The hardest question
A case that demands an answer.
A child is born with a painful genetic disease and dies before the age of five. She has done nothing wrong. She cannot learn from her suffering. She has no choices to make. If God is omnipotent, omniscient, and good — why does this happen?
The core
The problem of evil is the strongest objection to theism ever formulated, and it can be stated in four lines. God is omnipotent — He can prevent all suffering. God is omniscient — He knows about all suffering. God is perfectly good — He would want to prevent all suffering. Suffering exists. At least one of these premises must be false. This is the logical problem of evil, and it has been pressed against theism for over two thousand years, from Epicurus to Hume to Mackie.
The evidentialversion of the problem is more modest but harder to answer. It does not claim that God and evil are logically incompatible — only that the sheer scale and distribution of suffering in the world make God’s existence improbable. Not the existence of suffering in general, but this suffering: the specific, gratuitous, disproportionate suffering of the innocent. A world with some suffering might be compatible with a good God; a world with this much suffering, including the suffering of those who can learn nothing from it, is very difficult to reconcile.
The classical responses
The history of theodicy — the attempt to justify God in the face of evil — is the history of the most sustained intellectual effort in the philosophy of religion. Augustine argued that evil is not a substance but a privation — the absence of good, as darkness is the absence of light. Leibniz argued that this is the best of all possible worlds — any world with less suffering would also have less good. The free will defence argues that the possibility of evil is a necessary consequence of human freedom. The soul-making theodicy argues that suffering is the medium through which moral and spiritual development occurs.
Each response illuminates something real — and each has a limit beyond which it becomes obscene. To tell a parent who has lost a child that this is “the best of all possible worlds” is not philosophy; it is cruelty. To tell a victim of genocide that their suffering was “necessary for soul-making” is an insult. The problem of evil is not merely an intellectual puzzle; it is a wound in the heart of every religious tradition, and no answer that fails to acknowledge the wound deserves to be taken seriously.
In the Islamic tradition
The Islamic tradition has engaged with the problem of evil with its own distinctive emphases. The Mu’tazilah insisted that God is bound by justice: God cannot do evil, and everything God does has a rationally discernible wisdom. Suffering must serve a purpose, even if we cannot always see it. This preserves God’s goodness but limits divine sovereignty.
The Ash’aritestook the opposite path: God’s actions define justice. Whatever God does is just by definition, because justice is whatever God wills. If God sends an innocent person to hell, that is just — because God did it. This preserves divine sovereignty absolutely, but at the cost of making the word “justice” meaningless when applied to God. If “just” means “whatever God does,” then the concept has no independent content.
The Qur’an itself addresses the problem directly, though not as a philosophical argument. It presents suffering as ibtilā’ (testing) and balā’ (trial): “Do people think they will be left alone because they say ‘We believe’ and will not be tested?” (29:2). This is not a theodicy in the philosophical sense — it does not explain why God tests — but it reframes suffering from meaningless accident to purposive trial, and promises that the trial is not permanent.
Iqbal’s approach is existential rather than theoretical. He does not offer a theodicy; he offers a response to suffering — the assertion of the self’s creative power against the forces that threaten to destroy it. Evil is not explained; it is overcome. The self that grows stronger through adversity is not justifying the adversity — it is refusing to be defeated by it. This is closer to the book of Job than to Leibniz: God does not explain the suffering; He calls the sufferer to rise.
Why this matters
In Pakistan, the problem of evil is everywhere and nowhere. It is everywhere in lived experience — in the earthquakes, floods, and violence that regularly devastate the country. It is nowhere in intellectual discourse — because the dominant theological framework has foreclosed the question. If everything that happens is God’s will, and God’s will is by definition just, then there is nothing to explain. The child died because God willed it. The earthquake happened because it was written. The corruption persists because God allows it for reasons beyond our understanding.
The cost of this theological closure is enormous. A society that cannot ask “why does this suffering exist?” is a society that cannot ask “how can this suffering be prevented?” The conflation of divine will with historical outcome produces fatalism — the conviction that what happens is what should happen, and that human effort to change it is at best futile, at worst impious. This is not piety; it is the intellectual residue of a theology that denied human agency while claiming to honour divine wisdom.
What Tadreej insists on is the right — indeed the obligation — to ask the question. Not to answer it definitively, because honest thinkers disagree about the answer. But to ask it: why does suffering exist, what can be done about it, and what does it demand of us? A civilisation that stops asking this question has not achieved wisdom; it has achieved resignation. And resignation, as Iqbal saw more clearly than almost anyone, is the death of khudi.
Connections
Related pages
Appears in
Lecture IV (throughout)
Further reading
- Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom, and Evil (Eerdmans)
- Al-Ghazali, Iḥyā' 'Ulūm al-Dīn, Book XXXV (On Patience and Gratitude)
- Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, Lecture IV