God does not create everything with a separate and discrete exercise of His will...

God does not create everything with a separate and discrete exercise of His will; His will is not exercised individually. The entire world from beginning to end came into being with a single exercise of His will; it was this that enabled creatures in their infinite multiplicity to come into being. There is, then, a specific law and order that regulates all the dimensions of creation. Within the framework of causality, it assigns a particular rank and position to everything.

God's will to create and regulate the world is equivalent to His willing order in it. There are definite philosophical proofs in support of this proposition, and it is also expounded in the Qur’an: "We created everything with a certain quantity and limit; Our act is but one, like the blink of an eye." (54:49-50) It would be wrong to imagine that the differentiation and relations established by God in His creation are the same as the conventional relations existing in human society.

God's connection with His creatures is not a mere convention or perceptual matter; it is a connection deriving from the very act of creation. The order that He has placed in all things is the result of His creating it. Every being receives from God the amount of perfection and beauty it is able to receive. If there were no particular order regulating the world, any being might, in the course of its motions, give rise to any other being, and cause and effect might switch places.

But it must be understood that the essential interrelations among things are fixed and necessary; the station and property bestowed on a thing adheres inseparably to it, whatever rank and degree of existence it may have. No phenomenon can go beyond the degree that has been fixed for it and occupy the degree of another being. Differentiation is a concomitant of the degrees of being, assigning to them differing amounts of weakness and strength, deficiency and perfection.

It would be discrimination if two phenomena had the same capacity to receive perfection but it was given only to one of them and denied to the other. The degrees of being that exist in the order of creation cannot be compared with the conventional ranks of human society. They are real, not conventional, and not transferable.