Machine summary:
Evil and Islamic Theodicy On 12 January 2010, the world witnessed the complete devastation of Haiti, this hemisphere’s first black independent nation.
In this editorial, I seek to provoke philosophical debate and refocus theological attention on evil in the world, while hoping to raise more pointed questions about those who attempted to provide absolute answers for this particular earthquake.
The very next day, the infamous televangelist Pat Robertson of the “700 Club” dared to offer an apparent justification and cause of this earthquake.
While there is no sociopolit- ical explanation for the earthquake itself, there are many explanations for why it was The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 27:1 so devastating.
Philosophers from Plato to Ibn Sina (Avicenna) to Thomas Aquinas have deliberated upon the prob- lem of evil in general, including natural disasters, in an attempt to explain its exis- tence vis-à-vis God’s goodness – or lack thereof.
Inati’s The Problem of Evil: Ibn Sina’s Theodicy, in which she also covers the philosophical theories of his predecessors.
Earthquakes happen due to geological fault lines located all over the world,6 regardless of whether people obey God or not.
For instance, how does Robertson know that God is taking revenge on the Haitians, especially with the over- whelming evidence that the country is located close to one of the earthquake fault lines and thus is poised to experience earthquakes?
Muslim scholars have long deliberated on the problem of evil and theodicy.