The issue about the cruelty of nature is not that nature is evil, it by no means is. It is natural, it does what it needs to survive, and is free from good or evil. It's an issue of quality of life, and use of power.
Say you have a choice. Say you can make something suffer (and not as punishment of anykind, just making something suffer for the sake of suffering), or you can make something not suffer, which would be the morally demanded choice? To make something suffer without cause would be cruel, especially if it was completely unnecessary and within your power to prevent.
God Created the earth (I don't believe that, but for arguments sake we'll say he did). He created it from scratch, he could create it anyway he wanted it, it's within his power. What loving choice did god make? He chose suffering. He could make it so all natural life feeds off of sunlight, and water, and never dies or has need to reproduce. It could live in complete harmony, be beautiful, wonderous, and free from suffering, disease, pain, it wouldn't be a never ending struggle for survival where one must kill to survive. Not at all unthinkable, certainly within the abilities of a god that is infintely wise and powerful, and seems to be demanded of a god that is infinitely loving. But did he choose to make a world free from suffering, perfectly harmonious? No. He chose to make every living thing suffer every day of it's life.
The reason that the nature is a cruel fight for survival is that, that is the nature of life dictated by evolution. Evolution is not morally responsible for the suffering of all life, and thusly is a far less reproachable answer. I've read the witness literature on Evolution, and it's damn frightening. Not because it creates such a solid case against evolution, but because it's so incredibly ignorant, and borderline propaganda.
The book "Life-how did it get here? By evolution or creation?" is filled with such gems as "If you leave a car in the desert, does it turn into a better car?" or on the topic of the development of single celled organisms "if a tornado goes through a junkyard, what are the odds it will make a fully functioning 747?" or on the topic of mutation "If a driver made thousands of bad decisions for every good one, would you ride with him?". It's full of illustrations that have little if anything to do with evolution, and filled with drawings of scientists arguing with each other angrily as if they can't agree on anything, and that's what it's like to be an evolutionary biologist. It's designed to create an illusion without providing any kind of actual argument. It quotes lots of scientists that have disagreed with one aspect or another of evolution, and acts like that's the norm. It throws in some "scientific" data and numbers that either are completely meaningless, or totally inaccurate. And then it of course sticks to the standard completely illogical arguments used by fundamentalists that don't understand anything about biology, such as "2nd law of thermodynamics disproves evolution!".
Sometime last year I was given a "special edition" of the Awake magazine dealing with evolution, and it was even more contrived than the 23 year old book I was talking about above. I mean they actually interview Michael behe "author of Darwin's Black Box", as he states that obviously there has to be a god, evolution couldn't happen the way scientists say it did! Failing to mention that Michael Behe believes in evolution, or that there have been a ton of books and papers written that refute many of his claims. It's all written, not as a cogent argument against evolution, but rather to bolster the beliefs of those that already think evolution is wrong by cherry picked arguments, bad data, compelling metaphors that have nothing to do with evolution, and quotes from smart sounding people that seemingly agree with your beliefs.
But that's neither here nor there. the point is, If God created Nature as a whole as the bible literally said he did, he's not all loving, wise and powerful. Nature is flawed, and needlessly cruel.
And don't even get me started on the mosaic law he created for man. Jesus may have abolished the law, but Yahweh still supposedly gave the "perfect law" to man.
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