God of Goodness, God of Evil

This article was firstly published in Indonesian at 9/5/2004

Many people assume that my thoughts are “deifying” reason. The fundamentalist Muslims convey this assumption the most. They see reason as leading humans astray. It is because reason is weak, limited, and therefore in need of guidance. And the right guidance only comes from God. In other word, reason is the devil’s “ambassador” in the human’s life. The Devil went ashtray when he used his reason, hence when Allah commanded him to prostate himself before Adam, he refused “Khalaqtani min narin, wa khalaqtahu min thin, Thou created me from fire, and created him from soil.”

My question is this: is it true that the source of evil is out of God? Isn’t it possible that evil lay within God himself? If evil is absolutely out of God, wouldn’t it lead to polytheism since there will be two gods: a god of goodness (the hero) and a god of evil (the villain)?

This complex issue has been a classical debate for a long time now. Debating about it may be wasteful. Furthermore, we are facing the presidential election for the first time. However, let me convey my temporary opinion about it.

To me, as a monotheist, the most reasonable concept about God is the concept regarding God as “dzat”, “being”, or “wujud” that is in the process. This “processing” conception of God is not weird and surprising for anyone who has read the thought of a process philosopher, Alfred Whitehead. Goodness or evil originated from the same god, and there are two paradoxical aspects within god. This divine paradox afterward emitted (in philosophical terms: emanate/al faidh) into the human’s life. If human were created in God’s image (Imago Dei in the Christian conception; or wa nafakhtu min ruhi in the Islamic conception), hence those paradoxes within God will “flow” into the human’s nature and psychology.

Just as God experiences a sort of “process” inside that is involving the battle between the “good” and the “bad”, just as God experiences a dialectic inside, sodo humans (Ulil Abshar-Abdalla)

(Translated by Lanny Octavia, edited Jonathan Zilberg)