Is Mankind Inherently Evil?
Are humans evil? This was the type of question Brother Jeffrey Lang was asking when he was an atheist Mathematician professor when he discovered a Quran sitting on his desk. Someone had anonymously gifted it to him. So one night when he was sitting in his apartment with nothing to do, he picked up the Quran and began to read through it. His life has been changed ever since.
Up until this point Brother, Jeffrey had been raised a Catholic. By the age of eighteen, Jeffrey began to ask questions about the condition of mankind and why God had created us in this perpetual state of corruption and bloodshed. He could not help but ask ‘is mankind inherently evil?’ and if so ‘why did God create us this way?’ Brother Jeffrey couldn’t find any answers to his questions and so he abandoned his faith in God and left his previous religion of Catholicism.
So, once he got his hands on the Quran and began to read through the first verses of the Quran. He began to notice some strange literary devices and some deviation from the bible’s storytelling. From the moment he read about the creation of Adam, he was puzzled.
Allah said in the Quran:
❝And [mention, O Muhammad], when your Lord said to the angels, “Indeed, I will make upon the earth a successive authority.” They said, “Will You place upon it one who causes corruption therein and sheds blood, while we declare Your praise and sanctify You?” Allah said, “Indeed, I know that which you do not know.”❞
Quran 2:30
Brother Jeffrey was amazed at how ‘this author’ (Allah) would reveal to the reader one of the most important theological questions (‘is mankind inherently evil?’) ever asked by mankind only thirty verses into the Quran. He thought that ‘the author was committing theological suicide’.
However, brother Jeffrey was even more amazed and perplexed about how Allah answers their question:
“I know that which you do not know.”
Brother Jeffrey discovered in the next few verses that God had given mankind the gift of intellect. He then saw that man is a moral being that chooses between right and wrong by being introduced to the story of Satan disobeying Allah and subsequently Adam disobeying Allah. Brother Jeffrey had discovered something in these verses that was right under his nose. Mankind can choose to do both good and evil through the intellect. That is why mankind is a being of choice.
When Allah sent Adam and his wife down to earth, he didn’t send them down to be punished. Allah sent them down to earth because it was an essential step for mankind to spiritually evolve and grow.
Brother Jeffrey found himself arguing and conversing with the Quran throughout the completion of the book. He read it over and over again, he would read the Quran finding questions being asked by Allah and answered in the next few verses or chapters.
Over time, the mental wall that Jeffrey had built in his mind, which kept out the idea of God’s existence, just crumbled away. His question of ‘is mankind inherently evil?’ was just not enough to keep from believing in God.