"...sadly, if God exists, then He has chosen cunningly to hide His existence from most of His creatures. Indeed a physicist once noted that things make much more sense if you assume the world was created not by an all-good and all-powerful being, but by one that is 100 percent malevolent yet only 90 percent effective. If He does lurk benevolently in the background, on the other hand, then one must presumably be confident that He is greater in not just the depth but also the range of His compassion than we are... Statistically, the bulk of the world's suffering is undergone by members of other species. Sometimes the anguish is quite ghastly and prolonged. Such suffering doesn't, even notionally, have any redeeming features. It isn't character-building. It never issues in great art and literature. Thus it can't even support the kinds of sophistry we use to rationalise our own ills... Mercifully, however, the anguish and malaise of non-humans from the biological Nightmare Era is likely to be phased out too. For there's no need to pay homage to the product of selfish genes as though self-replicating DNA were some sort of secular equivalent to Providence. The genetically pre-programmed well-being of the post-Transition epoch shouldn't, and probably won't, remain arbitrarily species-specific...."
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