[Serious] The Good

[WinterHold]

the quoted verses are raw just like they are written in the original book that Muslims  read:

This is something I haven't thought about before. When you say the verses are "raw," it makes me wonder about the type of hermeneutics that go into reading the Quran. 
Do Muslims believe that the important meaning will be available to amateurs, or are trained guides necessary when reading? I know that teachers and interpretive texts are important in the tradition.
Among trained Christians, each verse is said to have four levels of interpretation, and (despite common American practice) it is very unlikely that just some guy off the street will hit on the truth of what's written there. 
I'm not challenging your reading -- just curious about how far I can trust myself even to read these sentences. 

The belief in the provided hermeneutics differ between Muslim sects.
Sunni Muslims give scholars who interpret the Quran a higher degree of trust and authenticity.
There are 4 main Sunni scholars that the sect mainly follows:
1-Ahmed Ibn Hanbel
2-Imam Abu Hanifa
3-Malik Ibn Anas
4-Imam Shafi'i
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiqh
Criticizing any of the schools, their Imams or their teachings is highly held as a negative behavior in Sunni grounds. But still the 4 Imams are considered to be "normal, just people", but criticizing them or revising their teachings is considered an attack on the sect itself.
Shiite Muslims hold their scholars in a different level. Unlike Sunnies; Shiites believe that there is a number of "divine people" who speak with God's authority; criticizing these certain people is just as criticizing God. All these people belong to the same family -the family of prophet Mohammed's son-.
For this; we rarely see the Quran being provided "raw" to understand. It must either be subjected to Sunni interpretation, or Shiite interpretation. In other words; you must have a "Sunni Imam from the schools of the 4" or a Shiite "Imam from the family of Mohammed" to explain the version of Islam wanted to be preached.
What I try to do -and actually do in my everyday life- is to go alone with the Quran outside the influence of any school of thought.

Personally I won't advice to follow 1 guide specifically. A good Arabic to English dictionary is sufficient; and knowledge in what the Quran says.
For example; a story in page 3 must be joined with another story in page 400 to get the whole picture and fetch what you need.


Scholars only provide good shortcuts and save you a lot of time by pointing you to meanings.
Any interpretation of the Quran based on the Hadith is not to be trusted.

I believe that interpretation must be "pinpointing" to things and "very obvious".

This I like a lot. It says that we are a mixture of good and evil. And here, as we were saying before, only God is perfectly Good. But the discernment is also a part of our natural faculties, with success or failure defined as the proper application of this discernment.

Balance between the two are the only way for us humans to live probably in this world.
We are doing evil -for example- by butchering animals, but we make up by feeding other hungry humans from the same butchered animal.

Naturally this is harder for me to see the point of. 

I can imagine that people are closed to the Good for all kinds of reasons. If it's God, though, who is intentionally shutting their eyes to the Good, then they can hardly be blamed for the evil they do. 

Unless God is here inventing a short-term evil to do better good in the long run, I'm not seeing the reason for this. And I think the following two or three things you quote are along the same lines.

For us it begins with "free will".
We are given a choice before the situation: our eyes are never closed from birth. We must trigger God by doing something bad first.

The first thing we ever experience before this test is mercy.
We have bodies, eyes, minds, ears, we begin with a lot of blessings. Being born with a "disability" or living with a chronic disease is just a reminder that some of us get for free regarding the blessings they once had; or were stripped from.

But even with challenging conditions; we get "mercy" to start the test with.

These parts I find easy to accept, though my personal reading may be too Platonic for your tradition. I'm not sure.

When I read "the will of God" or similar phrases, I just read "the way things are." The will of God is our analogous phrase to describe the principles, orderliness, and goals of the universe. To push against all of this is to do harm to ourselves. To obey it is in fact to do what is best for ourselves. 

People who talk about God like a tyrant, I think, are thinking too anthropomorphically. If God is the Good, and it is always in our best interests to do what is good for ourselves and the world, then obedience here isn't like giving up your own good for the benefit of someone else. It means discerning and aiming toward what really will make us happiest in the long run. This is clear in Dante and other Christian writers, and it's odd to me that the anti-religion people never seem to have read these things.

I believe that God should never be thought about in an anthropomorphically fashion. He is indeed not a tyrant sitting on a huge chair, carrying a sword and fighting demons.
He is something different; that's why in Islam he is never pictured like Christianity or Greek mythology.

If you thought of it like a mathematical function, God is teacher. The universe is a function. Humans are the parameters of the function:

God creates==> universe(x){
                                                    //universe body
                                                 }

We are a seed put in the universe. God is higher than both of us and the universe.
Thus his laws, constraints and rules control the function and its parameter.

---

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Now to change the subject somewhat:

I looked up Avicenna's views on Good and Evil in the world, because I know he has a lot of Greek influence -- particularly Neoplatonism, which is a system I can plug these problems into when I think about them. 

Here is something I found on line this morning:

Metaphysical (and particularly Neoplatonic) connotations are evident also in Avicenna’s exegesis of Sura 113 in the Qur’an which relates to the problem of evil. According to Ashʿarite doctrine, God - as an omnipotent Being - has to be credited with the creation of both goodness and evil.26 In order to set his metaphysical ideas closer to such a stance, Avicenna comments on the verse ‘Say I seek refuge with the Lord of the Dawn’ (113:1) and distinguishes between a primary and a secondary intention in God’s will. Avicenna comments:


‘The daybreak shatters the darkness of privation by the light of existence (bi’l-nur al-wujud) which is the Necessary Existent and this is a necessary act in God’s ipseity, intended by a primary intention (bi’l-qaṣd al-awwal). The first emanation of existents is from Him and this is His decree (qadaʾhu) and there is no absolute evil (la sharr aslan) in it with the exception of what emanates hidden under the radiance of the first light. [...] Evils (shurur) do not occur according to a primary intention but according to a secondary one (bi’l-qasd al-than’yya)’.28

Initially, the discourse on evil is addressed with references to the emanative scheme: evil (or impurity - al-kadurat) emerges with the first emanated being and is said to be attached to its quiddity (mahiyyat) and to be generated by its ipseity (huwiyya). All causes in the emanative process are said to be led by their collisions towards evils which are necessary to themselves; this, Avicenna stresses, is nothing but God’s qadar and His creation (khalq).29 Interestingly, Avicenna uses the term creation rather than emanation in order to link his metaphysical idea on evil with the content of the successive Qurʾanic verse (113:2): ‘[I seek refuge] from the evil of created things’. With reference to this verse, the philosopher explicates that evil is placed in an aspect (nahiyya) of creation, according to a specific determination (taqdir). This is so because, Avicenna explains, such evil is generated only from the materiality (ajsam) of things which is due to divine destiny and not due to God’s decree (kanat al-ajsam min qadarhi la min qadaʾhi).30 This statement reveals a clear Neoplatonic undertone: in effect, Avicenna states that evil emerges in those beings that need to receive measure and determination (al-shurur al-lazima fi ashyaʾ dhuat al-taqdir) that is to say, those beings that possess a body (badan) and are therefore connected to matter.31

https://iis.ac.uk/academic-article/avicenna-matter-disobedience-matter-and-evil-reconciling-metaphysical-stances-and-qur-anic


This seems to me to be close to the idea of evil as privation, but not quite. The Neoplatonic idea that God emanates the world, and his essence is combined with Prime Matter, seems crucial here. As we said before, only God is good completely, so the essence imprinted into matter will naturally lack that full goodness. Then each created thing, just by dint of it lacking the entirety of goodness, will have a particular tendency toward doing bad, in its unique way. 

I have no idea how much Avicenna is taken seriously in the Muslim world today. He's useful for me because he's working with Greek concepts that are so similar to the Christians of the time.

I would like to thank you a million times first for mentioning Neoplatonism. The "idea of the one" is very similar -if not identical- to the Islamic belief that God is one; and we shall all return to him in the end.

Philosophy in general became a dying field in the Muslim world today, I don't think Avicenna's writing are treasured but by a small number of Muslims.

I contradict him in a point though: his theory suggests that "Evil is a consequence that God didn't even make". It's a mere "Avicenna explains, such evil is generated only from the materiality (ajsam) of things which is due to divine destiny and not due to God’s decree"; but doesn't that mean God is playing with us? he is indirectly infecting us with evil and claims that he is not responsible for it; or at least that what I understood from Avicenna's text.

I personally think that "verse 7 of Sura 15" says explicitly that God inspires the human soul to do both evil and good; in my perspective God created evil and made it very possible; but left it as a "choice" for creatures with a brain -like humans-.

We humans were inspired to do both good and evil, and were left to decide by ourselves what to choose. God is all powerful; nothing is a consequence but everything is very planned and even known to happen by God before it happens. That's fate.

[The Grand Nudger]

The particular manner in which contemporary christianity posits a god (and the nature of man) necessitates or makes desirable a theodicy that isn't required of islam.  Privation theodicies are meant to explain natural evil, but islam tends to prefer soul making theodicies for that, instead (christianity also makes use of these...but there's an important choice to be made between privation and soul making).  As in judaism, as another poster pointed out, the notion that god created evil or disaster just hasn't weighed on the minds of muslims like it has on christians.  It's not an issue for secular ethics at all, not only because of the lack of any god in a secular explanation..but because those things that these theodicies seek to address may not be relevant in the first place, in this view. 


In christianity we have privation.
In islam we have the final value of evil.
In secular ethics we have an irrelevant question/postulate.

Take, for example, the notion that good and bad are in some meaningful way evolutionary products, just one of many secular povs.   Evolutionary processes aren't an intentional agent, let alone an intentional moral agent.  It's only because we posit that it would be bad for an intentional moral agent to create evil (or create disasters) that we might then require some justification for such an agent to have done so, or to posit that this agent did no such thing, just as it's only because we posit that natural evil may have no final value that we might then require a privation theory.

(as an interesting side note, soul making and privation theodocies are, respectively, the best arguments against each other if we limit ourselves to the context of intentional moral agency and realism)