Stephen King wrote a marvelous guide to writing, where his prime directive was “tell the truth” (obviously it’s all fiction, but it must all be true within its own context).
I’ve been pissed off at authors who lie to the reader (Umberto Eco, I’m glaring at you).
Tolkien went thru a lot of trouble to write a “true” account of Middle Earth creation, which was NOT “and Bilbo sprang into existence, fully formed, at the creation of the world, including memories of having met Gandalf before anything ever existed”.
Stories which _do_ involve “false memory” beginnings, like Dark City or Blade Runner, are horror stories.
As scripture reiterates, the creation declares God’s majesty et al. Can it do that by falsifying the sensible interpretation of everything we see? How can we believe in Him when we cannot trust what we see just out of reach, and by extrapolation must disbelieve everything we experience? Look, a star a million light years away! no, wait, the _light_ we see it by travelled no more than 10,000 light years, so we have no reason to believe that star even exists ... and by that precept, everything we can know collapses into the utterly unknowable, leaving us with a God who created a grand illusion deceiving us and leaving us to wonder what there is in Him to believe.
“Can it do that by falsifying the sensible interpretation of everything we see?”
You are assuming it is not sensible to give God credit for being an Author and not just a mechanic. I do not make that assumption.
I assume God created a setting for man, and that setting included the option of rejecting Him. I see nothing logical about assuming God cannot create a setting, or that everything you see must take into account how you interpret it.
The back story for Middle Earth is not real. It was made up by the Author as a setting for his book. It wasn’t a lie, but neither is it objectively true. It is just the setting. It is what the characters do in that setting that is important.