The Bible paints God as suffering and experiencing real pain
whenever He sees even a little sparrow fall wounded to the ground (Matthew 10:29) or when He sees animals in general suffer and die (Jonah 4:11, Proverbs 12:10).
It also paints God as wishing to create a place where sentient animals do not harm or eat each other – where lions, leopards, wolves, calves, lambs and little children, current natural enemies, co-exist happily and peacefully together in the world made new as it was originally intended to be (Isaiah 11:6).
It is hard to imagine then that such a God would deliberately create using a painful and evil mechanism of the “survival of the fittest”, where carnivorous animals are “red in tooth and claw” in a place with untold amounts of suffering, pain, and death for billions upon billions of sentient creatures over vast eons of time, and then call it “very good” (Genesis 1:31)."
Sean Pitman
