Why Did the All-Loving God Create a World with Pain and Suffering?

How is it possible that a Creator, so full of love, created a world and a nature where animals can live only by killing other animals that have to endure terrible pain and suffering? Nobody can give me a satisfactory answer. If men kill each other, it is sin; they need not. But, animals cannot live without killing the other animals for food. What do you say ? We are anxious for your opinion.

Swami Sivananda, "God's love for the created universe knows no bounds; He cannot be held responsible for the experiences of created beings. God does not punish or reward anyone in a personal way; it is one's own actions, sinful or good, that works as the cause of experience here.

"As the human being is endowed with moral sense and as he is invested with the consciousness of doership and responsibility, he imposes this sense of morality and responsibility of action on sub-human beings also. The defect, therefore, lies in man and not in the animals which act without any consciousness of ethical conduct, and spontaneously, free from the responsibility connected with doership or agency.

"No action can produce a retributive effect unless it is done with the consciousness of personal doership and responsibility. Man shall be punished by retributive justice, for man has the freedom to act and he is responsible for what he does. But animals have not been endowed with such a freedom and power of understanding and reason; so what they do is just the expression of the instinctive natural promptings in them and this is included in the scheme of the universal nature. Nature is beyond moral laws. Moral conduct is only for man, meant to restrict his behaviour and lead him on to universal consciousness through gradual ascent along the evolutionary ladder.

"All things born must die. And there should be some immediate cause for the destruction of things. This cause of destruction may be another animal, an earthquake, a thunder-stroke, flood, disease, storm or any such thing. These should not be clothed with moral and ethical values except when these are concerned with human agency."

An excerpt from "May I Answer That?"