Good and Evil Are Known Only Through Revelation

Ashari theology, and through it the Hanbali school and much of the wider Sunni world, holds that acts are not good or evil in themselves, independent of God's judgment, and that human reason on its own cannot establish what is morally obligatory or forbidden; what is good is simply and entirely what God commands, and that command is knowable only from revelation, never derived by unaided reasoning about the nature of the act itself. Islamic Creeds: A Selection presents this as following directly from the refusal to place any standard, including a standard of reason, above God, since if an act were good or evil prior to and independent of God's command, God's own will would be answerable to that prior standard rather than being the source of moral value itself, a conclusion Ashari theologians judged incompatible with God's absolute sovereignty. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition records that this position was formulated as a direct and deliberate counter to the rational ethics associated with the Mutazila, who held that reason alone can discern basic moral truths independently of revelation, and that God, being perfectly just, necessarily commands what reason itself would already recognize as good, a claim Ashari theologians regarded as subordinating God to a standard outside himself.

The Mutazila, whose rationalist theology dominated in parts of the Abbasid world before the Ashari settlement displaced it, argued the reverse position, that reason unaided by revelation can discern basic moral truths, that certain acts are objectively good or evil prior to any divine command, and that God, being perfectly just by his own nature, necessarily commands what is already good and forbids what is already evil rather than defining goodness by fiat. The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam situates this dispute within the broader theological struggle of the ninth century, in which Mutazili doctrine briefly held state patronage under the mihna before its eventual collapse left the field open to the Ashari settlement that followed. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition records that later Sunni theologians, including the Hanbali tradition which shares this specific position with the Ashari school despite disagreeing with Asharism on several other points, rejected the Mutazili account chiefly on the ground that it appeared to bind God to an external standard he did not himself establish, treating divine command as merely confirming a moral order reason could in principle discover without revelation at all, a conclusion the Ashari and Hanbali traditions alike found impossible to accept.