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The Most Influential Muslim Philosophers

Decent Essays

The world we live in has seen immense amounts of progress through the eras. Taking a look at the past 50 years, people’s lives have been improved through technological, medicinal, and scientific advancements that make life easier and improve the quality of life for them. Progress is what drives people forward, and as many people see it, there is always something to improve upon in the world and people will always strive to come up with the next best thing to improve their lives and the lives of others. However, according to Al-Ghazali, the world was perfect when God created it because a perfect being would never create a world with any imperfections and it is ignorance that causes people not be able to fully understand how perfect the …show more content…

No improvements can be made to the world because it is a perfect one. Since the world is perfect, there is good in the world. In order for people to appreciate and understand the goodness they were gives, God also gave the people evil. Good and evil are correlates and the two have to go hand in hand; “Were it not for illness, the healthy would not enjoy health. Were it not for hell, the blessed in paradise would not know the extent of their blessedness” (Ghazali, 57-60, 191). People need pain and suffering in their lives to be able to fully appreciate the extent of the goodness that they have been blessed with. People also need this in order to have balance in the universe. God achieved perfection through a balance of good and evil in order to show the contrast and be able to identify the goodness in the world. Without evil in the world to contrast goodness, there would be no way to distinguish how good things can be. The necessary contrast between good and evil makes logical sense, and is key in identifying and appreciating the perfection. In this line of thought, people lose their free will in order to live in this perfect world. God has a hand in everything that occurs in the world and the “cause and effect” that we see is not determined by the laws in nature—they are directly

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