God saw all that he had made, and it was very good (Genesis 1:31).
I don’t think so!
I remember from early childhood being horrified by the brutality of war. I can’t remember where I first encountered stories or images of war, but my entire growing-up years were overshadowed by an absolute dread of it. I had years of night terrors about it and to this day (I’m over 70 now) I’m still too horrified to look at most images of war. They still shake and disturb me deeply.
It wasn’t until much later in my life that I realised there is a horror in this world more pervasive, more brutal and more unrelenting than the horror of war. It is the horror of nature.
We are used to the phrase “the beauty of Nature” but beneath its façade, nature is a huge and complex killing machine – indifferent, amoral, heartless. A colossal hierarchy of predatory violence and excruciating death.
This is one of the main reasons I don’t believe in a loving Creator. A hymn I used to sing in my youthful Christian days started: In the stars His handiwork I see. In the stars, perhaps. But down here on earth in the brutal daily carnage of the “food chain”, I see no such handiwork.
This world is no lover’s work. If it’s an “intelligent design”, as some Bible-believing Christians assert, then how sadistic and callous must the “intelligence” behind it be. Nobody with a grain of decency or compassion could look into this horror and say: This is very good. Perhaps the God of Genesis could see it, but I certainly can’t.
