Related to: Denying the Cat: A Wonderful Chesterton Quote

I attribute [god becaming BFF rather than The Law] to the material comfort of modern existence, it encourages metaphysical optimism that wasn't tenable when everyone was regularly confronted with extreme suffering

Seems plausible. We still do have extreme suffering thought, we just don't see it in our day to day lives. Aguably we are worse people from a virtue ethics perspective.

I don't think we have good reasons for metaphysical optimism regardless of that issue however. My argument against it is anthropic. Assuming there are many possible metaphysics, a position that might be trivially false, I don't know enough to comment on that, we can infer that human values being complex only a tiny fraction of them are favourable.

Our physical surroundings can't help but be at least somewhat favourable. We can't help but be on a planet in the goldilocks zone in a universe with its particular value for the gravitational constant, because if we weren't there wouldn't be anyone around to make the observation.

When it comes to metaphysics we most certainly can make observations in a universe (metauniverse?) where the metaphysics have horrible things in store for us.

This argument works for the laws of our universe too. They are provably minimally friendly to the development of intelligence, but are very likely not friendly to its long term survival or flourishing. And all this is assuming an uncaring universe a caring one may be much worse in the uniquely horrible way an almost friendly AI would be.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

--H. P. Lovecraft