(2/2)

>This would not be a form of understanding because it is not possible to understand something full of internal contradictions, paradoxes and circular reasoning that the problem of evil brings with it into fine tuning.

Continue off the fine-tuning argument as presented in three statements earlier.(1) and (2) are premises and (3) is the conclusion (and it is a valid argument - accepting the premises logically leads to the conclusion---perhaps it is not a sound argument, but that is neither here nor there). Suppose you accept this argument (because you accept (1) and (2)), and then accept that there was a designer of the universe. Now consider this argument:

Premise (1): There is evil in the universe.
Premise (2): If the designer was all-good, there would be no evil in the universe.
Conclusion (3): The designer is not all-good.

If you accept (1) and (2) of the fine-tuning argument (and also go on to accept that the universe was designed by a designer), and accept (1) and (2) of this argument, you are logically led to knowledge of the designer, hence understanding of the designer. So it seems that the acceptance of the fine-tuning does not logically lead us into a designer which we can no longer gain forms of understanding of.

>Why in the world would you bring something you don't even take seriously yourself into the dialogue? Have you already run out of things you do take seriously? Bad faith

What I do or don't take seriously isn't relevant to whether the fine-tuning argument posits a designer that is beyond understanding or whether religion is the only place you can take the fine-tuning argument to. I don't buy the fine-tuning argument either (because I am skeptical of premise (2)), but I think credit should be given where credit is due. "Bad faith" doesn't demonstrate that an argument is invalid anyway.

>Totally irrelevant to the question of understanding the designer, but let's be honest here: religion and metaphysics are basically two peas in a pod.

I don't know why a kind of understanding we can have of the designer would be irrelevant to the question of understanding the designer, namely because showing that that kind of understanding of the designer is possible, then that answers the question of understanding the designer.

>religion and metaphysics are basically two peas in a pod

Well, this is a contentious claim among theist and atheist philosophers alike, so it warrants being substantiated.

>Again something you just don't understand. You're doing a lot of not understanding for somebody who understands God. In this case, one is beyond understanding of the other because one is infinitely larger than the other.

I don't see how God's intellect being infinitely larger than human intellect implies that God is beyond understanding.

>How could you be confused with your own words?

I don't think I am, if this isn't the confusion, then I'm sorry.

You can see the thinkers mentioned thus far for arguments of what God is, why God is, or how God came to be this way that it can fine-tune universes.

>Here, in the second sentence you are doing the thing that you said you never did in the first sentence. There is no such thing as an all-good designer, as you demonstrated yourself with the problem of evil. And you cannot ascribe the not-all-good attribute to a thing you have not even established yet. You cannot use Argument A (problem of evil) to support Argument B (fine tuning) while at the same time using Argument B to support Argument A. Circular reasoning

But I'm not using one argument to support another. What I am doing is giving just one example of how one might go about this project of understanding the designer posited by the fine-tuning argument---namely, using the problem of evil to establish that the designer cannot be all-good, thus gaining understanding of the designer.

>All you've done so far was engage in contradictions, self-refutations, circular reasoning, false claims and other fallacies, so characteristic of goddidit.

But it's not clear that I've done this in what I've said to explain why the fine-tuning argument does not posit a designer that is beyong understanding.

>Here you are reinterpreting understanding to mean "ascribing paradoxical properties that depend on circular reasoning."

But this isn't what I've said.

>Want to have another go?

Not particularly.

Now that I've hit the HN limit for a comment's limit (...among other reasons), I now suspect that HN is no longer the appropriate place for this discussion anyway (unless someone tells me that it would be fruitful for me to continue replying here). If you'd like to continue, feel free to drop an email (or XMPP or Matrix account---but please, not Discord or anything like that).

[0]: https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/964/spinoza-the-atheist

[1]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/fine-tuning/#FineTuniDesi - "Indeed, many regard the argument from fine-tuning for a designer as the strongest version of the teleological argument that contemporary science affords."

[2]: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/creationism - "Scientifically Creationism is worthless, philosophically it is confused, and theologically it is blinkered beyond repair."