World Scripture Ⅱ
Part One - God and Creation
Chapter 1 - God
10) God’s Goodness
2. God’s Goodness Manifest in the Creation
Religious scriptures
God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
Genesis 1.31
He has created the seven heavens in harmony. You cannot see a fault in the Beneficent One’s creation; look again, can you see any flaws? Look again and yet again, and your sight will grow dim and weak [without finding any.]
Qur’an 67.3-4
This world is a garden, The Lord its gardener, Cherishing all, none neglected.
Adi Granth, Majh Ashtpadi, M.3, p. 118 (Sikhism)
Abundant is the year, with much millet and much rice; And we have our high granaries, With myriads, and hundreds of thousands, and millions of measures; For spirits and sweet spirits, To present our ancestors, male and female, And to supply all our ceremonies. The blessings sent down on us are of every kind.
Book of Songs, Ode 279 (Confucianism)
It is He who sends down to you out of heaven water of which you may drink, and by which grow trees, for you to pasture your herds, and thereby He brings forth for you crops, and olives, and palms, and vines, and all manner of fruit. Surely in that is a sign for a people who reflect. And He subjected for you the night and day, and the sun and moon; and the stars are subjected by His command. Surely in that are signs for a people who understand.
And He has multiplied for you in the earth things of diverse hues. Surely in that is a sign for a people who remember. It is He who subjected for you the sea, that you may eat of it fresh flesh, and bring forth out of it ornaments for you to wear; and you may see the ships cleaving through it; that you may seek of His bounty, and so haply you will be thankful… If you count God’s blessing, you can never number it; surely God is All-forgiving, All-compassionate.
Qur’an 16.10-18
The great Tao flows everywhere; It can go left; it can go right. The myriad things owe their existence to it, And it does not reject them. When its work is accomplished, It does not take possession. It clothes and feeds all, But does not pose as their master. Ever without ambition, It may be called Small. All things return to it as their home, And yet it does not pose as their master, Therefore it may be called Great. Because it would never claim greatness, Therefore its greatness is fully realized.
Tao Te Ching 34 (Taoism)
Let me tell you then why the Creator made this world of generation. He was good, and the good can never have any jealousy of anything. And being free from jealousy, he desired that all things should be as like himself as they could be. This is in the truest sense the origin of creation and of the world, as we shall do well in believing on the testimony of wise men: God desired that all things should be good and nothing bad, so far as this was attainable. Therefore also finding the whole visible sphere not at rest, but moving in an irregular and disorderly fashion, out of disorder he brought order, considering that this was in every way better than the other.
Now the deeds of the best could never be or have been other than the fairest; and the Creator, reflecting on the things which are by nature visible, found that no unintelligent creatures taken as a whole were fairer than the intelligent taken as a whole; and that intelligence could not be present in anything that was devoid of soul. For which reason, when he was framing the universe, he put intelligence in soul, and soul in body, that he might be the creator of a work which was by nature fairest and best. Wherefore, using the language of probability, we may say that the world became a living creature truly endowed with soul and intelligence by the providence of God. Plato, Timaeus (Hellenism)
The primary cause of the pure unity of Enlightenment and Nirvana that has existed from beginningless time is the principle of integrating compassion, the indrawing, unifying principle of purity, harmony, likeness, rhythm, permanency, and peace. By the indrawing of this Principle within the brightness of your own nature, its unifying spirit can be discovered and developed and realized under all varieties of conditions. Surangama Sutra (Buddhism)
Teachings of Sun Myung Moon
When looking at reality from the perspective of love, God is the root. The root communicates through the stem to the sprouting leaves, which spread out in all directions: east, west, south and north. As the plant spreads out, its leaves sprout more abundantly, the stem grows stronger and the root grows larger. Live like this, and you will discover that God is the loving vertical Father of our human world. God is our Creator and Father who bestows true love in abundance.
(203:352, June 28, 1990)
Everything exists for the sake of something greater than itself, and the greater thing for something still greater. It is wrong to think that life is simply about the strong eating the weak, as Charles Darwin taught. That perspective on life is dead wrong. The Lord of the universe—the Creator of the universe—created all things for the sake of human beings. All creatures were created with that specific purpose in mind. (217:204, June 1, 1991)
God is the omnipotent and omniscient King of wisdom. In creating the universe of subject-object relationships, He had to decide whether the origin of true love, true happiness, true peace and the true ideal of the human world should be in the subject partner or in the object partner. God had to decide on this matter with the eternal ideal world in mind.
If God had set things up in such a way that all object beings must serve Him, then human beings would establish that same tradition: “Everyone must serve me.” This would have created serious problems. There would be no way to achieve unity, harmony or development.
Thus we understand: rather than demanding that object partners attend the subject partner, God invariably takes the position that He exists for the sake of His object partners. This way, everything becomes one; there is progress and development. Hence, the almighty God decided to set up the standard of peace, happiness, love and the ideal as “living for the sake of others.”
(72:14, May 7, 1974)