Is This the Best of All Possible Worlds? Islamic Reflections on Theodicy

Centuries before Leibniz’s famous claim that of all the innumerable possible worlds, God must have chosen the best, Islamic thinkers across philosophical and theological traditions grappled with similar ideas. If God is supremely good and powerful, perhaps the evident suffering and other evils in the world can be explained by the fact that no world could have been better, even if that seems contrary to our usual intuitions. In this lecture, I will discuss how major Islamic figures, from Avicenna and al-Ghazali to al-Maturidi and members of the Mu’tazila, tackled this and related questions, why their proposed solutions to the problem differed, and what resources they might give us to think and live with today.

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Host or Publisher University of Birmingham