I'm going to argue that humans won't ever have the capacity to determine whether the universe has design....
I think we are in a simulation and the problem you're talking about is deliberate so that the simulation is more immersive than if the simulation was obvious.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine-tuned_universe".....Stephen Hawking, along with Thomas Hertog of CERN, proposed that the universe's initial conditions consisted of a superposition of many possible initial conditions, only a small fraction of which contributed to the conditions we see today. According to their theory, it is inevitable that we find our universe's "fine-tuned" physical constants, as the current universe "selects" only those past histories that led to the present conditions. In this way, top-down cosmology provides an anthropic explanation for why we find ourselves in a universe that allows matter and life..."
That's a bit like what I believe... I think human history was the initial goal of the simulation and then possible starting conditions were calculated to give the impression that we've had billions of years of history.