Millions of years of animal suffering and predation, long before humans existed to sin, cannot be squared with a good Creator.

Why people find it persuasive

Animal suffering seems especially hard because the standard 'free will' and 'moral growth' explanations for human suffering do not obviously apply — animals are not moral agents making free choices, and much of this suffering (predation, parasitism, natural disaster deaths) predates any human wrongdoing by hundreds of millions of years according to the standard scientific timeline.

Important distinctions

• • Human moral evil (arising from free will) vs. natural evil affecting non-human creatures.
• • Suffering as subjectively experienced pain vs. the philosophical question of whether all animal experience involves suffering in the morally weighty sense humans mean.
• • A world with no natural evil whatsoever vs. a world operating by stable natural laws that make complex embodied life (including moral agents) possible at all.
• • Theological explanations that require certainty vs. those that only need to show the objection is not a strict logical disproof.

Christian response

• • Concede this is widely regarded, including by thoughtful Christian philosophers like Michael Murray and C.S. Lewis, as one of the hardest versions of the problem of evil — it deserves engagement rather than a quick dismissive answer, and honest apologetics should say so upfront rather than pretending an easy solution exists.
• • Present the 'nomic regularity' response: a universe with the kind of stable, exceptionless natural laws required for the emergence of complex life, including embodied free moral agents like humans, will also produce, as a side effect of those same reliable laws, events like predation, disease, and natural disasters — a world finely tuned to prevent every instance of animal pain might be a world too chaotic or too different in kind to support life and morally significant freedom at all.
• • Raise the question of animal consciousness carefully rather than dismissively: there is real, ongoing scientific and philosophical uncertainty about the nature and depth of subjective experience across the animal kingdom — nociception (a physical pain response) is well documented far more broadly than higher-order, self-aware suffering is, and this doesn't eliminate the problem for higher animals but does complicate blanket claims about 'millions of years of animal suffering' being uniform across all species.
• • Introduce theological proposals some Christian thinkers have offered without treating any as certain: that some animal suffering may be part of a not-yet-completed created order awaiting the redemption Paul describes as applying to 'creation itself' (Romans 8:19-22), or that predation and death entered a temporal order that was, in some theological accounts, affected by a fall not strictly confined to a single historical moment in human experience — these are proposals under real theological debate, not settled doctrine.
• • Return to the larger cumulative case: even a hard, unresolved difficulty like this does not by itself refute theism unless it can be shown to be logically incompatible with God's existence (which very few philosophers, theist or atheist, now argue), so the honest position is that this counts as significant evidential weight against theism that other evidence must be weighed against, not a knockout argument.

Christian counterresponse

Defenders of the nomic-regularity approach argue the scale objection actually supports rather than undermines their response: if a lawlike universe reliably produces both the goods of complex embodied life and its side-effect costs, we should expect exactly this kind of pervasive pattern rather than isolated incidents, which is consistent with (rather than embarrassing for) the 'stable natural order as a necessary condition for greater goods' framework.