In a comment to the previous post, Jeremy said:

And if [the new creation] is “a brand new order of a completely different kind” then why didn’t God create it that way in the first place. If I recall, Keith Ward said that the universe as it exists may be the only kind in which we can have life as we know it. If we say that God can eliminate suffering and death in this universe as it stands in the age to come then that aggravates the problem of theodicy.

This isn’t a question I have anything like satisfying answer to, but here’s an idea I’ve been kicking around: Maybe if God wants to raise human beings to blessedness, he has to create this kind of world.

My reasoning is that, just as my personal history is an essential part of my identity, the history of the human species is an essential part of its identity. For God to simply create creatures like us in an immediate state of blessedness would not be to create human beings, but some other kind of creature (however much they might resemble us in certain ways).

Consider: if God were to create a replica of me as I now exist in a state of blessedness, would it be me? I want to say no because who I am essentially includes my personal history. Even if the heavenly replica-Lee had all my memories, they would be false memories since he wouldn’t have actually lived through the experiences that they were memories of.

By the same kind of reasoning, maybe the long evolutionary history of humanity is an essential part of us. Human-like creatures created in an immediate state of blessedness simply wouldn’t be human beings since they wouldn’t be the heirs of human biological history. If they were close enough replicas they might have the characteristics of humans, but those characteristics wouldn’t be the result of the same process that created us.

So, I’m suggesting that for God to destine specifically human creatures for blessedness requires creating creatures who pass through the specifically human process of development. Anything else would not be human beings, however valuable they might be in their own right. And creating human beings requires a world in all essential respects like our world, since its only in a world like ours that specifically human beings could come to be. (Tradition obviously holds that God did create rational beings in blessedness, but they’re angels, not humans.)

This is all highly speculative, of course. So, let me buttress the case a bit with some considerations from the Christian tradition. Christian theology has usually held that the condition of the blessed redeemed is superior to the original condition of Adam and Eve in the garden. Redemption is not simply a restoration of Eden, but a transition to a higher state. So it seems that humanity was always destined for a journey from a less exalted state to a more exalted one; going through a historical process is essential to our destiny.

Another consideration: creation, in the opening chapters of Genesis, is said to be good, not perfect. This allows for a development or process toward better things, even if we recognize that at some point humanity went off the rails into sin and away from God’s intentions. (This is a more “Irenaean” picture of the fall than an Augustinian one.)

Finally: a robust minority tradition in Christian theology has held that, even if there had been no fall, God would still have become incarnate to unite human nature to the Divine, and to manifest the divine love to creation. This also seems to imply that humanity was not created in an original state of perfect blessedness, but with a potential for that state – being united in the closest possible relationship with God.

So, there are both theological and broadly philosophical reasons for thinking that some kind of process of development, some kind of journey, is essential to what it means to be human. This suggests that, if God wanted to create human beings and raise them to communion with the divine life, then it was necessary to create them as part of an unfolding, historical process rather than in an immediate state of static perfection. And that only after becoming the kinds of beings we are can we be raised to communion with the divine life. And it may further be that such a process inherently involves the possibility of suffering, death, and sin.

Like I said: extremely speculative and not completely satisfactory.