All Muslims all over the world believe that God Almighty is transcendent and beyond all physical limitations of man, so through the medium of an angel, God causes His command to be revealed to His human messengers and thus to mankind. The purpose of our life on this earth is to worship God and obey His commands. Through His Grace and Benevolence, God sent prophets and messengers to every nation, in order to communicate with and guide mankind to the right path.
The prophets who were sent to mankind include (among others) Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Moses, David, Jesus, and finally, Muhammad (peace be upon all of Allah's prophets). These (and many other) chosen men all came with the same message: Islam. That is, they taught of faith in One Almighty God, faith in the Day of Judgment, faith in the Prophets and the Books, and asked people consequently to live a life of obedience and submission to their Lord. This is how Muslims identify themselves.
Whereas classical Greek religion ascribed to the gods very human foibles, theism from Plato onward has affirmed that God is purely good and could not be the author of anything evil (Republic). In Judaism divine goodness is thought to be manifested especially in the giving of the law (Torah). In Islam it is thought to be manifested in divine revelation of truth through the prophets, especially as revealed in the Qur'an. And in Christianity it is manifested in the gracious granting of Christ as the way of salvation.
While goodness encompasses all moral perfection (e.g., truth telling, justice), benevolence is that particular aspect of goodness that wills the benefit of another. The Reformers, and Protestantism generally, stressed that God's desire for the benefit of creatures is dependent not on their merits but purely on divine love. Divine love is not only irrespective of merit but it is shown most clearly where it is entirely unmerited, as in grace shown to fallen humanity. Therefore divine forgiveness and redemption are taken as the highest expressions of benevolence. Benevolence intersects with omnipotence in providence, wherein God orders events for good ends. It also raises the possibility of a clash between the divine and human wills, as when a person spurns God's action in the world.
Divine goodness raises the question of whether God wills x because it is good, or x is good because God wills it. The former seems to weaken divine sovereignty, but the latter seems to make goodness arbitrary. The arbitrariness may be somewhat relieved if God's will is understood as bounded by his unchanging character. God would not, for example, decide to make torturing for enjoyment right since his nature forever condemns it. The issue has implications for divine command ethics, according to which acts are right or wrong because God commands or forbids them (as opposed to, for example, a competing view that acts are right or wrong according to whether they promote the greatest happiness).
As to our knowledge of divine goodness, Aquinas separates the order of being from the order of knowing: all goodness derives from God but we understand divine goodness by extrapolating from the goodness of creatures. For Aquinas, this requires an analogical (as opposed to an equivocal) relationship between divine and human goodness. For Kant, divine goodness is known as a postulate of pure practical reason: God must be there to reward virtue and punish evil.
The greatest challenge to belief in divine goodness has been the fact that evil exists, or more recently, the amount and type of evil rather than the mere fact of it. The problem is lessened if it is acknowledged that divine goodness does not require that each creature always be made to experience as much happiness as it is capable of experiencing. Reasons may include, for example, that: it is impossible that all creatures collectively experience maximal happiness (e.g., because the maximal happiness of one precludes the maximal happiness of another), or that there is some higher good than the happiness of all creatures (e.g., John Hick's view that maturity is that higher good, and acquiring it may entail some displeasure), or that some forms of good are manifested only when certain types of evil exist or because God's favor is undeserved and not given in response to merit, it cannot be owed and God cannot be faulted for not giving it.
Benevolent: kind, caring, compassionate, generous, giving, benign, munificent
Thomas Aquinas(1225–7 March 1274) was an Italian Catholic priest in the Dominican Order, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the scholastic tradition, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Universalis and Doctor Communis. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of the Thomistic school of philosophy and theology. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy was conceived as a reaction against, or as an agreement with, his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law and political theory.
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