Allah, Goodness and Justice

"Theologians have always taught that God's decrees are good, and that this is not a mere tautology: it follows that goodness is logically independent of God's decrees."- Bertrand Russell


If there is no conceivable state of affairs that would force you to admit that, in this case, Allah has acted unjustly or in a manner contrary to the good, then you have denuded the concepts of goodness and justice of meaning.  For example, Al Ghazali informs us that "harm is not conceivable from Allah - the High - because He does not encounter any ownership of other than Himself, in which His dealing could be described to be harmful" and "He is able to bring upon His creatures all manner of torture and to try them with all kinds of pain and affliction. Even if He should do this, it would be justice from Him, it would not be vile, it would not be tyrannous." 

Justice is intimately bound up with the concept of rights; a common definition of what it is to be just is to observe the rights of others.  In  a situation where there are no rights at issue, there can be no justice.

As for the good, we humans generally understand good people to be hose who are beneficent to others and avoid harming them.  Leaving aside the question of whether Allah is in fact good according to this definition (and the prevalence of 'natural evil' such as earthquakes and tornadoes should make one doubt it), can the claim that 'no matter what Allah does, he is good' be squared with any definition of the good that we would otherwise accept, independent of theology?  I doubt that it can.  To claim that Allah could torture babies for eternity and still be considered good or to conceive of this as something other than a harm, is to misunderstand what is meant by the word good. 

If a word can be applied to describe any conceivable state of affairs, it is meaningless.  Given that Muslims apply the words 'good' and 'just' to Allah's actions without consideration of what these actions may be, they apply these terms incorrectly, without regard to their meaning.  They thus render them meaningless.  Such nihilism in regards to basic ethical terms (one shared by many fundamentalist Christians and others), once it seeps into the deep structure of a mind, prepares it to commit horrors.