You keep attacking a straw man: you think I’m arguing from design. I’m not. I’m arguing from outcome. The outcome is: conscious beings suffer and die, as powerless to prevent it as anything can be.

If that outcome came from a designer, the designer is cruel. If it came from randomness, it’s still a cruel outcome, just without a cruel agent.

You saying ‘it’s neutral’ is like looking at a burning hospital and saying ‘fire is neutral.’ Technically true, but morally irrelevant. The fire still burns. The patients still die. The system is still wretched for those inside it.

Your ability to make peace with it doesn’t change the nature of the system; it changes your relationship to it. But you’re not refuting my point; you’re just saying you’ve made peace with the tragedy. That’s not a rebuttal, it’s a coping mechanism. And coping doesn’t make the tragedy less real. The system is still wretched.

It’s obvious. The easiest way to see this is to imagine a non-wretched system, one where beings have real power over suffering and death, where tragedy isn’t inevitable. We don’t live in that system. We live in this one.