Explaining free will to a 5 year old

[Colonel_Hardstone]

Asslamo Allaikum,

One of our 5 year old students asked this weekend

Q) If Allah (SWT) already knows if you are going into Heaven or Hell then whats the point of doing good or bad as it doesn't really matter?

P.S: He is confused between fore-knowledge and free-will (or choice). How do you clarify that to the child?

[DefendingIslam]

Salam Alaykum,

I think we will have to make a special section for answering these types of questions, since they come up quite often nowadays.

I am unsure about how to approach a 5 year old in this issue. But perhaps it could be told to him that the reason Allah knows who is going to Heaven and Hell is because we will do the deeds that will lead us to Heaven or Hellfire. These deeds of course, are also known to Allah.

Not sure if this is the way to explain it to a 5 year old. But perhaps someone else can break it down as appropriate.

[Intrepid]

Each time he ask distract him with a lolly, as he is way to young to able to comprehend such issues.

[alfatiha]

Asslamo Allaikum,

One of our 5 year old students asked this weekend

Q) If Allah (SWT) already knows if you are going into Heaven or Hell then whats the point of doing good or bad as it doesn't really matter?

P.S: He is confused between fore-knowledge and free-will (or choice). How do you clarify that to the child?

These are my answers, so if it's wrong hopefully any knowledgeable brothers can help:

"Allah subhanahu wata'ala knows, but you don't know."
"A muslim with Iman will go to Heaven, but whoever does several good deeds will go years earlier than whoever does one good deed." - 'Allah already loves you, and He will love you more if you do good deeds'-sort of answer.

in summary tell them about rewards instead of explaining about the Qada' and Qadar. Even for adults it is very confusing topic.

[ibnIslam]

Asslamo Allaikum,

One of our 5 year old students asked this weekend

Q) If Allah (SWT) already knows if you are going into Heaven or Hell then whats the point of doing good or bad as it doesn't really matter?

P.S: He is confused between fore-knowledge and free-will (or choice). How do you clarify that to the child?

,

This happened to me last week as well with some 8-year olds. I gave them the same answer as found in Sahih Muslim as bolded below:

Ali narrated that "one day the Prophet was sitting with a wooden stick in his hand with which he was scratching the ground. He raised his head and said "there is none of you but has his place assigned either in the fire or in Paradise." They said, "O Allah's Messenger Why should we carry on doing good deeds then, shall we depend (on Al-qadar) and give up work? The Prophet said "No, but carry on doing good deeds, for everyone will find easy (to do) such deeds as will lead him to that for which he has been created "then he recited this ayat:

"As for him who gives (in charity)and keeps his duty to Allah and fears Him, and believes in Al Husna (Tawheed, path of righteousness) we will make smooth for him the path of ease, goodness..(92:5-10)" Muslim vol.4)

It was enough for them . There is much barakah in following the sunnah!

[Saj]

Salaam

Maybe relate it to something contemporary. I tend to think of it in terms of our life being a film - we make our choices in this world and the film progresses - we can't see the end of the film because we are in the film and the film progresses as our life unfolds. Allah (swt) knows the whole film - He knows the ending and how we got there - what our journey through the film was like and He allowed us to make the choices we made.

For older children (maybe out of fashion now, but very popular in the 80s) use example of those "choose your own adventure" books. Every page or couple of pages you had a choice of what course of action to take e.g. if you choose the red door go to page 8, if you choose the blue door go to page 10. Now the reader does not know what awaits him, but he can make choices based on what he has already read, but the author who wrote the book knows which option will lead to which end.

[sudoku]

Each time he ask distract him with a lolly, as he is way to young to able to comprehend such issues.

lol... this would be sweeping the question under the carpet, though I agree with a five year old being way to young to understand, as even I still have trouble understanding taqdeer and free will. I'm actually amazed such a small child would even think to ask such a question... when I was that age I'd simply do things because my mom would say that Allah told us too. I guess kids nowadays are smarter that I was at age five, Masha Allah.

[Colonel_Hardstone]

Salaam

Maybe relate it to something contemporary. I tend to think of it in terms of our life being a film - we make our choices in this world and the film progresses - we can't see the end of the film because we are in the film and the film progresses as our life unfolds. Allah (swt) knows the whole film - He knows the ending and how we got there - what our journey through the film was like and He allowed us to make the choices we made.

Very good...I was thinking of something similar...

Jazakullah Khairun

P.S: Obviously for adults this is not a good example because the director/producer/script writer actually controls what the actors do!

[umar_italy]

Very good...I was thinking of something similar...

Jazakullah Khairun

P.S: Obviously for adults this is not a good example because the director/producer/script writer actually controls what the actors do!

But isn't it so?

As for what I remember, at least in the Ash'ari 'Aqidah, Allah SwT is the Creator and Disposer of all out actions.
We "aquire" the actions that Allah SwT creates for us; we don't have "free will": isn't it a christian concept?

Everything that happens, happens out of the will and decree of Allah SwT, and one of the basic six pillars of Iman is that the good and the evil both come from Allah.

I really find the answer of RasuluLlah (saws) about Taqdir as the best one.

Wa Allahu a'lam!

[umar_italy]

I've found the following quite interesting, and confirmed what I remember from my studies: that of "free will" is a Mu'tazili concept.

Wa Allahu a'lam!



Islamic theology, Western philosophy and Predestination: A comment

By Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Lagos.

This is a comment on M. J. O. Mustapha’s article on predestination (ThisDay, Friday June 13, 2003). I am not too familiar with Iqbal’s work on this matter (which formed the basis for Mustapha’s discussion) but it raises fundamental philosophical questions that in fact complicate, rather than resolve the problem(i.e the debate between believers in "free-will" and believers in "pre-destination"). This of course is not Iqbal’s fault. Once Reason is taken as the basis for establishing the truth of metaphysical postulates, as we know from Kant, its antinomies (or self-contradictions) emerge. These antinomies run through the article under discussion. Take for instance the attempt to resolve the issue of the value of prayer by pointing out, correctly, a self-contradictory presupposition in the very concept of pre-destination that God both exists in and transcends time. The concept presupposes that God exists in time and thus ordained something that would happen in the future. But if He was bound by time at some point He would not then be transcendent with regard to time, and we believe He is. He has no beginning and no end. Indeed the prophet (SAW) in a hadith prohibits the Muslim from cursing time because Allah is time. By removing the position that suggests embodiment in time he resolves the contradiction, or so it seems. But in truth he raises a new one that leaves the question unresolved.

The solution proffered is to interpret "predestination" as meaning that "God’s wisdom, knowledge and power encompass all and nothing can conflict with that." But we cannot assert, as Mustapha does, that "it does not conflict with the notion that God responds to our prayers" unless we first of all presume some partial delegation of power to humans, which is precisely the bone of contention between proponents of free-will and those of predestination. If by the proposed redefinition of pre-destination we mean that nothing happens outside God’s power and control (which is one sense of Allah’s omnipotence) then we pray because He wills us to pray and what we get in response is also willed by Him. As such it is not our prayer that gets us anything but His will. We cannot therefore say that we got what we did as a response to our prayers and the argument is thus refuted.

This is the position held by believers in predestination: that we have no power over our actions and that everything in fact is a creation of God. He guides whom He wills and leads whom He wills astray. We are mere pawns in His hands in everything we do. These are called in Muslim theology the jabriyyun or Jabriyya and they are the majority among Sunni Muslims. At least jabr is the dominant streak in Ash’arite theology and among Sufis, to the extent that some Sufis, notably Ibn ‘Arabi, are alleged to hold that even the companions of hell are in service to their Lord and derive pleasure from the punishment inflicted upon them because they are doing His will.

If on the other hand omnipotence refers only to the ability to do everything, and we presume that Allah has permitted man to have power over some things then man is fully responsible for at least some of his actions. Those who believe in free will are referred to in theology as Qadariyyun or the Qadariyya. These are found among the early philosophical theologians or Mu’tazilites and also constitute the majority among the Shiites, certainly among those of the twelver, or Ja’fari school of jurisprudence. The critics of this group argue that to presume that man is in control of some things makes him a partner unto God in His creation, whereas God is the sole creator of everything in the world. The Qadariyya themselves reject this charge and a section of them is called the Mufawwida. They hold that they are able to do things because they have been entrusted, through delegation of power (tafwid) to do so without God’s help and guidance.

The whole debate on free will and predestination is based on the need to resolve a contradiction at a higher level than is covered in your paper-a contradiction usually stated as the problem of theodicy. If God is the all-Good, why is there evil in the world? If He is omnipotent and can thus eliminate evil from the world but chooses not to then He is not all-Good. If He is all-Good but incapable of eradicating evil then He is not omnipotent. The existence of evil is inconsistent with an omnipotent, omniscient and all-Good God. This is the contradiction everyone seeks to resolve, each in his own unique way.

The jabri school argues that God made everything, and in the extreme, that nothing really is evil since it came from God’s wisdom. Things may seem evil to us because we do not appreciate the Divine wisdom or hikmah behind those things. We are all servants of Allah and He does with us as He wishes. In the extreme, it is suggested, even when we sin we are acting our part as servants who will commit the act but it was really ordained by Him, so when man enters hell he is simply continuing with service for the pleasure of His God. (I must stress that this is not a mainstream ‘Ash-arite view at all, but it is the logical culmination of Jabrite arguments.Indeed there are many layers in Ash-arite theology that I will not go into here.) This view in the extreme thus removes the contradiction by assuming that evil does not exist in reality, only as a delusion borne of our ignorance. One recalls Dr Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide and the caricature made of "the best possible world".

The qadari school, with which you obviously sympathize (and whose position seems more appealing than the Jabaris’), argues that evil is inconsistent with an all-Good or Just God. So evil must come from man. God has given us the power to choose between good and evil and sent messengers to tell us what is right and wrong and then given us the power to choose. He rewards those who do good with paradise and the evil doers with a grievous chastisement. They reject the claim that they have made man a partner unto God and point out that what man does is by power granted him by God and if God wills He would take away the power. In short man is responsible for his moral choices and actions, but he has no real power since this ability was given to him by God in His wisdom. The best articulation of this view I have read is in Ayatollah Murtadha Mutahhari’s seminal work, al-‘Adl al-Ilahi. The school of course still leaves open the question why allow man to perpetrate evil at all and why not just make us all good?

A third group, mainly the salafiyyah among sunnis, take a middle ground as exemplified by Ibn al-Qayyim in Madarij al-Salikin. To this group God is Just but also Wise. His justice does not negate His wisdom. So in His wisdom He knows those deserving of His grace and guides them, and those who are undeserving He forsakes. Whereas God is the author of everything we may not attribute evil to Him. If we do good, we should thank Him for it and praise him and He will guide us to greater good because of our humility. If we do evil we should blame ourselves and our evil soul and seek forgiveness from God so that He can turn to us in grace and not leave us to our designs. This group is, in the final analysis, jabrite when it comes to good, qadarite with regard to evil. And I personally hold this theology to be the safest for one’s faith.

Which brings me back to my opening comments. Iqbal’s arguments are brilliant but over-ambitious in seeking to find firm grounds in Reason for metaphysical truths. Indeed the very fact that he chose to approach the theme from the perspective of a philosophy of time should have sent a caution as to the limitations of the thesis. Kantian epistemology addresses the question of time and space (the Forms of Sensibility) and considers them the boundaries of possible experience. Our knowledge of Reality external to us comes from the contact, through schematics, between these "Forms" and the "Forms of understanding" or the "Categories" of Quantity (unity, plurality, totality); Quality (reality, negation, limitation); Relation (inherence, causality, community) and Modality (existence/nonexistence), possibility/impossibility, necessity/contingency).

Because Iqbal begins from the premise that God transcends time and is not limited by space, He correctly removes Him from the sphere of sensibility and thus possible experience. We cannot therefore by Pure Reason alone know through a priori Categories, that, for example He exists or exists necessarily (modality) or that He is One (quantity) or Real (quality) or the Cause of this and that (relation) since these categories can only apply to what is sensible in time and space. If this is the case, at least from Kant’s Critique, how could Iqbal hope to resolve an Islamic theological argument in the realm of metaphysics by taking off from the very philosophy that dealt metaphysics a telling blow?

Precisely because God is outside the realm of possible experience knowledge of Him, in a watered-down sense, is obtained through faith in the message of the messenger. Every argument based on Reason alone can be defeated by opposite arguments based on the same Reason in these matters, which is why any attempt to prove the superiority of one over the other based on philosophy will fail. We cannot establish, irrefutably and based on pure Reason, that God, and nothing else is the Cause of everything or something, since God transcends space and time and is presumed to lie outside the pale of sensible experience and thus knowledge through Reason. This is why it is possible to have equally valid philosophical arguments for free-will and its opposite pre-destination, as indeed for the existence or non-existence of God or a plurality of gods.

The Muslim conception of Reason differs from that held by western philosophy. Understanding this point is critical to any philosophical analysis of this nature. The enlightenment changed even the European conception of Reason from the Ratio or Intellectus of Aquinas. The Islamic concept of rationality-the ‘Aql- is, to quote Sayyid Hussein Nasr (The History of Islamic Philosophy,p.16), a God-given faculty operating within the ambit of "a cosmos in which prophecy or revelation is a binding reality." Kantian philosophy, on the other hand, builds on the Cartesian Cogito and Hume’s empiricism by restricting Reason to Pure Reason, that which is capable of apprehending the exact, scientific knowledge of the material world. Strictly speaking, even this is not correct, since Kant’s analyses of Practical Reason and of Judgment in the (second and third Critiques) actually suggest a more flexible conception of Reason. The restriction is post-Kantian, but it remained central to philosophical modernism.

In distinction, for Islamic Philosophy, there are more levels of reality than one. As Nasr wrote in his foreword to Omar Bakr’s Classification of Knowledge in Islam, there is the Absolute Reality(God the One), the angelic orders, the imaginal world (‘Alam al-Khayal), the world of the jinn and men and finally the natural world. Also there is a hierarchy within the epistemic Subject. Man is not just the cogito who knows on a single level. He knows through the senses, the imaginal faculty, reason with its own several manifestations, the heart-intellect and finally revelation. To analyse Islamic metaphysics from the stand point of a philosophy of space and time is to try and ground a non-material Reality on an empiricist epistemology. After Kant’s Copernican revolution, all such attempts are doomed to failure. Herein lies the weakness in Iqbal’s theory.

At the end of the day we must adopt that position that appeals more to us, recognizing, if we insist on western philosophical concepts, that it is based on faith or probable opinion, not fool proof knowledge, and respect the views of others even when we disagree, since Reason has no absolute right to truth-claims in these matters. We may find in Reason support and legitimation for our opinions, but Pure Reason is incapable of providing, on its own, a secure foundation for our faith. Philosophy is a wonderful and good thing. But good philosophy must recognize its own limitations.

That we cannot prove an argument based on Reason alone is no basis for discarding it or presuming it to be untrue. But we should at all times understand the basis for its acceptance. I do not criticize Iqbal’s "reconstruction" of Muslim thought, or his preference for the belief in qadar, or free will. I question the legitimacy of any claims to establishing the truth of this position based on the principles of modern western philosophy. Such a claim is bogus and presumptuous and elevates Reason beyond its due limits. This, at least, we learn from Kant.

July 2003