My favorite response to these things is the "Why should god just make everything easy?" nonsense, which is a roundabout way of trying to justify suffering by claiming that there are benefits from it. The problem is that if god is omnipotent, he could give us any such benefits without the suffering, and we're left to conclude that god made suffering exist for suffering's sake, probably because he's a sadist.
Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cozy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigor, and the great spaces have a splendor of their own - Bertrand Russell
