The problem of evil is probably the biggest reason I struggle to believe in God

I went to Catholic school my entire life, and honestly I think the problem of evil was one of the first things that really made me start questioning Christianity. At this point I’d probably call myself an agnostic atheist, but I’m still very open to Christianity and especially Catholicism.
I know the problem of evil gets talked about constantly. It’s probably one of the most common arguments against God. But I don’t really think that makes it a bad argument. If anything, I think there’s a reason people keep coming back to it.
Basically, if God is all knowing, all powerful, and all loving, I just have a really hard time understanding why this world looks the way it does.
One thing I’ve never really understood is blaming evil on Adam and Eve or humanity in general. If God is all knowing, then he knew Adam and Eve were going to sin before he even created them. He knew exactly what would happen afterward too. He knew every war, murder, disease, genocide, child dying, everything. And then he still created this exact world knowing all of that would happen.
So I don’t really understand how we can put all the blame on humans and say we messed up God’s perfect creation. He knew we were going to mess it up before he created us.
Satan also confuses me. If Satan is actually active in the world right now and causing evil, then why does God allow him to do that? If God wants to stop him but can’t, then obviously God isn’t all powerful. But if God could stop him at any second and just doesn’t, I don’t understand how that fits with God being perfectly loving.
Maybe I’m missing something there. I genuinely could be.
The answer I hear most is free will. The problem is I already don’t really believe in free will, at least not libertarian free will. But even if I completely put that aside and pretend for a second that Christianity is true and we do have free will, I still don’t really see how it fixes everything.
If God already knows every decision I’m ever going to make, I already have questions about how free those decisions really are. But even ignoring that, God is supposed to be all powerful. Why couldn’t he create a world where we have free will and still freely choose good?
I know the immediate response is probably that this is contradictory because if God makes us choose good, then we aren’t free. I understand that. But we’re also talking about the being who supposedly created reality itself. If God literally created the rules that reality operates under, why is he stuck with this specific rule where freedom has to come with the possibility of horrible evil?
And even if free will explains some evil, it definitely doesn’t seem to explain all suffering. Someone murdering another person can be blamed on free will. But what about cancer? Natural disasters? A little kid dying from a disease? Someone being born into horrible circumstances, suffering for most of their life and then dying?
Whose free will required that?
And honestly, the more I think about it, animal suffering might be an even stranger problem for me.
Animals were suffering for an unbelievably long time before humans even existed. The overwhelming majority of species that have ever existed are now extinct. For hundreds of millions of years animals have been starving, getting diseases, being eaten alive, fighting, getting injured and dying.
And I understand why pain exists from an evolutionary perspective. Obviously an animal needs some way of knowing that its body is being damaged. But if God designed the system in the first place, why did it have to work like this?
Why does a gazelle have to experience the terror and pain of being chased down and torn apart by a predator? Why does one animal have to rip another animal apart just to stay alive? Why create an entire food chain where the survival of one conscious creature can depend on the suffering and death of another?
Even if there were some reason animals needed a warning system for bodily damage, couldn’t an all powerful God have designed something other than intense pain? Couldn’t animals recognize danger without actually suffering? Or couldn’t nature have been designed so animals didn’t have to kill each other for food in the first place?
And I don’t think saying animals aren’t as conscious as humans really solves it either. They don’t need to be sitting around thinking philosophically about their existence for their suffering to matter. Animals can experience pain and distress. If you’ve ever seen an injured animal, that’s pretty hard to deny.
This is where the problem almost becomes less about “evil” to me and more about suffering itself. A lion isn’t evil for killing another animal. It’s doing exactly what its nature tells it to do. But that almost makes it stranger to me, because nobody is morally responsible for it. That’s just how nature works.
If God designed nature, why design it that way?
Another thing I hear is that life itself is a gift. And I understand that for a lot of us. There are plenty of things about being alive that I’m grateful for. But there are also people who basically come into existence, suffer horribly, and die. It’s hard for me to look at that person and just say that life was a gift.
And this might sound dark, but sometimes I genuinely wonder why an all loving God would create anything at all if he knew this much suffering would come from it.
If God never created humanity, there would be no genocide, torture, cancer, starvation, grief, hell, or any of this suffering. And really, this applies to animals too. There wouldn’t have been millions of years of creatures suffering and dying before we even showed up.
Obviously there wouldn’t be happiness either, but there also wouldn’t be anyone sitting around wishing they could experience happiness. There would just be nothing.
I’ve also recently come across the Epicurean paradox on Reddit, and I know it isn’t some automatic checkmate against Christianity or anything, but it pretty accurately describes the problem I keep running into.
I’m not saying any of this like I’ve disproven God. I haven’t. Maybe I’m misunderstanding something major. I’m 19 and I’m still trying to figure out what I actually believe, so I’m definitely not pretending I have all the answers.
But I also don’t want to convince myself that an answer makes sense just because I want Christianity to be true. And I do want it to be true. There are a lot of things about Catholicism that I still really love. This is just one of those things I can’t seem to get around.
If I could actually get a satisfying answer to the problem of evil and suffering, it would remove probably one of my biggest barriers to believing again.
So I’m genuinely curious what Christians here think. I’d especially like to hear something beyond just “free will,” especially when it comes to things like disease, natural disasters and animal suffering, where human free will doesn’t seem to have much to do with it.
I’m not trying to debate anyone into atheism or do some gotcha. I’m genuinely asking because I haven’t found an answer that satisfies me yet.