note that I believe that the first 11 chapters of Genesis have only a meaning based on correspondences and not a literal or historical sense. Still, let us examine the story of the creation of Adam and Eve for its spiritual meaning. In that story, God did create Adam almost immediately. Adam (and Eve) were ‘very good’ and lived full of innocent, unashamed and wonderful love in the Garden of Eden. But look what happened next: there was a ‘fall’ within the first generation! This was hardly a robust life. Adam and Eve were thin-skinned rather than thick-skinned individuals. And look what prompted their fall in this story: it was the desire of Eve to ‘be as gods, knowing good and evil’. To want to ‘be as a god’ is to fail to realize that one can not be a god. It is to argue from appearance and to forget that one has life only ‘as if’ from God. These newly created individuals lacked a robust intellectual discrimination concerning even a fundamental truth of theism. They were therefore easily led astray by superficial and erroneous conclusions.*
To create permanent and robust individuals, they must be developed so that, at every stage of their life, they are thick-skinned, which is to have a substantial history of physical actions in the past and mental and spiritual lives built on that. Since not even God can create history, this means that a longer and slower process of creation is needed if a race of people is to be developed who have fully-developed and long-lasting characters to be loved and to love in return.
The creation of such people must be gradual, by means of a series of beings that themselves have their own personal histories. The process may only start by some simpler physical action by God if one could be found that did not require a history of its own. Once such an ab initio physical event has occurred, all subsequent actions must be gradual and by means of successive modifications of what already exists. This is what we (should) call evolution. It is needed by God. Not Darwinian evolution of course, but something different that we might call theistically driven evolution, a subject for further discussion. There can be no immediate creation of new beings, neither plants, nor animals, nor humans. There are no instant adults. There can only be gradual internal modifications of already-existing beings. God has to be patient.
These arguments concerning biological evolution may hardly be widespread among religious people or theologians today, but surely they can see the same logic at work in the development of individual spiritual lives and in the creation of new religions or churches. When developing our spiritual life, God works with what we are and tries to improve that. Such changes cannot be sudden, or we would lose our sense of individual existence. That certainly could not be permitted. Some will argue that the influx of grace may have a sudden effect and that the creation of a new religion by revelation or incarnation is surely a sudden process. My answer is that gratuitous grace has indeed dramatic influence, but the real task of religion is afterwards, when we return to our original lives and diligently seek to modify our previous habits into the new pattern that was briefly glimpsed. With Paul, the well-known recipient of grace, the assimilation took more than ten years, probably fourteen years! It is similar with new religions. Miracles do convert quickly. Jesus always asked beforehand whether the person was prepared: whether he or she ‘had faith’. That meant there would be some continuity even in these miraculous cases. It is well known that the receivers of a new religion are often recalcitrant in keeping their old rituals that are supposed to be given up. The greatest number of religious conversions are by assimilation rather than by replacement precisely because of the need for continuity in our most permanent biological and spiritual lives.
* Such superficial conclusions are those reached on the basis of only appearance and external knowledge and not on understanding or wisdom. To conclude on the ba