ULUM (Dec 2022)
A Brief Comparison Between Systematic Theodicy and The Qur’anic Theodicy
Abstract
One of the most debated problems in the history of philosophy is the problem of evil. Since classical times, philosophers have started to think about evil, a phenomenon that exists in the world and that almost everyone encounters. With questions such as why there is evil in the world we live in or how we can deal with evil, the problem of evil began to be examined philosophically. However, this is not only unique to the history of philosophy, it is also a topic of discussion that religions with a tradition of revelation have dealt with. Religions such as Judaism, especially Christianity and Islām have to some extent dealt with this problem. The means by which these religions respond to this problem is different from that of philosophical explanation, in which the process of reasoning and each philosopher's own logical process is heavily involved. Philosophers have tried to explain evil within the framework of neo-platonism and argued that it is actually the absence of goodness. While matter takes its most concrete form at the lowest levels, it moves far away from the good. Therefore, distancing from the perfect brings evil. Scholastics and Islāmic theologians, on the other hand, have tried to show that the evil in the world is not incompatible and contradictory with the existence of God by providing explanations that are partially in line with the doctrine of their religion. These theologians sometimes went beyond the framework of the doctrine and carried their reasoning tools quite far. Philosophers and theologians have tried to act according to the religious tradition to which they belonged in offering some solutions to this problem. Nevertheless, they did not always take the religious tradition into consideration when providing these answers and often tried to produce philosophical answers. In the modern period, the problem of evil has been seen as the soft belly of the Abrahamic religions. Since the seventeenth century, it has become one of the strongest atheistic arguments and has been used intensively today. Academically, this issue has generally been dealt with within the framework of philosophy of religion. It seems possible to say that a Qur'an-oriented study is relatively rare compared to the philosophical one. Therefore, in this study, the researcher has tried to focus on some Qur'anic verses that can be associated with the problem of evil and to show the relationship between the concepts used in the Qur'an in this context. He then discusses whether some of the Qur'anic parables can be evaluated within the framework of theodicy. In addition, the researcher has tried to reveal the differences between the arguments and style in the Qur'an and philosophical theodicy, also called systematic theodicy, throughout this study.
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