I would argue that if God exists, they aren’t intentionally being an asshole. They are being completely hands off so as not to corrupt the experiment, or override free will. After all, the only reason any god would need a prime material plane of existence is to see if they can create a peer of themselves, and at least as far as most of the major religions seem to be concerned, if someone created this universe, they decided that we have free will, so it’s kinda hard to directly intervene. They could send avatars from time to time to attempt to intervene, but they kinda tied their hands in the act of creation.
You can absolutely intervene without affecting free will and that is assuming we even have free will. I am not convinced that we do.
Also why would you presume to know what a being (that as we imagine it) with unlimited power and knowledge would want or even need?
If you are a god and you see 25,000 people (10,000 of which are children) starving to death every single day and you have the power to stop that and you don’t then you are an immortal monster.
