And how do you mean, dirty hacks. Our fundamental physics nowadays is quite elegant, I'd say, and still we have many questions still to be answered and much deeper to delve till we hit the "bare metal". We've only been in the universe-figuring-out business for real for about 200 years after all!
7,100,000,000 people seem to find it quite easy [0] (although I'm not one of them)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations
but then there's the question of what came before the universe(s) ours originated from and what came before that and so on, since, following our current understanding, everything has an origin
even if we were to argue our universe is a simulation, who/what's running the simulation and where did that originate from? how did it come about?
The universe is a giant hack job, and I think it evolved that way. I'm a big believer in the "multiple nested universes" theory that our universe began as an offshoot of another, parent universe, and that some of the larger/heavier black holes in our universe could be gateways to other child universes.