There were a number of points in your last response where you attributed claims / implications to my view which I already explicitly denied. Such as:
To elaborate on that: God creates the non-elect for their own sake. The life he gives them is still good, even though it fails to attain to the ultimate good that God desires for them and offers to them (and even though that failure is an evil). It is only in a secondary sense that he creates them for the overall purpose of achieving the salvation of the elect.
This is perhaps easiest to see if one takes an annihilationist view (which is a biblically viable option, in my opinion), but it is still the case on the traditional view (eternal conscious torment) as well. On the traditional view, the torment of the damned in hell is the just punishment for rejecting God, the ultimate good, and continuing to do so for eternity (just as those who are saved continue to accept God and choose a right relationship with him forever, so those who are condemned continue to reject God and choose to sin forever). And just punishment of evil is itself a kind of good. (It is refraining from just punishment that would be injust and thus evil.)
If hell (or even annihilation) sounds like a disproportionate punishment to you (“reprehensible”, even), I suggest that stems from a differing view on the magnitude of the sin of rejecting the ultimate good. (And please recall that I believe everyone has the opportunity to go to heaven: no one in hell is there by hapless mistake.)
I never claimed that souls that enter hell were necessary in order to educate the elect. Here’s what I did say:
Which also belies your claim:
Because I never denied that it was unnecessary for some people. You are reading contradictions into what I have said, not out of it.
And where, exactly, did I imply this?!?
Correct that I see nothing wrong with God creating people he knows will end up in hell (with what I’ve said above in mind).
Wrong that their existence is irrelevant to the benefit of the elect - that fact that the existence of the damned is not necessary in the abstract for some people to be saved does not mean that there are not specific people (a vast number of them) who will be saved who could never have been saved, or who could never have even existed, without conditions contingent on the existence of those who will end up in hell.
Correct again that this mere benefit to the saved does not (at least by itself) justify God’s creating those who would end up in hell.
But wrong again for believing that creating them is reprehensible merely because they end up in hell. As I said above, their creation is, in fact, good. God allows them to bring their lives to evil, but his foreknowledge of that does not make him morally responsible for it. (I suppose I should have explicitly listed “Molinism satisfactorily resolves the tension between divine foreknowledge / predestination and human freedom” as one of my assumptions, since that plays in here.)
My apologies if any of these misunderstandings are my own fault, and sorry as well for becoming exasperated. Perhaps there is, as @AlanFox suggested, a lack of a shared language here.
In response to some of your other comments:
The alleged contradiction was between:
God uses his foreknowledge (specifically, middle knowledge) to ensure that, in the world he creates, everyone who is saved and enters heaven freely obeys him for eternity (though it is possible for us to choose to sin in heaven, in fact, we won’t. See Molinism for how that could work).
and:
To have free will while nonetheless being guaranteed to choose rightly, with no possibility of going wrong, requires having an infinite nature, i.e. being God.
There is no contradiction: in the first case I state that it is possible for the saved to sin in heaven, but God uses his middle knowledge to make sure it doesn’t happen. The second case is discussing a being for which there is no such possibility. A grasp of how Molinism resolves the tension between divine providence and free will helps to see the distinction I am making here (and also how God could accomplish what I suggest in my point 5), but I don’t have time for a crash course.
In the broader view that I’m assuming with my point 8 earlier, everything is dependent for its identity on the way it comes into existence. An acorn that grows naturally can’t be the exact same acorn that God creates supernaturally in some other possible world, for example - they have different origins. This dependence is metaphysically necessary, something even God does not have control over, because nothing has an identity until it exists, so the identities of things only come into existence alongside the things themselves (and can’t be interchanged with the identities of other things). That’s the basic idea, at least.
Given this, the soul’s identity is tied to the identity of the body, since it comes into existence bound to that body. And the identity of the body is just as tied to its physical origins. Nevertheless, this does not mean that the soul can’t be separated from the body at death - its identity is dependent on the body, but not its continued existence.
God could, perhaps, create souls separately and attach them to bodies, but he has not done this, and that would be to create different kinds of beings than he has in our case - essentially spiritual beings only contingently attached to bodies.
To reiterate:
And appearance is not identity.
This is part of the “lack of shared language” problem. In these eschatological discussions (about heaven and hell in the future, after everyone’s mortal life has concluded), the Christian conception of “heaven” is more properly “the new heavens and the new earth” - a recreated material universe (albeit changed more fully permeated by spiritual reality). What exactly that will look like is not something any of us know, of course, but it seems safe to assume that it will be temporal. Building a clock will probably not be first on anyone’s priorities, but it should be possible to do so. 