Aesthetic morality as theodicy

Salt Lake City

My current favorite theodicy is that God’s morality is based on an aesthetic sense that is neither similar to nor aligned with traditional materialist atheist utilitarian views of morality—these views being that all / almost all suffering is bad. Just as a novelist puts eir characters through immense amounts of suffering and kills, maims, and traumatizes them, perhaps so too does God aim to craft a poetic (in the sense of “there is poetry in the city”), beautiful narrative, while paying no mind to or somehow missing the fact that the simulation has developed consciousness.

Why, then, do the prayers of the religious get answered? Perhaps this, too, appeals to God’s aesthetic sense, and strikes His fancy, or perhaps, in part, when cold hard statistics and clear thinking free of confirmation bias are applied, He does not actually answer prayers (i.e., properly prayed-for things occur at a rate not statistically differentiable from the background rate at which non-prayed-for (or improperly or insufficiently prayed-for) things appear). While the thought is anthropomorphic and has not been scrutinized, I feel original in suggesting that Christians or others are doing the heavenly equivalent of navigating the bureaucracy, and that when they speak directly to God He cannot but answer their prayers. (This could be for a number of possible reasons; among the less plausible are guilt, theological iron laws, or the reasons why calling an office can sometimes get you an exception to the rules.)

On transit coming back from the airport—

Perhaps it is like poking at the fourth wall of the simulation.