I think its easy to visualize how that could be true. As an atheist, I will assume that you think consciousness can reduced down to a purely physical interactions. Lets start there. That means that in theory, without enough cpu power, you could program conscious beings into a computer simulation. But because it is a computer simulation written by you, you can also define parameters so that they differ from our real world. For example, you could program in an a constraint that objects only move to the left or stay stationary; they never move to the right. No matter what happens in your simulation, the universe will always tend to the left, and in fact has been written so that it is "smeared" to the left, i.e. it spreads out over time as not all things move to the left equally quickly. The conscious beings in your universe will eventually become curious and start trying to model their reality and figure out its rules. They will develop physics that describe their universe that only moves to the left and spreads out over time. But they will have a big question to answer. They will deduce that at some finite point in the past, all matter was to the right of where it is now, and it was all compressed. There is no physics they can uncover, because it isn't coded into their simulation, that lets matter move right or compress...so how did it all get there? At that point, the religious among them will begin to wonder if their universe was actually set up by a creator who doesn't obey their rules, and who can act outside their rules. They will tell stories of the great, all-powerful creator who could set all objects to the right with just the flick of his wrist. Can they prove that? Probably not. But its not a stupid idea.
You can call it "god of the gaps", and maybe it is, but that doesn't make it wrong. We are in analgous situation right now in physics. Our current physics paradigm tell us the universe evolves in one direction. It start with a big bang and expands infinitely until nothing is in causal contact with anything else. It had a beginning a finite time ago. There is no physics consistent with our current theories that describes how that beginning can happen. In fact, much about the beginning requires physics that we don't observe today. For example, if you just naively try to use modern General Relativity to try to simulate how an early, dense universe expands to our current universe, you actually fail miserably. Instead, our current observed universe is one that didn't evolve according to GR, but rather is described by "inflation". That's a big problem, because it means that it looks like the physical laws in the early universe are completely different than our physical laws today, and despite the best efforts of theorists, there isn't much progress made on how the two are related. Now, I don't know how you jump from this to an intelligent creator, but it does start to look to me eerily isomorphic to claims made by deists... that there is a set of laws governing our universe today, but there may be *something* else out there, that follows a completely separate set of laws, and that only interacted with us in the opening moments of the universe.
See, I don't think those two things earn us bragging rights. We put some conductors in a box, lit an explosion under it, and crashed it into the other floating rock that is closest to us? Monkey's reach South America by getting caught on logs during a storm. In a few billion years our sun is going to swallow that rock and it won't be there. In 10^21 years, there will be no planets at all. Only super massive black holes. And for 10^64 years, there will be only those black holes. The universe will exist in a state dominated by black holes for an unfathomably longer time than planets will have existed in it. Yet the physics of black holes are incredibly poorly understand. So I don't think its worth bragging that we shot some shit from one planet to another. Its like a UFC fan who wrestles his brother in his basement trying to wear TAPOUT and act hard.
