I think many of y’all are going at the question sideways, upside down, and wrong.
The sense of goodness or evilness of the world is an emotional cognition. A value judgment, if you will, but ultimately it’s how you feel about it. So far so good (or evil)…
The theological or philosophical or evolutionary purpose of such emotionally-grounded assessments of the quality of life is to direct individuals towards the betterment of things: if they were profoundly happy all the time, they wouldn’t find the worst aspects of matters as they are to be intolerable and hence would not go forth determined to fix them. If, on the other hand, they were profoundly miserable to the point of not seeing any purpose to life, no possibility of it being enough better to count, they won’t have sufficient inspiration and optimistic sense of purpose and confidence to go forth determined to fix things. So we’re equipped with a natural “taring” mechanism, like a scale being zeroed before use: generally speaking, things are seldom so awful that we can’t find some pleasure in some aspects of our lives, nor so good that we can’t get distressed over some flaws in our paradise, and that’s exactly as it should be.
But I think we also have some long-term things going on that give us some less relative assessment skills — some mechanisms that would cause us to be unhappier as a whole if the entire social-environmental situation were worse — say, under a totalitarian regime with brutality and scarcity and lots of random cruelty.
I happen to think that some of our long-term taring dates back to before the agrarian revolution, and that our species has been discernably unhappy with things ever since we started planting stuff in the ground and setting down and making cities and whatnot. And I happen to think that we have the potential for a much better way to live and that that potential is far more in our immediate grasp (give or take a half-millennium or so) than it was 4000 years ago. In brief, we have surplus and lots of cool technology and we are in many important respects post-agrarian, although our social mores and notions of how to “do society” are still anchored in our agrarian past.
As a side note, I find this darkly amusing. If we ever manage to win this game, as far as it can be “won”. By winning I mean we develop tech to the max, abolish aging and death, launch robotic self replicating offspring to the stars, and then settle in for some retirement in virtual reality. “we” may not live to see this but billions of humans might. If they don’t get killed in the process.
Anyways, the virtual reality would probably not be realms of peace. They’d be scenarios crafted to appeal to our instincts. Post apocalyptic earths where YOU and only you have supernatural powers. Past earths where you get to roleplay Genghis khan or Adolf Hitler. An alternate universe where Tom Clancy novels are fact and you get to play as Jack Ryan. Etc.
Was that you, on the plains of Thrandor, beneath the dour shade of Mt. Frigglethorpe, where we fought off ravening hordes of sandgorgons and bugblatter beasts, narrowly escaping with our lives?
I think it’s rather arrogant of the OP to presume that his viewpoint on wisdom, death, predation, pain, disease, filth, suffering, good, benevolence, wicked, evil, and sadism are universal or even relevant in the grand scheme of the Universe.
Is a lion wicked for eating a gazelle?
What is a lifespan of 90 years reduced to 20 when we are talking about time scales of billions of years?
To a God, is man’s genocide against man materially different from his genocide against the polio or measles virus?
Of all the trillion quadrillion atoms on Earth, what makes this particular configuration “filthier” than that one?
In any true singularity, transhuman world one of the first things we will do is transfer consciousness to a better substrate. Our consciousness is stuck inside our brains, which are very limited and prone to suffering. In a transhumanist society, we’d transfer our consciousness to either mechanical brains, engineered organic brains or VR brains which have a totally different set of cognitive and subjective experiences.
There is no law in the universe saying my consciousness can’t be transferred to a brain (either mechanical, organic or VR) that is 100x smarter and that feels unfathomable bliss every second from now until the end of time.
People are going to choose that over being stuck inside their biological brains. It is easier to change our brain, than to create an environment that triggers the reward mechanisms of our brains and avoids triggering the punishment mechanisms.
According to the bible - it was - took it seven days, trapped all of its creation in a ‘garden’ and forbade said creation to eat from a specific tree - without giving them the knowledge they needed to understand that eating from said tree was a ‘bad thing’. If it weren’t for our lord and savior, we would never have escaped from that garden nor had the ability to discern good from evil.
For escaping, said deity cursed women, limited our lifespans and forced us unto hard labor - and then confounded all of our efforts to work together (the babel incident) for said deity was concerned we would become as powerful as him. Failing then to stop our progress, it then proceeded to commit genocide on the whole of the earth with the exception of one family and their pets.
Then, in order to make it all up to us - said deity required human sacrifice to appease him and promised to never flood the earth again - of course, when it returns it will destroy the earth with fire.
Your takeaway point is that most of us are unable to jump off that cliff or stick that gun in our mouths or swallow that bottle of pills or what have you. We’re wired that way to make sure we hang around and keep suffering.
This whole thread and especially the OP is very human centric. If a god created this planet for beetles,thing aren’t so evil and sadistic. They just keep on keeping on. Getting eaten by the occasional bird is just life.
What if there is no good or evil? What if the word just exists and it’s humans that have overlaid it with this concept of good and evil. Our counterparts in the animal word certainly don’t seem to be bothered by the intrinsic goodness or evilness of their world. They just keep on truckin’.
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