Question

In one of your lectures you said, in response to the problem of evil, that anyone who claims that there could be a world with fixed laws of physics + free will that is also better than this world bears the burden of proof. In other words, one can assume with fairly high probability that if you want to combine free will + fixed laws of physics, our world is the best one possible. That is, God wanted to create a good world, and the fact that there are earthquakes and volcanoes is the least bad option. It can’t be better than this.

Now I want to offer a proposal that gives a solution from a different direction, דווקא from the direction above physics.
A world in which only one person (or some of the people) has a soul. Everyone else is a human being without a soul (that doesn’t necessarily mean they are bad or immoral).
What does this solve?
The people who have a soul are people who were “dealt” good cards, or at least neutral ones. They weren’t born with a severe illness, they weren’t born poor. They were born okay, into an environment that is okay, and now it is possible to test their free choice and see how they behave.

Such a world is necessarily better, because babies who are born only to die have no soul and no suffering consciousness; the same goes for all the people who are born into a reality of necessary evil.

If you believe that God created the best world that can be created, then in my opinion one has to adopt a belief model like this.
Especially in light of the fact that I have no real indication that other people besides me have a soul.