Michael: Temptation and adversity may be necessary for growth and character development, but God doesn’t have to create impersonal forces (or mindless robots) to provide these things. Imperfect creatures will create their own trials (and will either be better or worse for the experience).
Tom: I’m late posting as usual. There are several moving pieces to this convo. Thought I’d toss in a few comments and see where they land.
Michael, your comments here pretty much reflect standard soul-making theodicy I think. I have a lot of respect for this position. Most forms of this explanation of evil in the world answer your opening question (to this thread) that there’s just no way God could have created beings ‘perfected’ in the full sense of the word (i.e., with fully developed moral characters, viz., as perfectly loving) apart from progressing into such a state. And with that much I absolutely agree. There’s just no creating beings who are perfectly loving and fully personal from the get go. That sort of character and personal identity—for created, finite creatures—are creative achievements. What God ‘is’, we have to ‘become’. There’s no creating us–poof–finished products.
Where I part from standard soul-making theodicies is that they posit the necessity of actual moral evil (sin) and I’m very suspicious of this. I think I could see my way through to positing the necessity of ‘suffering’ per se (natural evil, for example), but not moral evil. I think I can conceive of a world that was risky and unpredictable and which could ‘hurt’ us, but in which no rational creature need choose to mistrust God. Naturally, I’m separating certain kinds of ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’ from ‘evil’ and ‘sin’. Most like to equate them. I don’t know that that has to be the case.
What I do think has to be the case is the ‘possibility’ for moral evil. If humans are purposed (even in part) for loving, personal relations, then they have to possess the capacity to choose their way into such a state, and that means the capacity for moral evil (sin). This is all standard stuff. My point is that I think I see a need for ‘actual’ pain and suffering in the world, but only the ‘possibility’ of sin. If that’s not maintainable and I have to marry them, fine. I do wonder whether God, in considering this whole project, does not know that eventually moral evil will erupt and pervert creation. (I’m coming at this as an open theist, remember.) And if I’m wrong about separating some forms of ‘pain/suffering’ from moral ‘evil’, then God would know that eventually sin and pain and suffering would occur and spread, in which case I’d be inclined to say nothing connected to ‘sin’ and ‘evil’ is ‘necessary’ to human becoming. I’d jettison the soul-making project at that time, because for me (thanks to David Hart) evil can have nothing positive to add to the explication of created beauty. With the Eastern Orthodox, I’ll argue that ‘evil’ is pure ‘privation’.
About ‘perfection’ though. This admits degrees I think; “perfection with respect to.” Perfection with respect to a two year old will require a height and weight different than perfection in the case of an adult. True, God is unsurpassably perfect (necessarily so). We are created surpassably perfect—that is, we were created all we needed to be in order to become all God intends us to become. We can call this imperfect so long as we don’t read that ‘negatively’ and can say, with God, upon contemplating it, “Hey, that’s ‘good’. I like what I see.” The point is that finiteness, dependency, the capacity to grow, etc., are in fact ‘necessary’ to our ‘becoming’ what God intends. And in Gregory of Nyssa’s view they’re a permanent feature of human being even after the perfections involved in glorification. In his view we’ll always be finite, dependent upon grace, and have the capacity to grow into more of God (even if we WILL finally escape the necessity of libertarian choice and thus risk). That’s why these features of creaturliness (is that a word?) can be “good” (as created, not as marred by sin) even if they’re destined for an ultimate perfection.
Just thoughts,
Tom
And then there’s the dang agnostic doubters 
It isn’t even, and cannot be, a personal estimation of the value of CMI on this or any other topic–only an inductive expectation based on the state of TBW that same year as CMI’s release. Inductive expectations can be falsified pretty easily sometimes. 
)
) just fits the world as I see it.