Divine Justice & the Problem of Evil

God is a necessary being and a necessary being must be necessary from the aspect of every perfection otherwise if he is not necessary from the aspect of any perfection,and that perfection is absent from Him then God will be necessary from some aspects of perfection and possible from certain others and hence this will render Him a composite of necessity and possibility, which is inadmissible; therefore if God is necessary from the aspect of every perfection so He must also be necessary from the aspect of the perfection of Justice [adl] meaning that he must be a Just Lord, otherwise if it is assumed that He is not necessary from the aspect of Justice then He must be possible from this aspect, and that would render Him a composite of necessity, because he is necessary from the aspects of the other perfections, and possibility, which is inadmissible because that which is composite is contingent and hence an effect in need of a cause, as has been proven above.

Now coming to the questions. The above questions pertain to the problem of evil, and hence it is necessary to first explain what exactly is meant by evil; evil is defined by the philosophers as a negation, absence or non-existence of Good, just as darkness is the absence of light, death the negation of life and sickness the absence of health, and as a negation evil is not a positive-existent but something negative because everything that positively exists in reality has existence, and existence is a Good and a perfection whereas evil is equivalent to non-existence and imperfection, therefore those who claim that there is evil in the world must first clarify what exactly do they mean by the statement "there is evil", if they mean by it that evil is something that exists positively so that is absolutely incorrect because as has been shown evil is equivalent to non-existence or the absence of and the negation of existence, and as such it cannot have any positive being in reality because to assert a positive reality for evil would be the same as asserting that non-existence is also existent which is clearly contradictory.

Secondly if evil were to be a positive existent so it must either be caused or uncaused, and if uncaused so it would have to be essentially-necessary or a Necessary Being, but we have already demonstrated that a multiplicity of Essentially Necessary Beings cannot exist as that would lead to each one of them being a composite because each one of them would have an aspect of assimilation due to which it is similar to the other Necessary Beings, which is necessity itself, and also an aspect of distinction due to which it is different from the other Necessary Beings, because the assumption is that they are different and not the same hence there must be a distinguishing factor, but the existence of the above mentioned dual aspects in each Necessary Being would render each of them composite, and that which is composite is contingent and hence an effect in need of a cause, as has been proven above, resulting in none of them being in fact Necessary Beings, hence this proves that since a multiplicity of Necessary Beings cannot exist and Necessity only allows for unity therefore evil, if it is assumed to be a positive existent, cannot be an Essentially Necessary Being.

Now if evil is not essentially-necessary then it must be essentially contingent, if it is assumed to be a positive existent, but every contingent requires a cause for its existence; now the cause of evil, will either be evil or something else; but if evil is caused by yet another positively-existing evil so that cause [which is also evil] will either be essentially-necessary or contingent, but it cannot be essentially-necessary as proven above that a multiplicity of Necessary Beings cannot exist, therefore the cause of evil [which is also evil] must be contingent and hence an effect of some other cause, and the same argument and objections will revert to this second cause leading to a regress, but since infinite regress is impossible so we will ultimately have to halt at a cause for evil that is other than evil , but that which is other than evil is Good, and Good being the opposite of evil, cannot be its cause because there has to be some suitability between the cause and the effect in terms of perfections or existential features or properties, but there is no suitability between good and evil. This demonstration proves that evil has no positively existent cause, and that which has no positively existent cause cannot itself have any reality or existence, because an effect cannot come into existence or be realized as a reality in the absence of its cause. Therefore evil has no positive reality of its own in the external reality but is a negative affair.

If Good is synonymous with existence and perfection, so the opposite of good must be synonymous with non-existence and imperfection, and evil being the opposite of good is therefore equivalent to and synonymous with non-existence and non-existence being nothingness is a non-entity and hence that which is nothing cannot be a positive-existent and can have no reality whatsoever because it is the very negation and opposite of reality because even reality is synonymous with existence, therefore that which has no existence has no reality, and since only positively-existing things have positively-existing causes and evil is not a positive-existent therefore it does not have any positively-existing cause from which to derive existence or being, and that which has no positive-cause cannot be a positive-existent. This therefore falsifies the claim of those who assert the positive existence of evil.

Now God or the Necessary Being cannot be the cause of evil because God is either pure-goodness or pure-evil or partially-good and partially-evil : now He cannot be pure-evil because pure-evil is absolute nothingness [adum-e-matlaq], and pure nothingness is a non-entity, meaning it has no being or existence in reality, but we know that God being a Necessary Existent and the Reality of Existence [haqiqat-al-wujud], exists necessarily. He cannot be partially-good and partially-evil because that would render Him a composite being [murakab] , and every composite is dependent upon its underlying constituents [ajza] or parts for being what it is : similarly nothing composite can be a Necessary Being [wajib-bil-zat] because had any one of its parts been necessary in itself so it would not have required the other parts for constituting the whole [kul]. Therefore this logically demonstrates that God is nothing but pure-goodness [khayr-e-mehaz].

Therefore being Pure-Goodness nothing evil [sharr] can emanate from His sublime Essence [zat], meaning that everything caused by Him is good [khayr] in so far as it is existence [wujud], meaning to the extent that it is existentially-perfect [kamil]. This logically proves that everything good or perfect is endowed with goodness and perfection by Pure-Goodness, and is consequently dependent upon Him for its borrowed goodness and perfection.

Now that it has been established that evil is simply a negation of Good and existence or the absence thereof we may make our concluding statement that a thing cannot be other than itself, meaning a thing cannot both be itself and not be itself simultaneously because that would be contradictory,for instance 'x' cannot both be 'x' and 'not-x' at the same time, similarly the accidental existence of evil as a negation or absence of Good is an essential feature of the physical or the material world and hence to demand the world to be free from evil is equivalent to requiring the world to not be what it is and to be something else or other than its own essence, for instance to ask the world to be evil-less is equivalent to demanding it to not be the world but be paradise, while at the same time also retaining its own essence, and this is essentially-impossible, because the material realm is a realm of conflict, tension, strife, limitations and opposition among its elements and individual units,and where the character of matter is such that a new form [surat] can only be realized into existence by effacing the present one.