If there were highly advanced beings that constructed the universe, and designed it to obfuscate that very fact, what would evidence of that look like?
If they are perfect at hiding their hand, we wouldn't be able to tell.
But that kind of thinking is akin to solipsism, a mental dead end. What if you're the only real person and the rest is simulated or a dream? Would you be able to tell?
What if god left all those dinosaur fossils as a joke, and big dinos never really existed? Well, it's possible, but it's a thought-terminating idea, so best not considered.
But you’re the one doing the thought terminating. These things don’t have to be a dead-end.
What if it wasn’t perfectly obfuscated? Is there any evidence at all you’d consider to be in favor of the world being not as it first appears? Not something that’s way more easily explained otherwise, like fossils.
There are things that come to mind for me. One is the brain’s ability to experience hypergeometry and additional dimensions on psychedelics. I don’t see how a brain that has the capability of being enhanced in that way happens through evolution alone. I don’t think geometry scales in the way that running does, for example.
Similarly is are the many cases of people experiencing beings outside of consensus reality. People see people talking to them clear as day, that no one else sees. You can write this off as either a drug-induced hallucination or mental illness, but that’s deciding the cause a priori. It’s circular reasoning.
Without getting into the details of hallucinations and experiences you mention: how is anything of that even weak evidence of a constructed reality?
> I don’t see how a brain that has the capability of being enhanced in that way happens through evolution alone
Regardless, it's exactly how evolution works. Evolution allows for irrelevant and harmless traits with no purpose to exist. It even allows for somewhat harmful traits to exist, as long as they are balanced by a competitive advantage they piggyback on (e.g. what if hallucinations and listening to voices are a side effect of creativity and imagination?).
What would a constructed universe look like? I dunno. I would like to see contradicting evidence and timelines, maybe even obvious "coverups", maybe if a hyperadvanced civilization appeared across the whole globe (no secrecy) saying "hey it was us!" (but maybe they'd be lying, so who knows).
Skepticism is one of our most important tools. It tells us to triple check any extraordinary evidence and rule out all possible natural/ordinary explanations first.
You would have to pass a pretty high bar to consider a constructed universe... and remember, it would have to be strong evidence, because like you objected, "well God/Genuine faked all the fossils" is uninteresting.
Possibly timespans for interesting things to happen would be way shorter (compared to sentient animal lifespans). Less wasted time. Fewer deadends. No/fewer extinction events (possibly, or maybe our aliens designers like seeing stuff die or explode like with do playing SimCity?).
Things would make more obvious sense. There would be fewer contradictions. The purpose of life would be clearer, since it was designed. The physics and "rules" of the universe would have fewer special cases and would be easier to model. There would be no paradoxes. We would be able to explore the whole universe more easily.
I'm sure you can think of objections to each of my arguments, but really, some evidence would be there. Everything currently and firmly points the opposite way, except we don't know what happened before the Big Bang... but that's "pink invisible unicorns" stuff which I don't think we will be able to ever answer conclusively.
