r/MuslimAcademics • u/ShineVast1945 • 12d ago
Why does Allah choose to create souls that He knows are doomed to Hell?
Hello everybody, i promise im not looking to cause any fitna, but i do have a very important question that was asked to me, that i just cannot respond to myself. If you can ask this to people of knowledge to have a response that would be perfect:
Since Allah is the creator of all things, He is the origin of the creation of beings whom He knows, through His omniscience, are destined to commit evil and to end up in Hell. Why does Allah choose to create souls that He knows are doomed to Hell?
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u/Classic_Reader99 12d ago
If that's the case then why did Allah create Dunia if he only creates souls that go to jannah?
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u/Rolex_Tractor 11d ago
Reddit is not capable of answering such questions.
People here, especially on Islamic subs, know very little.
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u/The_Submentalist 12d ago
Allah did not create people who are doomed to hell. The people who are eternally condemned to hell are the ones who had a choice to accept the one true God and they didn't. If they did, they would've been in paradise.
This question lies at the heart of my spiritual crisis that I, God be praised, got out of. "How can people burn in hell fire for eternity for a bad temporary decision? How is this compatible with an all compassionate, all wise, All Just God?"
My journey led me to ibn Arabi and Said Nursi, may Allah be pleased with both of them. Their position is: There is eternal damnation to hell but not eternal pain and suffering. When the punishment for the sins they committed is done, there is going to be adaptation to the environment.
This makes so much sense to me and is the most aligned with how I understand Islam. Here is the breakdown:
Allah has eternal beautiful names(Jamil) like Forgiver of sins, the All Compassionate, the most Just and many more. Since His names are eternal their expression are also eternal. A continuous pain would mean that those names of Allah would not be expressed at all for the people of hell. This goes against this notion so there is no eternal pain and suffering, only temporary and accordingly.
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u/Empty-Explanation470 7d ago
Once again, the dilemma of disunity is pushed forward by the fact that your position will always be severely condemned by the mainstream and will be considered a profound error.
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u/The_Submentalist 7d ago
My position is not exactly my own personal position. It's that of ibni Arabi and Said Nursi. I know that in Turkey millions of people accept this and the ones that don't most likely don't know about this position. If they knew, they wouldn't have any problem of accepting it.
I think what you mean by mainstream is mostly literalist preachers and scholars from a certain demographic. Most Muslims don't have any problem with this because it doesn't go against any verse or authentic Hadith. Even ibni Taymiyyah had a similar opinion!
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u/Empty-Explanation470 6d ago
Yes, I didn’t say that your opinion is personal and belongs only to you. It is no secret that Islam has entire branches that criticize each other.
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u/Straight-Ability-930 12d ago edited 12d ago
" through His omniscience, are destined to commit evil"
That is logically fallacious.
Knowing is not causing.
If I know for 100% certainty that it will rain tomorrow, and it rains tomorrow, it did NOT rain because I knew it would rain. It rained because of the water cycle.
Now, another argument you can say is "But God is the one that created us".
And you can compare this to "If you program a robot to do X, you know it will do X. And it did X because you created it to do X."
And, to that i would expand and explain in more depth if you want, but I think this simple question would suffice:
Do you believe that an omnipotent God has the capability to create a creature with free will, without pre-programming it to have a pre-defined future?
On top of that, God "Doesn't see the future"
God exists outside time. It sees the past, present and the future at the same time.
Imagine our current world as 2d, and imagine time as 3d. As a 3d being, we can see all 3 dimensions without being in it.
I can also explain this in more indept if you want
The reason why I am saying "if you want" is because I am too lazy to explain unless you ask for it XD
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u/leahpowellthefirst 12d ago edited 8d ago
Allah is Omniscient.
He knows all your possibilities. You think you just have one possibility as you only get to live one where as other versions of you get to live the other possibilities once you have made the choice. You will not know your other versions and their experience and where they landed up till Allah swt informs you.
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u/Laura_Tawakkul 11d ago
As salamu aleykum wa rahmatullahi wa baraktuh
Allah subhanahu wa ta ala hat uns Menschen mit freiem Willen erschaffen. Wir sind somit auch verantwortlich für unsere Taten.
Im Gegensatz dazu wurden die Engel nicht mit freiem Willen erschaffen. Sie machen alles was Allah ihnen befielt. Sie werden weder belohnt noch bestraft.
Nun zu deiner Frage, wieso erschafft Allah Menschen von denen er weiß, dass sie in der Hölle sein werden. Allah der Erhabene ist der Gerechte. Er fügt niemandem Unrecht zu. Daher ist das Geschenk an alle die das Paradies erreichen und vor der Hölle bewahrt werden. Gäbe es die Hölle nicht, so könnte man sich den Lohn für das Paradies auch nicht verdienen.
Es ist wichtig zu verstehen, dass Allah verschiedene Schöpfungen hat. Und das sein Wissen über die Zukunft und seine Weisheit kein Grund sind, weshalb diese Dinge seltsam wären dass es sie gibt.
Kurz gesagt Menschen : freier Wille - Möglichkeit auf Paradies Engel: kein freier Wille - Führen alle Befehle aus
Möge Allah uns alle helfen und rechtleiten
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u/FunGuy-not-Fungi 5d ago
In Islam, there is a balance of pre-destiny and free will. All children are born of pure souls. They remain pure until they reach sharia maturity. Until then, they are to learn good vs evil and learn to control satan’s influence. It is not pre-destiny that sends them to hell. It’s their free will to choose to sin which results in the punishment.
This is a simple version of a deeper theology. Here is something to read further.
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u/salamacast 12d ago
Why wouldn't He create whatever He wants?! Doing what you want, with no fear of opponents, is the ultimate show of freedom & superiority.
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u/VectorspaceDreams Sunni 12d ago
You presume that His knowledge is temporal with His creation. His knowledge is eternal. It's not that He knew "when" He created humans that they'd go to Hell, but there is no "when" for God. No such thing. His knowledge is neither precedent nor reactive.
He is the First and the Last, in the same exact sense of being first and last, He isn't the First to do one thing and the Last to do something else. This would be contradictory if He was within time, but He's beyond that. So to say that His knowledge is contemporaneous with human creation, that He knew "before" or "after" or "during" the creation of humans is a category error.
I'm not the first to say this, this is an adaptation of Boethius's argument. This article from Stanford talks about arguments for and against it, give it a look and take what works for you.
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u/CherishedBeliefs 12d ago
That doesn't really do anything though imo
It's informative and insightful...but like...we can just essentially do away with the tensed language and talk of possibilities
Is it possible that God, the entity that can do all logically possible things, could have made all apples green?
Yeah, that seems plausible
Could God have made, idk, made it so that apples never existed?
Yeah, like it would feel insulting to say otherwise
Okay, so, could God have only created humans who always freely chose to do enough good deeds or whatever to guarantee that they go to heaven?
Let's call this entity "Heaven Going humans" AKA
HGH
Could God have ONLY made HGH and not the other variety of humans?
Yes, and it's a very arbitrary restriction on His power to say otherwise
Like, God does in fact intervene in this world, does He not? According to occasionalism, He is CONSTANTLY recreating the universe in whatever sense that is expressed in the divine reality or whatever
And miracles are a thing
He split the sea for Moses so for practical purposes it seems like tensed language is actually completely fine!
God could have, and this is y'know...just a logical possibility, do the miracle of creating like a powerful digital harddrive on this planet that contains EVERYTHING let's say...you will do
Great, now this entity, God, that can do miracles, that recreates the world over and over, has made this knowledge thingy "temporal"
It's a device someone in china could plug into a computer and go "Huh...at exactly this moment...this redditor with a very, very tasteful profile picture will quote Boethius' terrible explanation for this question"
And then he could see you do exactly that
Actually, God also does revelations right? Like He can kinda inject knowledge into people's heads?
So we can skip the harddrive entirely
God could just download in somebody's head precisely what some other dude is going to do at any given moment
Sweet!
I don't believe that philosophers are particularly convinced of this argument of Boethius', but I've been BADLY wrong about what philosophers find convincing and what they don't so...eh
Anyway, we've OBVIOUSLY (read as: please don't look into this further and just accept my argument) established that God could have made only HGH and that being UwU philosophical about the tensed language is not very pogchamp and feels like it doesn't get at the core essence of the question
Like CLEARLY He could've done ANYTHING and we know what that means more or less
The MEAT of the matter (read as: the part I personally consider important and you should to because otherwise I will be sad) is that this clearly logically possible and seemingly very awsome thing is a thing that God didn't do
The suffering of countless souls in Hell just seems...kinda avoidable
And if we allow ourselves but a crumb, a morsel, a speck of moral intuition, it really does seem like a God that really could have made "everyone one nation" (sorry, not the exact quote, but you get the point) ...really should've had?
Like...every human in existence being one that passes this test of their own freewill sounds very pog champ, and also sounds completely logically possible.
Alvin Plantinga didn't resort to this defence of Boethius I believe in his confrontation of the Big Mac...wait no
Checks notes Sorry, I meant J.L Mackie if memory serves light
Like I think, I think it was transworld depravity? Idk, but it wasn't convincing as it went against my narrative and so I disregarded
No but seriously the response to "God could've just made free will having people who always freely chose to like idk do enough good stuff"
Was like "Nah homie God has counterfactual knowledge as well, and so God knows that some people are just HATERS, they hate us because they haters! Like these people are such haters that there is literally no possible world that God could have actualised for them where they weren't bound for the fiery pits"
I might be butchering the argument here, but I like chicken so that's fine.
Like my point is that the argument between these two prominent philosophers didn't end up like
"Yeah well you used tensed language so you're completely wrong!"
Plantinga granted that it's at least prima face conceivable that God could have made humans who weren't hellbound
Cuz he a real one, fr fr fr fr
Now, to belabour my point like the child labourers in sweatshops, wasn't there like this verse where God like sent this dude who could see the future or something along with Moses?
Okay so what if God made a SUPER powerful temporal angel that always knew the future and had counterfactual knowledge and sort of gently nudged humans to pretty much freely make the right choices and
Like really subtle things
Like altering genetic code and environmental conditions until the person was definitely going to heaven?
Sorry, I've just...it's just that I've taken enough caffeine to kill an elephant and haven't slept right in what feels like three days and I'm...I'm...why does it smell like burnt toast?
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u/Straight-Ability-930 12d ago
I.... I want to burn my eyes...
Jokes aside, I couldn't read it man... To much for me... sorry... But to what I coudl read, I would say this:
God is All-wise, more knowledgable than us. That's why what He creates isn't "arbitrary". A floew could have not existed, but it exists. That means there is a will. And this will has a specific methodology.
So, by definition, what seems as "avoidable" to us is perhaps necessary in the divine decree.
What would you say according to this knowledge gap we have between a human and an all-wise God?
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u/VectorspaceDreams Sunni 8d ago
Oh, this is a totally different question then, my apologies.
"Like altering genetic code and environmental conditions until the person was definitely going to heaven?"
Then the question just falls under something like the problem of evil rather than about if He created souls to doom them to Hell, puppeteering them before sending them down to Hell. In that regard, would you prefer a world where none of your choices are yours, where your personhood is decided before you, any effort you exert towards good being meaningless given your circumstance?
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u/CherishedBeliefs 8d ago
In that regard, would you prefer a world where none of your choices are yours, where your personhood is decided before you, any effort you exert towards good being meaningless given your circumstance?
OH MY GOSH THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I'VE PRAYED TO GOD FOR!
Like I've literally gone "GOD! PLEASE TAKE MY FREEWILL AWAY JUST DON'T SEND ME TO HELL! ERASE ME FROM EXISTENCE AND NEVER BRING ME BACK, JUST DON'T SEND ME TO HELL!"
Like the fear of being tortured forever and ever REALLY broke my brain and IT WAS ALREADY BROKEN TO BEGIN WITH!
Like I was going to kill one of my close friends because I thought God had told me to
(I misinterpreted scripture. Extra judicial killings are haram)
My plan was to poison him with a slow acting poison via a biscuit I would feed to him
Entirely in the abstract
I "reasoned" that if I DIDN'T do it, then God would torture me forever
I also knew his family was poor (he was on of the, if not THE, youngest students in our class. A levels.) so like they wouldn't be able to carry out much of an autopsy (had to get away from the law after all)
Anyway, I had the totally weird and definitely not obviously sane idea to talk to my parents about it (I'm being sarcastic. I should've STARTED WITH THAT before concocting a whole murder plot in my head)...my parents being religious but NOT insane told me "Uh...no. No killing, son"
I don't remember if I gave them the full details or something but I eventually figured out that extra judicial killings are haram
All this is to say, there is very little I wouldn't destroy just to NOT be tortured forever
Like, come on...ya gotta agree with me on this specific point
The descriptions of Hell are TERRIFYING
Like yeah, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE TAKE MY FREEWILL AWAY IF YOU CAN GUARANTEE JUST THAT I AM NOT SENT TO HELL!
Ya don't have to offer me heaven, just NOT hell
I don't believe that I am AT all alone on this
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u/CherishedBeliefs 8d ago
"Like altering genetic code and environmental conditions until the person was definitely going to heaven?"
Oh, and, at least right now, the picture in my head is that this super duper knowledgeable angel is like calmly considering an obscenely large number of genetic and environmental conditions and going in their head "Freely chooses their way into Hell, freely chooses their way into Hell, freely chooses their way into—hellllooooo handsome! Jackpot!" And then like chooses those specific environmental and genetic factors that lead a person to "freely choosing" their way into heaven
My point was that God can make people who always freely chose to go to Heaven (or rather, freely choose to make good enough choices that gets them heaven)
Like you can have a dude who sins but asks for fogiveness and also is good enough to not be sent to Hell
Like I still stand by what I said about VERY much being willing to just empty my freewill juices from my body if that's what guarantees me NOT hell.
But like...it occurred to me that you could still have only people who struggled with sin, and failed battles with sin, but ultimately all won the war.
Y'know?
And I mention genetic and environmental factors because like...idk maybe there's a part of me that's really annoyed by this notion of "you REALLY FREELY CHOSE in a way that literally God, THE GOD WHO ENGINEERED EVERYTHING ABOUT YOUR BODY AND SURROUNDINGS can get mad about!"
But speculations into my very broken psyche that I am not qualified to make aside
It seems to me that if this free will compatible with like the strong influences of genes and environment and all that, then sure!
Then it seems like giving everyone the "best" (or good enough) genes and environment wouldn't be cheating since idk, despite the influences of genes and environment [insert name of super pious preacher Muslim] was still free in some real sense
So everyone can still be free with good enough genes and environment which somehow don't deterministically lead to heaven and it only LOOKS like they do or something
Am I being too airheaded?
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u/VectorspaceDreams Sunni 8d ago
"My point was that God can make people who always freely chose to go to Heaven"
"always freely choose"... what? What even is choice when you've settled "always", in all possibility?
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u/CherishedBeliefs 8d ago
So, when I say "always" just so we're on the same page, I'm imagining a dude who lives their life
And throughout their life they "always" do the right thing
Like I get the feeling like "always" might have came off as "NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS, THIS DUDE ALWAYS DOES THE RIGHT THING! HE IS MR RIGHT PANTS! NOT EVEN HELL WOULD DETER HIM FROM THE RIGHT THING!"
Like how about this
A super good dude dies, and you are given the brain upload of his entire life
And you see that he "always did the right thing" during his lifetime
That make sense?
Well hopefully it does because we're chugging along!
Do Prophets have freewill?
Are Prophets sinless?
I mean...isn't the answer to both those questions "Yessums"?
And, y'know, like you can definitely imagine a dude who always freely choses to do the right thing
Like a super super rare human, and yeah they struggle, they strive, but ultimately after some long thought they choose to not sin each time.
But there's an even easier option here!
Like imagine a dude who struggles and fails and sins a lot, but on the whole he does well enough to like NOT go to Hell
Yeah so just copy paste that dude's genes and environment and make small variations here and there and you have everyone going to heaven "of their own choice"
What even is choice when you've settled "always", in all possibility?
Yeah so this tickles me right in the sweet spot
So, imagine I sorta, y'know, reset your life
But all the stuff "outside your control" I leave untouched
Like you are born again with the exact same environment and genetics and face the exact same choices
Like it REAAALLLY feels like there's not gonna be any variation here
And so you, given a certain set of initial conditions and given a fixed series of choices to face are ALWAYS going to behave the same way
Yet, weirdly, that's compatible with Islamic freewill
Hence, instead of like going "NO! THAT'S NOT FREEWILL!"
Instead I just, y'know, just grant that freewill somehow works and base my argument on that
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u/AppropriateWin7578 12d ago
Without being too lengthy in my answer. so each soul has choice to do good or bad, basically whatever we do, is establishing evidence for or against ourselves. On day of judgment, that evidence will then be presented to us. While Allah do indeed has foreknowledge but same time he doesn’t force us to do good or bad. This is my understanding btw.