, their neighbor, or whatever, somebody really close to them died and they couldn’t find a reason for it; why should this person die? Why should this person suffer? Or some people who find themselves in this world in very awkward situations; person born with certain illnesses which would cause them to be quadriplegic, we have some of the leading atheists in the world today- one individual who is known is quadriplegic, he can hardly communicate verbally but he’s written some very powerful books on the beginning of time and all these kind of things in world history in which he basically denies God’s existence and in the end of it all when one looks at his basis of denial; he questions Why? Why if God is good and there is a good God should he have been born in the state that he was born in? It’s something very difficult for him to come to grips with.

Atheists would argue that in fact if God is All-Powerful as those who believe in God believe, for the most part. Those who don’t believe God is All-Powerful usually have beliefs in more than one God. We are talking about those who believe in one Supreme Being. That Supreme Being is All-Powerful and that God is good. And the idea of God being bad, that God is not a good God - this is something for those who believe in one God is not acceptable because if that one God then tells us don’t do bad things, how can that be when he himself is bad? It’s contradictory. It’s something not acceptable. So the basic belief is that God is good. He’s all good. The ultimate good. So now if we have a most powerful God able to do all things who is ultimately good, then where in the world did evil come from in our world? The fact that there is evil, atheists argue, is proof that there is no God. So we can see this issue of coming to grips with where evil came from in the world relates back to our very belief in God itself. It is essential for us to come to grips with this, to understand this, to confirm, to realize the fullness of our belief in God. To understand where evil comes from in this world, it is important for us to understand a couple of principals:

First and foremost, there is a particular phrase in Arabic which goes like this, wa bididdiha yathamayyazul ashyaa’, and it is with opposites that things become clear or distinct. It deals with this basic concept, i.e. we know things through their opposites. For example, sweet- if we don’t understand sour, what sour is, then sweet has no meaning. Sweet only has meaning if we have understood sour. Up has no meaning if we don’t understand down. Left has no meaning if we don’t understand right. And so on and so forth. Light and darkness. Soft and hard. All of the opposites. Our world is created in opposites. All of these opposites are necessary for the individual elements to be understood. So similarly, good can only be grasped if we understand evil. So evil is necessary in our world for good to become a reality, something which we strive for, which we support; if there is evil for us to oppose, to reject and to work against.

The other point that we need to understand is that when God creates a thing, and we said everything God creates is good, when he creates something, he may create that thing totally good in and of itself for the good of itself or he may create something because of the good that that thing will bring. Now that thing when we look at it itself, it may not be good, it may not appear to us to be good but it brings about, it causes a greater good, much greater than the apparent evil that there is in that thing. This is why for example, whenever you find Allah talking about the evil in His creation, you will find that Allah never attributes that evil to Himself directly. Though as a general principle when we believe that Allah is the creator of all things, there is nothing outside of His creation, there are no other creators, nothing else is created which is not a part and parcel of his creation which can be attributed back to him. Then it means evil in the creation has to also ultimately be attributed back to Him too. But what we find is that whenever Allah refers to that evil, when you read through the verses of the Qur'an, Allah always refers to the evil of his creation, not the evil that He created. For example, in the second last chapter of the Qur'an, known as Surah al-Falaq or the Daybreak, the Dawn, you’ll find Allah there saying for us to seek refuge in Him, min sharri ma khalaq, from the evil of that which He created. He didn’t say the evil, which He created, but the evil of that which He created. And this is a standard principle throughout the Qur’an. You’ll find that Allah attributes the evil to his creation, not directly to Himself though it is what He created and the evil came from it therefore it is a part and parcel of His creation. So what is being demonstrated here is that evil may come from some aspect of His creation but the fact that Allah is all good means that that creation has a good part to it whether we are able to grasp it or not which is really what was the goal of its creation; for the good that would come from it.

If we look into our own lives, we do function in a similar fashion. For example, when we go to the dentist to have a tooth extracted and the dentist has to numb the gums, numb our nerves so that we don’t feel when the tooth is extracted. And he pulls out that big long needle, this syringe with a needle that seems to be about this long. The longest needle we see for almost anything. Very scary. All of us, we get some shivers down our spine when we see this needle. And no matter what he does before giving us the needle, we are still going to suffer from it, it’s going to pain, it’s going to hurt. We know it! But we gladly accept him sticking that big long needle into our gums because of the good which comes from it. I.e. numbing of the gum so that the extraction of the tooth is not painful. So here we are accepting that harm for the greater good that would come from it ultimately. Similarly with any form of injections. We could also include in this the medicines that we take, for example the doctor gives us a medicine we have to take. Castor oil for example. I know as a child myself castor oil was the most hated of the medicines. You got sick and you had to take castor oil, uff this is the end. The most trying medicine to take. Horrible smelling. Horrible tasting. Makes you want to vomit. But this is prescribed for us, we take it because of the fact that it is going to get us well. So we function in this that way. That there is evil but that evil we accept because of the fact that a greater good will come about from it. A person gets cancer in his foot and the doctor tells him I’m going to have to saw off your foot. If I don’t the cancer is going to spread to the rest of your body and you’re going to die. That person will tell the doctor Please saw off my foot. This is life, isn’t it? We will sacrifice parts of our body to save the rest of the body. Though the act of cutting off that foot or hand or breast in the case of a woman with cervical cancer, whatever parts of our body are cut off, for saving the rest of the body we gladly accept it. Similarly when Allah creates certain things that we may perceive to be evil, there is a greater good, there is a good side to it that we may not perceive. Maybe we’ll see it later on, we’ll understand it later on or maybe not. For example, I remember a few months ago when the Gulf Air airplane crashed, it was going to Bahrain I believe, crashed in the sea and all of its passengers died. Perhaps the investigations as to the whys are still going on. Now that was a great tragedy. The next day after the crash I remember seeing in the newspaper, newspaper coming with a picture from Egypt, there was a man there with his sister kissing him on one cheek and his father kissing him on the other cheek and he had this big smile there, thumb was up in the air. What was the caption? The caption was this individual was supposed to be on that plane. He’s a teacher. Many of the people who died in that plane were teachers going back to the beginning of the school term. And he was supposed to get on the plane and he had gone to the airport with all his stuff and he didn’t have some stamps, some stamps were missing from his passport, he needed to get these stamps and he was going to miss his flight. It was a very important flight to get back in time to begin work. If he is late maybe he might lose his job or whatever. He was so upset, he had been so worked up, so upset about what happened to him at the time when he couldn’t get on the flight. However, the next day after the news came that the flight crashed and he survived because he wasn’t on it, then he was extremely happy, extremely happy. So this is life, isn’t it? Circumstances may appear to us at one point in time to be evil, later on we come find out that in fact it’s good.

Whether we are able to perceive the good aspects of a thing or not, we have to understand that the good is there. And the fact that we cannot see that good shouldn’t then lead us to deny God, that there couldn’t possibly be any good here. When we look for example at the case of Adam (عَلَيْهِ السَّلاَمُ), Adam (عَلَيْهِ السَّلاَمُ) ate from the tree. This was an evil act on his part. It was wrong, disobedience. Adam (عَلَيْهِ السَّلاَمُ) and Eve, they both ate from the tree. However God had taught Adam (عَلَيْهِ السَّلاَمُ) and Eve words of repentance, how to turn back to God in repentance having committed a sin and He taught them these things even before there was any sin envisioned, before they had committed anything, these words were already taught to them. Now the significance of those words came to them once they disobeyed God. When they disobeyed God, then they turned back to Him in repentance, called on Him, asked His forgiveness. God forgave them. God forgave them. And the consequence of the sin was ended there. This is why we don’t believe in any inherited sin, as Christians do for example that Adam (عَلَيْهِ السَّلاَمُ) and Eve’s sins are inherited by all the generations to come and everybody else’s sins are inherited by generations coming afterwards. And this sin became so great that human beings could no longer free themselves from it. But No! We don’t believe in the inheriting of sin. The sin that you do is on you, that I do is on me, each person is responsible for their own actions. So Adam and Eve (عليهم السلام), when they disobeyed God, they turned back to Him in repentance and he forgave them.

The act of repentance, turning back to God, remembering God, turning to Him and God forgiving is a far greater good than the evil which came from their disobedience. This is the principal here. That greater good turning to God, God forgiving them, could only become manifest if they committed a sin, if they disobeyed God. This is why Prophet Muhammad  was authentically recorded to have said that if we didn’t commit sins, Allah - God - would have removed us from the Earth and replaced us with another people who would commit sins, turn back to Him in repentance and He would forgive them. That greater good is a part and parcel of our creation and of the creation of evil in this world, or means to evil. Now human beings, they are the ones who we can say may commit or do pure evil, meaning they have an evil intent and they commit an evil act. In the case of God, His intent is good and He may do what we perceive to be an evil act or He may cause to happen or He may create what seems to be an evil creation. However the good which comes from it, far outweighs the evil that is as we perceive in it.

It is the human being really, this is the source now of pure evil. Human being, as well as the Jinn. The jinn and other creation which we will look at in more detail in coming sessions who live in a world parallel to ours and they have the ability to choose between good and evil also like ourselves. It is the beings of these two worlds, these are the beings that commit what we may call pure evil. They have an evil intent and they commit an evil act. However even this, when we go back to the realities of God’s creation, the point here is that even this only takes place with the permission of God. Because the person may intend evil, many people intend evil but when they try to fulfill it, they are incapable, they are unable to fulfill it. So it goes back to God again, whether He will permit that evil intent to become manifest in the actions of that human being. So if God has permitted it, this is the part of His creation, if He has permitted it then though we may see again that thing as evil and we blame that human being, we may punish that human being for it as God has prescribed that he be punished for it, in the ultimate scheme of things, God only permitted that evil to take place because there is some greater good behind it.

Now a person may come back and argue so what, then what, you mean to say it is good for us to go out and do as much evil as we can so that we can ask forgiveness and God will forgive us? Is that a good thing? That’s the greater and the better thing? This is a big question. No, of course not. When we commit evil deliberately saying to ourselves Well Hey after doing it I’m going to repent, that repentance is meaningless. That is just a ritual. It has no value. It is when we commit evil inadvertently, not intentionally, not seeking - working out a plan that we’re going to just ask God’s repentance and He will just forgive us for this sin, so it becomes a deliberate plan for evil, that form of evil is not accepted - repentable, we cannot repent for it, God will not accept that kind of repentance. If we do sin and we truly and sincerely repent to Him, Yes, God will forgive us. But where a person plans ahead of time, you got a plan here to do this evil and repent, then we have to question what kind of repentance is that repentance going to be? If you planned it ahead of time, it’s going to be just a ritual. You know you say astaghfirullah, you go and try and do some good deed or whatever but in your heart the love of that evil is still there and you will repeat it. And one of the conditions for the acceptance of repentance is that one hates that evil, one feels sad and bad about that evil, one strives against it in one’s heart, otherwise then there is no real repentance from it.