I have thought about this before - for example it has come up in hypothetical scenarios where God creates a Garden of Even with a “false history” of variable tree rings and river deposits, but suppose it was nonetheless a coherent “history” with the apparent intention of humans uncovering it, for various possible reasons. I have a related question that may perhaps be for the physicists in the room, though I don’t know if it will make sense.
If we ask the question of whether or not a “coherent history” really happened or was pre-programmed in some sense… does even asking that question presuppose in some sense the objectivity of time, which we know now is in some sense an illusion? (dimensions of space-time, Einstein’s relativity, arrows of time theories, ideas of God being outside time, etc, etc) Is there any sense in which we could say that the real answer to such a question doesn’t even matter, or that there is no meaningful difference between the two, depending on our relation to space-time?
(Or to frame it in a way that gets dangerously close to the old problem of the tree falling in the empty forest, if there were no conscious creatures besides God for the first 13 billion years of the universe, does it even make sense to talk about whether or not those years were “played” or “experienced” at “normal speed,” “fast-forward speed,” or “instantaneously”? Experienced for whom?)