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The problem of evil is not the property of Christianity or of Western philosophy alone. Any tradition that affirms some form of cosmic goodness, justice or ultimate meaning must come to terms with suffering, and the resources different traditions bring to it vary enormously. This lesson is enrichment - it lies beyond the AQA-named scholar set - but a controlled awareness of other-faith responses strengthens evaluation and guards against the parochial assumption that "the problem of evil" has only one shape. We examine how Hinduism and Buddhism address suffering through karma, rebirth and dukkha, and how Islam and Judaism respond through divine decree, testing and, after the Holocaust, a literature of protest and reconstruction. A word of method, which the rest of the lesson honours: these traditions are internally diverse, and it is easy to over-simplify them. We should speak of characteristic responses, not of single official answers, and we should be careful not to flatten subtle doctrines into slogans.
It is worth seeing at the outset that the classical problem of evil - the apparent contradiction between an omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good God and the existence of evil - is sharpest for monotheisms that affirm exactly those attributes: Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Traditions that do not posit a single omnipotent, benevolent creator face the fact of suffering but not the logical tension in the same form. This is why the responses divide along a fault line. The Abrahamic traditions must reconcile suffering with a personal God's power and goodness; the Indian traditions explain suffering largely through an impersonal moral law (karma) or as a feature of conditioned existence (dukkha), where no single all-good, all-powerful agent is on the hook for it. Keeping this asymmetry in view prevents the common error of assuming every faith is answering the same question.
Hindu responses to suffering are grounded in three interlocking doctrines.
The karmic framework offers a remarkably complete answer: no suffering is ultimately gratuitous, because all of it is the lawful fruit of prior moral action. It thereby defuses the sting of apparently unjust suffering - the suffering of the seemingly innocent - by denying that anyone is, in the relevant cosmic sense, truly innocent: present suffering answers to a past the sufferer no longer remembers. Whether this is a satisfying answer or a troubling one is exactly what the criticisms below probe.
Key term: Karma (literally "action") is the principle that morally significant actions produce corresponding consequences for the agent, across this and future lives. In its classical Hindu form it is an impersonal cosmic law, which is why it can explain suffering without making a personal God directly responsible for it. Samsara is the cycle of rebirth through which karma is worked out; moksha is final release from that cycle.
It would over-claim to present "the Hindu view" as a single position, because Hinduism contains importantly different theologies. In the strongly theistic schools - for example the devotional traditions centred on Vishnu or Shiva, and the qualified non-dualism (Vishishtadvaita) of Ramanuja - a personal God (Ishvara) governs the karmic system, and the problem of reconciling that God's goodness with suffering arises more directly; such traditions tend to stress divine grace and devotion as the answer. In the influential non-dualist (Advaita Vedanta) school of Shankara, by contrast, the everyday world of distinct selves and their sufferings is maya - not a flat "illusion" in the sense of non-existent, but a lower, dependent level of reality that is finally transcended in the realisation that the true self (atman) is identical with the ultimate reality (Brahman), which is beyond the categories of good and evil. On this view suffering belongs to the realm of ignorance (avidya) and is dissolved, not explained, by liberating knowledge. The lesson here for evaluation is to attribute carefully: the maya-response is characteristic of Advaita, not of Hinduism as a whole.
The Bhagavad Gita, part of the epic Mahabharata, addresses suffering through the battlefield dialogue between the warrior Arjuna and Krishna (revered as an avatar of Vishnu). Paralysed by the prospect of killing kinsmen, Arjuna is counselled by Krishna along several lines:
The passage is often cited to show how a doctrine of the eternal self reframes the meaning of death and loss; it should be read in its own context (a teaching about duty and detachment) rather than pressed into a Western theodical mould.
The karmic response is powerful but attracts serious objections.
Buddhism approaches suffering from a markedly different starting point. The Buddha (Siddhartha Gautama, traditionally c. 5th-4th century BCE) declined to settle questions about a creator God - such metaphysical speculation he set aside as unhelpful to liberation - and so Buddhism does not frame suffering as a problem about divine justice at all. Instead it diagnoses suffering as a universal feature of conditioned existence and prescribes a path to its cessation. The Four Noble Truths are the core.
Because Buddhism posits no omnipotent, omniscient, wholly good creator, the logical problem of evil - the alleged contradiction between such a being and suffering - does not arise in its classical form. There is no divine agent whose power and goodness must be squared with the world's pain. Suffering instead has natural causes (craving and ignorance) and a natural remedy (the path). Yet Buddhism is not therefore indifferent to the structure of the Western debate, and three points of contact are instructive.
It is worth adding, to avoid over-claiming Buddhism's distance from the problem, that some have argued an internal tension remains: if karma is a cosmic moral law governing the distribution of suffering across rebirths, one may ask whether that law is just - why the morally weighted order of the universe should fall as it does. But because no omnipotent legislator is held to have designed the karmic order, this is not the classical problem of evil so much as a question about the intelligibility of cosmic justice, and most Buddhist thought treats it, again, as a distraction from the practical task of liberation.
Islam affirms the full classical conception of God - Allah is omnipotent, omniscient and perfectly good - so the problem of evil arises directly, and Islamic responses cluster around several interlocking ideas. (As with the other traditions, these are characteristic emphases; Islamic theology contains its own internal debates, for instance between the Ash'ari and Mu'tazila schools over the relation of God's will to human acts.)
Islamic responses thus resemble the Irenaean theodicy in treating suffering as a meaningful test that can deepen the soul, and resemble the Augustinian emphasis on divine sovereignty and final justice; but unlike process theology they keep God fully omnipotent, and the characteristic posture is islam in its root sense - trusting submission to God's wise will - rather than protest. That said, the Islamic tradition also contains lament and supplication, so "submission" should not be caricatured as passivity.
Jewish thought is the original home of the protest tradition (Job is a Hebrew scripture), and it offers a spectrum of responses to suffering that runs from traditional theodicy to radical reconstruction.
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