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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Justice of God The Issue of Predestination and Free Will One of the issues which is directly related to the issue of the justice of the Creator is the question of predestination or free will. According to the fatalists (those who believe in predestination), a human being has no choice whatsoever in his or her actions, behaviour or words and the movement of his organs are just like the predestined movements of the parts of a machine.

Thus, the question arises, how does this opinion relate to Divine Justice? And perhaps because of this, the previously-mentioned group of the Ash’arites , deny intellectual good and evil and have accepted predestination. Their belief in predestination is a denial of justice. Why? Because when one accepts predestination, justice makes no sense. In order to further clarify this point, we are obliged to study several subjects with care: Why Believe in Predestination?

All people, within their being, sense that they are free to make decisions. For examples, whether or not to give a loan to such and such a friend or whether or not to drink a glass of water placed before oneself. If another person commits an error in relation to this person, this second can forgive or not forgive the error. Everyone can tell between a hand which shakes because of illness or old age from a hand which one purposefully causes to shake.

In spite of the fact that the issue of free will is a general human sense, why do some people follow the school of the fatalists? There are several important factors that can affect a human: environment, education, propaganda, social culture and without doubt, the thoughts of a person. Sometimes, even one’s economic position can provide a motive for why a human being acts a certain way.

The totality of these cause one to assume that a person does not have free will, but rather that the external and internal factors join hands and force us to make a decision and that if these factors did not exist, we would not be forced with these problems. These are things which can be called ‘the environmental determinants,’ ‘economic determinants,’ ‘educational determinants’ and predestination are among the factors considered to be important by the school of fatalists.

The Main Error of the Fatalists But those who think this way have forgotten an important point and that is that the discussion is not about motives and defective causes, but rather the discussion is about complete causes.