To preface this argument, I am presupposing the existence of the all-loving/all-powerful notion of God. God is the architect of nature according to theists. The Fall/Free Will are typically the explanation for human-caused suffering which we will also accept for the sake of this argument.
The deeper question I have is why would an all-loving, all-powerful God design the mechanisms of flourishing to necessitate and enable suffering. Specifically I’m addressing two biological mechanisms. The requirement to consume other creatures to persist, and the need for sexual reproduction to endure beyond ourselves. Both give rise to great pleasures of life. However they are also sources of physical and sexual violence alike. Billions upon billions of creatures have carried immense suffering, pain and fear from this inbuilt design. Despite this, God also created photosynthesis and asexual reproduction, so we’ve seen the blueprints for other options yet this was chosen so there must be a good reason.
Preempting some responses, I understand that love may be seen as only possible because of loss, or that food is only good because of hunger. But this assumes that sexual reproduction is necessary for love itself. A parent’s grief, sibling bonds, deep friendship, compassion for a stranger are examples that require attachment, vulnerability and the possibility of loss, but none of those require sexual reproduction specifically. Asexual humans would still have parents, children, friends, communities. They would still lose people. They would still sacrifice for each other. The architecture of love remains.
Our all-loving God himself loves and God is not a sexually reproducing being. Divine love exists entirely outside of sexual reproduction. This framework already contains a model of the deepest possible love with no reproductive mechanism attached. So why couldn’t that model have been extended to creatures made in God’s image? God loves without sexual reproduction, so beings made in his image doing the same presents no logical contradiction.
Of course no one can know the mind of God, but if I had the choice, I would give up the pleasures of eating and sex in a heartbeat to never see another creature suffer or a child traumatised from sexual abuse. So why as a limited human, do I have the will to sacrifice two of life’s greatest pleasures if there was a guarantee that no creature would ever be torn limb from limb again or no child ever be taken advantage of sexually?
If God has given me the mental faculties to find these decisions unjust, then all I can do is align my values to my sense of justice.
So if I accepted God’s decision here as a justified part of his design, I feel like I would be accepting child sexual abuse as cosmically justified collateral. If my judgement is wrong, then God has made my recoiling at a structural feature of his design that enables child abuse, a defect of my mind. But if I’m right, then perhaps the real test of existence is not to outsource your morals to scripture as a proxy for God’s mind.