“…God wants us to mature for the exact same reasons we, as parents, wish our own children to mature, then pain can then be seen to have a purpose…”

Bzzzt. Causality cannot be used to justify the actions of the one who invented causality.

Imagine you create a video game. This is the closest thing to being a god. In the game, causality is your bitch. You can make the game so that pressing a button gives you wings, pressing another button builds a bridge. Talking to a character increases your intelligence. Talking to another character makes you old or young or wise or stupid or anything else you can possibly want. You have absolute control of what actions lead to what consequences.

Now image you create a game where, in order to save the world (and win the game), the player has to torture and kill a dozen perfectly innocent babies.

If you see it from the point of view of the player (who is at the mercy of the word’s causality), then torturing and killing the babies is justified. After all, you’re saving THE WHOLE WORLD. Most likely, if you didn’t kill the babies, they’d die anyway when the villain destroys everything, so the action is morally justified.

But if you see it from the point of view of the designer, you beg the question: Why torture and kill the babies? Why can’t the world be saved merely by caressing them or singing to them or talking to them? For the designer, there is no logical, moral, or otherwise necessity to have a particular cause being the sole possibility for causing a particular outcome. When you are the one who decides what causes lead to what effects, you cannot justify your actions by claiming “it’s the best/only way to do it” because it was you who decided what is the best/only way to do anything to begin with.