>>723957393
Interesting question. Book of Job's answer is basically "you can't possibly understand the reasoning behind a completely all powerful being who created the entire Universe".
Which in itself should be considered a reasonable explanation. Really try and imagine putting yourselves in the shoes of a galaxy brain, you can't. Nobody can think on that level.

But if I was to guess, I would say life on Earth is a test of humans' love for God.
The entire Bible has that structure the whole way through, from the Garden of Eden through to the crucifixion of Jesus:

>1: God presents humans with the opportunity to choose him and be rewarded in the long term, or choose something else for a short-term reward (the forbidden fruit, idols of Baal, Bathsheba, a scapegoat for Barabbas, etc)
>2: Humans almost always choose something other than God eventually
>3: Bad things happen due to the rejection of God
>4: Next generation of humans. Go back to step 1

Then eventually with Jesus, you get a spin on this pattern, in the other direction:
>1: God manifests himself in real life as a human who can feel pain. He gives himself the symbolic choice between painfully sacrificing himself for humanity, or short-term reward.
>2: He chooses to painfully die to demonstrate his love for humanity.

If you were in God's shoes, and you wanted to create companions for yourself, you already have angels, but they are not very good companions because they're basically robotic extensions of yourself. They have no free will, just the Praise God routine.

But if you create humans, give them free will, and let them choose between you and something else, and they choose you? Then you've got a companion who meaningfully loves you (abstractly).
>>723957540
The "external circumstances" could be mitigated if humanity wanted to. If we had all used our free will from day 0 to make life better, we could have already cured every disease and stopped every preventable death.