How rational "God permitting the killing of children as a greater good " defense"?

Question

According to the Quran 18:65–82, Moses meets a man(called the Servant of God) Moses asks for permission to accompany the Servant of God so Moses can learn "right knowledge of what he hasbeen taught. The Servant informs him that "surely you [Moses] cannot have patience with me. And how canst thou have patience about things about which thy understanding is not complete?" Moses promises to be patient and obey him unquestioningly, and they set out together.

this Servant of God commited such acts:

1- After they board a ship, the Servant of God damages the vessel. Forgetting his oath, Moses says, "Have you made a hole in it to drown its inmates? Certainly you have done a grievous thing."

2- Next, the Servant of God kills a boy. Moses again cries out in astonishment and dismay, and again the Servant reminds Moses of his warning, and Moses promises that he will not violate his oath again etc..

later the servant of God reasoned his act of killing the boy ,telling Moses :

Quran 18:81 “And as for the boy, his parents were ˹true˺ believers, and we feared that he would pressure them into defiance and disbelief.So we hoped that their Lord would give them another, more virtuous and caring in his place.

How rational such Quranic argument ,with regard to God allowing killing the boy for a greater good (according the author of the Quran) ?

Answer 1

“And as for the boy, his parents were ˹true˺ believers, and we feared that he would pressure them into defiance and disbelief.So we hoped that their Lord would give them another, more virtuous and caring in his place."

Based on what is being quoted this doesn't sound like he was killed for the greater good. It sounds like he was killed because he personally was heading off to be an evil person (according to the Quran's beliefs) Therefore it was better for everyone that he die in innocence and his parents have a better child in his place.

Answer 2

The "problem of evil" argument posits that there is some "evil" defined by the belief system which the belief system admits to exist and then contrasts that with supposing that the creator being in that belief system simultaneously does not want such a thing to exist and has the ability to prevent such a thing. In the scenario you have prevented, there is nothing to indicate that the moral system which includes this story would believe that an act done here would be evil, and therefore this is not related to that question.

Here, you are attempting to define as "evil" something that you as the reader, or Moses, a character in the story, believes to be evil. However, the story indicates that the problem is that you only perceive it to be evil because of your lack of omniscience. This doesn't cause a problem for a religious system because it is expected that people are not omniscient and even secular moral systems acknowledge that lack of omniscience can lead to being mistaken about what is and is not an evil act.

We might be able to derive some things from the story. We see that the better end in that religion, according to the story, is for children to be killed rather than to pressure their parents into defiance or disbelief. So, perhaps we could say from our observation that since there are living children who Allah didn't have killed who do pressure their parents into disbelief, then Allah is either incapable or unwilling to prevent the evil of letting those children live. Unfortunately, our lack of omniscience doesn't let us know whether or not there is some greater good which Allah sees to account for allowing the "evil" of letting children live, so we still cannot assume that it is a lack of ability, so it is still not a good argument from the "problem of evil".

The story itself isn't attempting to defend the values of Allah, but to show our inability to know what actions are actually good. It presumes that the reader already would accept killing a child to be a better thing than letting the parents doubt their belief. If you did not value the parent's beliefs over the life of the child, then you would have to find other passages which would address that matter more specifically.

Addendum regarding moral intuition

After reading the answer by @Dcleve on this post, I wanted to give a little further clarification and discussion regarding moral intuition, our innate sense to discern good, in the case of this account. I personally believe that it is an error to presuppose that our nature and intuition regarding morality can supersede direct revelation from an omniscient creator. This generally seems to provide a very weak argument against the moral claims of a religious system. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our moral intuitions, we must do so from within the framework of the given belief system.

So, I did a quick investigation on how Islam handles this. I am not a scholar of Islam, so I cannot confirm, but one of the first links I found was this call from a pro-Islamic site to Follow your conscience in Islam. It suggests things such as:

If something waivers in your soul, then you should abandon it.

Source: Musnad Aḥmad 21695, Grade: Sahih

So, it would seem that perhaps Islam might affirm our intuitions about morality. I also learned about the concept of "Fitra", which explains the moral conscious by suggesting that we have some intuitive knowledge from a pre-birth state.

Clearly in this story Moses has a moral intuition, as is probably expected to be the case of the audience, that killing a child is wrong. There is no doubt that this act makes him "waiver in his soul". And yet, the story depicts the killing of the child as good and Moses' intuitive reaction as (perhaps mildly) "evil".

So, problem of evil here is the question of why Allah allowed a (ostensibly?) good person such as Moses to have evil moral intuitions. What we would have to ask would be whether Allah in fact wanted to make Moses with evil intuitions or whether Allah was unable to prevent Moses from having evil intuitions. The problem would only exist if neither one of those options could be true.

Answer 3

Morality is not "rational", so the OP question about rationality has to be modified to be answered. We have a moral sense, which provides us a moral intuition, and attempt to fit higher level moral theories, which we postulate to the "objective morality" of our universe, to this moral intuition.

The stories cited in this question tell us several things about the Koran, and the message it is trying to convey.

1. Moses has a reasonably functioning moral sense, and cares about objective morality. He objects to the extremely immoral behavior of this "Servant of God" (SOG).

2. The "Servant of God" INTENDS to behave immorally, to make a point to Moses. His point is that Moses cannot trust applying either his moral sense, nor his moral models, to Allah, because Allah is beyond our judgement. There is a very similar lesson in the Book of Job in the Jewish scripture. Yahweh in Job argues the point more effectively than this "servant of God" does. In Job, Yahweh claims basically that might is right, and whatever Yahweh decides to do (or commands to do), is by definition moral (at least after the fact). A consequence of this Divine Command Theory approach to morality, is that there IS no objective morality.

3. The "Servant of God" then goes on to show how to do morality wrong, by rationalizing that evil is good. We humans have, in characterizing objective morality, established that freewill and free choice are good, that reasoning things thru is good, that freedom of thought is good, and that family ties are good, among other morally good things in the world, while killing is very very bad. The SOG rationalizes that freedom of thought is BAD, if that freedom leads to a loss of religious faith, and that the bad of a loss of faith justifies the destruction of a life, of family ties, of freedom of thought and reasoning, etc, etc. This is a perfect example of the rationalization of evil that criminals and miscreants engage in within their own minds.

4. Note the SOG has switched, in his rationalization, from the clear "Divine Command Morality" of Job, to trying to justify behavior thru consequentialist objective moral reasoning. This is to contradict his own DCM from 2. Yet this consequentialism is -- very poorly executed. What possible outcomes could there be? Even if one accepts the evil principles of no freedom of thought, and of religious intolerance that the SOG and Moses seem to agree on are somehow "good", How could it be BETTER for the son to die, and the family to lose a child, than for that son to be converted? If Allah is actually omniscient, then He would know how to convert a child to faith in Him! That he chooses not to do so, and instead sends an agent out to kill a child for the "sin" of freedom of thought, is a demonstration of one or all three of incompetence, failure of imagination, and/or just laziness by Allah.

Overall, these passages in the Koran very effectively demonstrate moral failings which are asserted to be present in Allah, and are then entrenched in the Islamic religion.

Note, as an addendum, that the principles of inapplicability of reasoning to Allah, and of intolerance for true conclusions that contradict Allah, lead to no way out for the adherents of a false religion to even hear or think about failings of that religion. And the directive to kill anyone who raises such failings -- is to extend this lock into a life of false belief to all of the neighbors of such an intolerant victim (and perpetrator too) of evil. And for the sin of pointing out these true and valid critiques of these passages, my life will be forfeit in some circles who follow them to the letter.

As a theist myself, who applies moral reasoning to evaluating competing religious claims, I consider any religious view that includes an anti-freedom-of-thought element to be false from the outset, because it removes any ability to ever self correct. To then additionally add religious violence to this dead end dogma, is for that religion to be a great evil in the world.