Abstract

The article demonstrates that Islam is far from the extremes of theodicy and anti-theodicy, which equally take God away from responsibility for the existence of evil and suffering in the world. Following Judaism in proclaiming God the primary source of both good and evil, Islam originally rejects theodicy, transferring all responsibility for evil to man, since, in this case, the metric of di-vine omnipotence will be incomplete. The Islamic worldview is not satisfied with all kinds of privat-ization theories that justify the all-goodness of God by the fundamental absence of evil in the world, for a variety of reasons, including the lack of good. Islam is also not a variant of the anti-theodicy, which asserts that monotheism is generally unable to explain the appearance and presence of evil in the world. Therefore, it is necessary to abandon either the symbolism of divine omnipotence, which means a departure from monotheism, or the recognition of the presence of evil and suffering in the world, which is also absurd. This position makes it possible to preserve the foundations of Islamic tawhid and en-dow a person with a certain measure of human responsibility for their intentions and actions. According to the author, the roots of the presence of many confessional, theological and philosophical approaches to understanding the problem of evil in the world lie the misunderstanding of the nuances of distinguishing between the concept as of “original cause” and “cause”, “source” and “original source”, which are meaningless in science, but extremely important for religion and theology. In this way, we emphasize the complex dialectic of the divine and the human in the un-derstanding of evil that exists in Islam, which distinguishes it from classical theodicy and anti-theodicy, common in modern analytical theology.

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