2011-09-28
Explanation
This comic tackles the classic theological problem of evil (theodicy) -- why do bad things happen to good people? In the first panel, a child asks a father figure this age-old question, and the adult gives the standard religious response: "God works in mysterious ways." This is one of the most common answers offered in religious contexts when people struggle to reconcile the existence of a benevolent God with the suffering observed in the world.
The second panel delivers the punchline by pulling back to reveal the true nature of reality in the comic's universe. Two aliens are sitting at a control panel, apparently running the universe as a simulation. One asks why the simulation works 6% more efficiently when they let bad things happen to good people. The humor comes from reframing "God works in mysterious ways" as a literal engineering optimization -- the aliens are not being mysterious or profound, they are just tweaking parameters for efficiency. The divine mystery is reduced to a minor performance gain in a computer simulation.
The votey panel extends the joke further, with one of the aliens noting they can get the efficiency up to 7% if they make candy tastier than vegetables. This adds another layer to the gag by suggesting that other seemingly arbitrary features of human existence -- like unhealthy food tasting better than healthy food -- are also just simulation optimizations rather than cosmic mysteries. It satirizes both religious explanations for suffering and the simulation hypothesis popular in philosophical and tech circles.