God: From Seeking God to Faith in God

The Rule of Kind Favors

There are several preliminary explanations on the rule of kind favors:

1-Creating man has no benefit for God, and avoids no harm from God, either; God is too great to need anything or anybody to help Him.

2-Humans have been created so that their character can be developed. In other words, God has set a perfect existence for man, and wants man to reach it.

3-Man is not perfect when he is born.

4-Man cannot achieve the desired perfection that is considered as his aim without endeavor.

5-Not all kinds of endeavor can guide man to perfection; the endeavor that is based upon conscience and reason, and is supported by divine sermons given by prophets can do that.

6-The above-mentioned principles can flow through two kinds of affairs:

a)Non-voluntary affairs: Affairs that influence man's fate although he can do nothing to change them, like being born, having certain instincts, having wisdom and conscience, hereditary backgrounds, social and geographical conditions, etc. These non-voluntary affairs are related to God's justice, for if we suppose that the aim of creating man (evolution and improving and developing the human character) is related to these non-voluntary affairs, there is no way except God's justice to adjust them. 

b)Voluntary affairs: These affairs also influence man's fate. Non-voluntary affairs are related to God's justice, but these affairs are up to man himself.

7-Now we can present a definition of kindness: Kindness consists of a certain effect of God's justice that motivates man in the boundaries of lack of clarity, and can be voluntary or non-voluntary. 

The Consequences of the Rule of Kind Favors 

The following four conclusions can be made from the rule of kind favors:

1-All the divine knowledge man can gain comes from the rule of kind favors.

2-According to the rule of kind favors, there is a series of duties and instructions which must be fulfilled if the human character is to develop. 

3-The necessity to appoint leaders arises from the rule of kind favors.

4-The acceptance of the overall opinion of jurisprudential scholars, which is one of the sources of jurisprudence, is also based upon the rule of kind favors, for the rule of kindness says God prevents the leaders of a school of thoughts from falling into error – when the scholars confer, there is either disagreement or agreement, and the leader is in one of these two groups.

The Relationship between God and His Creatures

Ever since a long time ago, the relationship between "the existence that has to be" and "the existence that can be" – the creator and the creature – has been subject to debate. Since man gets most of his philosophical and scientific input from nature, he cannot discover exactly the relationship between God and the universe. Most of the material at hand on the subject is also mere personal ideas or literary metaphors that satisfy just a few. As the famous Iranian poet Sheikh Mahmoud Shabestari says,

عدم آيينه، عالم عکــس  و  انســانچو چشم عکس در وی شخص  پنهان

تو چشم عکسی و او نـور  ديده استبه ديده ديده، را ديده که ديـده است؟

جهان انسان شد و انسـان جهانــیاز اين پاکيــزه‌تر  نبــود  بيـــــانی

(Absent is the mirror, and the universe is like a reflection. Someone is hidden in him, like the eye of the reflection. You are the eye of the reflection, and He is the light of the eyes; who has ever seen that true light with his/her eyes? Indeed, man becomes the universe, and the universe becomes man can it be worded any better than that.) 

The universe being a picture of God in the mirror of oblivion is merely a metaphor, for oblivion is not a thing to be able to reflect the truth. Can infinity ever be reflected within finite components?

The relation we use in order to discover the relationship between God and the universe – the cause-and-effect relation – is not accurate. The law of causality is derived from things in this world, associating things with one another, but God cannot be compared to things found in nature. Normally, causes consist of a subject cause and also a material cause, whereas God, a subject cause, needs no material cause. Things in this world occupy space and time in regard to one another, but God does not; His position is high above others. Thus, the concepts we conclude from the phenomena and effects in nature cannot be used to interpret God's relationship with the universe.

Man can see the relationship between God and nature by referring to his own self, his own nature, for though the human soul and body interact, they are not at all one of a kind. Likewise, although God created this world, He had no need for materiality. The human soul can invent imaginations that are not comparable with it at all.