Sure, keeping in mind that God “lets in” everyone willing to submit to him in obedience, which, by one of my assumptions, is a necessary condition for heaven to work. (I take WLC’s view that God makes salvation available to everyone whether they’ve heard of Jesus or not, though Christ’s death and resurrection is still the basis of that salvation.)
Nope.
If God chose to only create the people who he knew would be saved in this world, that would place those people in different circumstances, in which they could very easily make different choices and end up not being saved after all. Also, it probably is not possible to create only those people who would be saved, particularly given my assumption about essentiality of origins.
Skipping to that point:
That assumes that our souls are completely independent of our bodies, as if God can attach any soul to any body whatsoever. Such a view effectively takes human beings to be entirely spiritual, rather than both physical and spiritual. The majority Christian views (as far as I know) is that our souls and bodies are much more tightly interdependent than that - the identity of the soul does not float free of the body it is created for.
(Also, essentiality of origins seems an entirely reasonable metaphysical view about the individuation of substances, but I don’t have any desire to wade deeper into those weeds at this time.)
It doesn’t have to be. This brief life on earth is enough to mold us for, say, the first few years in heaven. Then our brief life on earth plus those first few years in heaven are enough to mold us for the next few years in heaven. And so on. So some of it does happen in heaven.
Lapses would make it short of the perfect environment required for heaven by my first assumption.
He condemns some people to hell - yes, even though he loves them - because they reject the necessary condition for entering heaven (obedience to God, which is necessary for the perfect relationships that make heaven what it is). He allows some to die as babies or be tortured because he ultimately brings good out of those evil circumstances - e.g. their eternal life that far outweighs any suffering on earth, say.
Are we going for volume? More people saved is better in some sense, but it is more complicated than that - see my response to @SlightlyOddGuy.
As for the non-elect, certainly they are considered too. God loves them and they have unique worth to him as well. Because he loves them, he gives them the opportunity to be saved just as the elect. He wants them to take that opportunity, and it is within their power to do so. But they don’t.
So in one sense God creates the non-elect for the same reason he creates the elect - he loves them, he wants to have a relationship with them, and they have unique value as persons themselves (their mere existence is itself something good). Because of that they are not “sacrificed” for the sake of the elect. They are ends in themselves and not mere means. But he also knows that they won’t ultimately be saved, so in a secondary sense he creates them so that he can bring other goods out of their circumstances as well (e.g. the salvation of the elect).
Seems time enough for me. What makes you think more time wouldn’t just result in people becoming more set in their ways, rather than changing their minds?
Of course, in some sense it certainly isn’t fair that some people get more time than others. But I doubt perfect goodness requires fairness in that sense (of exactly equal circumstances). It just requires that God judge everyone with the circumstances that he did place them in taken into consideration.
First, what keeps the Christian from sin in heaven (perfectly) is the same thing that keeps us from sin on earth (imperfectly) - namely, reliance on God’s power to do what is right. As for how we go from imperfectly relying on his power to perfectly doing so, there are a couple of options. Maybe it is a sudden transformation, but it is one that we undertake by choice. Or maybe we undergo a gradual transformation in our disembodied state between death and resurrection. Or maybe we undergo a gradual transformation after the resurrection, during the millennium of Revelation 20 and the subsequent judgement. Or maybe there isn’t any intrinsic difference, and God has just chosen a world where everyone who has been saved freely refrains from sin for eternity.
Reflection on my own life is sufficient to make it quite plausible to me that moral growth can come from times of difficultly or experiencing moral failure (and the consequences thereof). I suppose your mileage may vary. Note that I did not say that it is necessary:
I’m not claiming that he can’t, just that we aren’t those kinds of beings. Nevertheless, it remains good for God to create beings like us (see again my comments about there being many ways things can be good).
This is perhaps veering into a tangent, but let’s say God could have created beings that don’t learn from experience and instead just know things immediately and innately. In fact, that’s what some philosophers (Aquinas, perhaps most famously) say angels are. The downside being that, because they don’t learn from experience, don’t perceive the world they way we do, they can’t change their minds once they make a decision, and so aren’t capable of redemption (explaining why Scripture seems to indicate the humans, but not fallen angels, are able to be saved). Now, the reasoning behind that gets into metaphysical issues that I’m still working through, so for now just take that as one perspective. But if you’re curious, Ed Feser writes something about it here.
Again, I never claimed it was neccessary in all cases. So, for example, I think that God (again, using middle knowledge / foreknowledge) could arrange things so that those babies or children who die before being old enough to be held morally accountable would freely choose to obey God and so are saved.
God can create a world that began to exist 5 minutes ago with the appearance of billions of years of age, but not a world that began to exist 5 minutes ago with actual billions of years of age. If something has an essential dependence on a history (such as beings who learn from experience), God can’t create them without creating that history - the alternative is just a facsimile.
This isn’t to deny that God could have created a world entirely populated by people who get that experience in heaven, like babies who die very early on in life as I suggested above. It’s simply to say that he has chosen not to do so - or at least, he has chosen to create people who do reside in this mortal coil for a time as well. And I see nothing wrong with that. I am glad, after all, to be alive, despite life not being perfect - and throughout the history of the church many saints who have experienced tremendous suffering have still said, at the end of their lives, that God is good.