I don't believe in God in any religious sense.

You sure?

It seems to me that there are people who profess religious beliefs but are effectively atheists when it comes to beliefs revealed by their behaviours, and conversely people who profess atheism but buy into to various religious-like ideas and ideologies.
This isn't necessarily due to deliberate dishonesty: religious beliefs (or lack of thereof) often become signals of allegiance to social groups.

I personally can't think of too many ways that life outside of our universe could communicate with us but find the idea to be interesting if not a stretch.

I dunno, pulsing gamma bursts according to a sequence of prime numbers encoded in binary?

Anyway, the point of science is finding the simplest hypotheses that explain our observations. Intelligent gods (designers, programmers, etc.) are complex hypotheses. Thus we don't resort to them unless we ruled out everything simpler.