The Food Chain … Where is God’s Love? Posted in: Suffering and an all-powerful benevolent God

Lapwing Chick (Springwatch BBC 2009)

Beautiful and wonderful as nature undoubtedly is, it has a very dark side as well: The body of one species is always food for another. We call this the food chain.

For most species, their choice of food seems to happen instinctively. By design you could say.

The body of one species being food for another … where is God’s love in this design? How is this arrangement consistent with the idea of an all-powerful and benevolent God?

Kestrel and Chicks - they ate the Lapwing chicks! (Springwatch BBC 2009)

Even if you try to answer this question by distancing God from the design …call it karma … call it sinful reaction … call it whatever, still you come back to the problem that an all-powerful God can, but chooses not to, change the arrangement. Is it therefore possible that the design actually represents God’s love?

I think the answer is yes. I propose that it is actually God’s self-love, and by extension of self, love of us also. My proposition only really makes sense when one focuses on the oneness of the living entity with God. In fact the problem posed by the question seems to evapourate when we consider it from the oneness point of view, because it is no longer a case of God doing it to us, or letting it happen to us, but more God doing it to Him/Herself. More on the philosphy of simultaneous oneness and difference (acintya-bhedābheda-tattva) at wikipedia here

It all comes back to what we are doing here. To what God is looking to achieve in the form of the jivas (individual spirit souls) in the material world. I believe that against the myriad of back-drops provided by the material energy, and the experiences/emotions that they facilitate, God is expanding the completeness of His enjoyment. In the material world he does so as us. Those enjoyments are not one-sided. They include the dark as well as the light.

And that God might enjoy the dark side … is that so hard to accept? Haven’t you ever enjoyed being frightened by a horror movie?