Have you ever considered that our reality may not be as real as it seems?
That's the big idea behind simulation theory making the rounds nowadays in physics departments, philosophy journals and late night conversations. But I ask you a more pointed question: if it were a simulation, would we even know? Could we ever know?
Think about that seriously for a moment. Not as a philosophical exercise. As an actual problem.
You couldn't step outside it. You couldn't look outside it. You couldn't even see the shadows of outside. Every tool you have for investigating reality is itself inside the system you're trying to investigate. There is no angle, no instrument, no thought experiment that gets you to the substrate layer from inside it.
There's only one way you'd know: the designer would have to tell you.
But here's the problem. How does an entity operating from outside your substrate communicate with subjects inside it without breaking whatever the system is designed to test?
The elegant solution is interventions that are real but deniable. Things that later become dismissed as fables or stories, missing concrete or conflicting evidence in history. Precise enough to be meaningful. Ambiguous enough that recognition requires a choice.
Consider your phone.
As far as your phone is concerned you exist entirely outside its reality. You are the deity. You control everything inside it — what apps get installed, deleted, opened and closed, how they interact, when they run and when they don't. The entire inside reality of that device operates subject to your decisions from completely outside it.
The only hints that you exist at all might be found inside — pictures, videos, documents, messages. Evidence of an outside presence that left traces inside the system. Deniable to anything running inside that isn't looking for it. Unmistakable to anything that is.
Now scale that up.
If a designer existed outside our reality, what traces would we expect to find inside it had that designer needed to communicate in any way?
We'd expect documentation. Left by the designer through whatever interface was available. Received by subjects inside the system who experienced the contact as interaction with something operating above their reality — something they would naturally describe using the only category available to them.
A deity.
Which means the most logical place to look for evidence of outside contact isn't a physics lab — it's probably going to be a religious book. And worse, the physics lab may even generate its own competing narrative, making the test harder to read — which is exactly what you'd expect from a well-designed test-obfuscating deniability layer.
It would seem logical that this religious book might appear near the beginning of recorded history, acting as sort of a rule book for the test, or maybe something that explains the point of the test, or both. Perhaps with some course-corrections built in for when the test goes off-track. Possibly written using concepts or stories that seem a little "pre-science" at first glance — but may read a little differently once science matures.
The only problem is shelving the God/no-god theology we all take into reading a paper like this. In order to see something in a new way, we have to check our personal ideology baggage at the door.
So the question becomes specific:
Do any religious books describe reality the way a simulation would actually work? Since it will almost certainly be written before the word "simulation" existed, what language might pre-science humanity use to explain it? How would the stories be arranged? Would there be any logic or reason to what it says? Would there be a clear creation and evaluation narrative?
Because if one does, that's not theology; that's probably the user manual.