Full Lecture Transcript (Cleaned)
Suffering, evil, and divine wisdom — 0:00
so this question is a little long it's if allah loves his creation so much why did things like the bosnian genocide and the current uyghur genocide take place why would he want us to suffer at all yes they may be rewarded in the afterlife for their troubles in this world but what if they were good muslims who are going to be rewarded anyways so this question deals with the very very difficult topic of theodicy uh theodicy is explaining the existence of evil theodicy is a perennial problem it goes back to the very beginning of time and there are thousands and thousands of philosophers and theologians that have attempted to answer this question why is there pain and suffering and evil in this world in a nutshell there is no simple answer that is that is going to appease a person in two three minutes on the contrary this is a topic that uh much can be said and i've actually given longer lectures to google uh how do we explain evil by astra quality and the existence of how do you find entire lectures on that in a nutshell those who end up denying god because they don't understand evil which is the default of modern atheism neither do they end up solving the problem of evil nor do they have questions to the bigger problems of life which is why are we here and what is the purpose of life in other words this question is primarily the stepping stone for the rejection of god right number one reason why you know people like sam harris and stephen hawkings and richard dawkins the number one reason why they're atheists the number one reason is they give you a long list of the problems in this world the you know children that are suffering the tsunami waves this and that and they say how could a god allow this the response to this is twofold in rejecting god neither did you solve the problem you still have evil right and then number two you have created an infinitely longer list of problems that you have no answers to and that is life itself and the meaning of life and the purpose of life and who created us and how did we get here whereas what we are positing is that we begin with the paradigm of humility when allah announced that he's creating adam and adam was not like the angels adam had a sense of free will even the angels questioned why would you do that oh allah why would you create a creation that's going to kill and cause evil and cause bloodshed even the angels asked the basically the same question why what's the wisdom and allah did not attempt to rationalize to the angels even though the angels are better than us and smarter than us yet allah did not rationalize he didn't philosophize why are there human beings that are going to be creating evil on this earth allah simply said you're going to have to trust me i know things you will never understand so we begin to answer this question with a sense of humility we might not be able to understand the wisdom of allah and then once we begin with that humility are there wisdoms that are mentioned yes there are and i have many many that are mentioned i'll just mention uh one of them or two or three of them okay that will stop number one we firmly believe that the potentiality to attain good from any evil situation is more and outweighs the evil itself the potentiality for good outweighs the actual evil number two allah does not love the evil but allah loves the good that is generated from the evil number three there is indeed a hereafter and if you're not going to take the hereafter into account you will never understand that child that was suffering the pain that was happening to the parents the tsunami waves everything there are blessings that come from that in the next life now could allah have done it differently yes he could if he chose not to i can't question allah's wisdom neither can you it's not for me to do that there's a verse in the quran he is not questioned for what he does rather they will be questioned for what they do and then the final point that i'll mention then again listen to my lectures the non-theist the the atheist essentially listen to this carefully demands heaven without doing anything listen to me carefully the non-theist is irritated that he hasn't been handed heaven on a silver platter because the world that he's positing actually does exist the world without suffering the world without pain the world of eternal life the world of bliss it exists we call it jannah and in order to get to jannah we firmly believe there is a stepping stone and that stepping stone is showing how you deal with the pain and suffering of this world you want that place of no pain and suffering then live this world with dignity with faith and you shall get that world that you desire but these people they're frustrated and irritated that allah created them and then didn't just hand silver platter agenda to them on a silver platter and allah says in the quran that did you think that jenna would come to you for free do you think you're going to get this blessing for no reason no allah created us with a wisdom and purpose in mind if we live this life the way that he wants then we shall live with inner peace in this world and with eternal bliss in the hereafter and listen to my other two lectures online or three lectures and you'll get more answers than this inshallah m foreign