Cognitivity of Divine Attributes and Their Semantics from Mulla Sadra's Perspective

Understanding the divine attributes and clarifying their meaning accurately has always been one of the challenges of Islamic thinkers. Through distinguishing between concept and instance, Mulla Sadra tried to devise a method through which he could foreground the cognitivity of divine attributes without making them equal to creatures’ attributes. From Mulla Sadra’s point of view, God’s attributes like knowledge, power, eternal-living and agency are similar to existence as a universal fact which applies to all beings.  In some passages, Mulla Sadra denies the conceptual synonymy of the divine attributes, and in some others, he accepts it. This difference can be attributed to the oneness and unity of God, the Almighty. According to Mulla Sadra in relation to God’s predicative attributes, one should pay attention to the essence of meaning. This method, which is the method of science advocates, does not lead to meaning interpretation of the verses of the Qur'an and does not contradict the form of the verses. It, in fact, complements the literal meaning.