>The designer is beyond understanding by definition.

Where in the argument is the designer defined this way?

The argument is, roughly speaking:

(1) The fine-tuning of universal constants is due to either physical necessity, chance, or design.
(2) It is not due to physical necessity or chance.
(3) Therefore, it is due to design.

>You say that fine tuning proponents are still "open" to figuring out why or what this intelligent designer is, but unless you can provide an example of a reputable physicist actually working on this, it's a false claim.

I said that the fine-tuning argument does not commit you to not asking further questions. Fine-tuning proponents generally aren't just using the fine-tuning argument in isolation but rather to support a particular set of views. But if there's something problematic here, it would seem to be not the fine-tuning argument but other arguments or views these people have.

Besides, the questions of "where you came from" and "what caused you to form the intent" are in the scope of theology, and there is a diversity of views in the exact answers to these questions and arguments for/against them. Of course, this isn't a science, but that's because the designer explanation for fine-tuning is not a scientific explanation, just as the anthropic principle explanation for fine-tuning is not a scientific explanation. You can reject these explanations as bad ones, that's fine, but not being scientific just makes them not-scientific explanations. Not being good explanations makes them not-good explanations. It doesn't make them not-explanations.

>Here is one physicist explaining how to falsify one version of the multiverse theory

As I understand it, the Many-World Interpretation is just related to interpreting the collapse of the wave function in quantum mechanics---the other worlds in this interpretation don't have different universal constants or laws of physics; rather, the different possibilities that quantum mechanics allows for are all realized in different worlds.

Anyway, Carroll goes on to say that it's falsifiable, but it seems he only means falsifiable in the sense that quantum mechanics is falsifiable (obviously falsifying quantum mechanics falsifies interpretations of it), which is why he notes different interpretations which are experimentally indistinguishable. The issue is that this interpretation is not falsifiable with respect to other interpretations, which Carroll admits himself. But this is likely neither here nor there since MWI isn't the same as the multiverse response to fine-tuning, but maybe you can correct me.

In discussing the multiverse, Carroll himself has an interesting paper [0] on the multiverse and how its lack of falsifiability is fine. Indeed, he's quite on-point here, falsifiability is not really all it's cracked up to be as the field of philosophy of science has shown after Popper's formulation of it. Still, unfalsifiable.

So to be sure, my original point was that the fine-tuning argument for a designer is still an explanation (even if it's a non-scientific one or poor one) and has just as much predictive power as other hypotheses (none). It also doesn't close the door to any further questions any more than the other responses to fine-tuning---it might move them to the realm of metaphysical questions rather than scientific ones (and even if scientific, not empirically falsifiable or confirmable), but the door is open. Maybe theists will go on to close that door for a variety of reasons, but the fault doesn't seem to lie with the fine-tuning argument itself.

>If you can trace the claim back to a bunch of religious quacks who otherwise never made meaningful contributions to science

"This most elegant system of the sun, planets, and comets could not have arisen without the design and dominion of an intelligent and powerful being." - Isaac Newton, in the appendix of his Principia, apparently!

>one of the few things you're left with is appeal to authority.

I don't see why we need to resort to appeal to authority when we can make grounded criticisms of the fine-tuning argument. For example, why should we believe that the universal constants being what they are has a low probability, as if they were pulled from some probability distribution? That is, we can simply reject premise 2 of the argument as I outlined above.

The point is not that it's the greatest argument, but just that it's an explanation, not just meaningless drivel (like "because pixel cooked the music") as you were suggesting. And it has comparable (zero) predictive power to other hypotheses.

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I don't think this is relevant to the fine-tuning argument itself, but I'll respond to it anyway:

>First we were supposed to believe that the earth was flat, because that's how God made it.

This has never been a popular view among theologians or the church in the history of Christianity. The Aristotelian/Ptolemaic model (Aristotle, of course, not being Christian and writing centuries before the birth of Christ) seems to have been the dominant view until a bit after Galileo.

>in 6 days

We have discussion of this account in Genesis being allegorical among the early Church Fathers, very early in the history of Christianity.

>Then when that was disproven, we were supposed to believe that maybe it was older but it was the center of the universe. Then when that was disproven we were supposed to believe that maybe it revolved around the sun

We don't owe geocentrism to Christian thought but rather to the Aristotelian/Ptolemaic model. And geocentrism was on firm scientific ground at the time - astronomic tables in the Ptolemaic system and in the Copernican system had roughly the same magnitude of error. And the Ptolemaic system did not have the issue of not being able to explain why things on Earth did not move as if the Earth was moving - a problem that was only really solved until Newtownian physics, if I recall.

And the Copernican views weren't really problematic for the Church themselves, it seems that rabble-rousing by Giordano Bruno and Galileo was the real culprit for getting Copernicus's book banned. The Pope even gave Galileo a chance to express his views in the form of a dialogue, but Galileo didn't exactly give the other side a fair portrayal in this dialogue (calling the geocentrism-supporting character "Simplicio" and having him act like a fool).

Basically, it's just not true that geocentrism was church dogma held on religious grounds and refuted through science, at which point it was dropped---the history is more nuanced.

>God made us in his image

This is still held by Christians today and is not incompatible with evolution. Though yes, Christians certainly did not believe in evolution before Darwin.

>where once you get to God you are not allowed to ask any more questions

But we have a long history of Christianity being dominant among scientists asking questions about the natural world (and the intelligibility of the physical world is an idea very much in line with Christian thought). You talked about creationism - it was in fact a theist who formulated the theory of the Big Bang.

And indeed, theology is filled with questions about the nature of God and how to understand God's relationship with the world. See for example Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, which is nothing more than a list of questions and answers along with possible objections about reason, faith, God, and theology. Not a scientific work of course, but the point is you are certainly allowed to ask more questions.

>Hegelian dialectics

I don't see how Hegelian dialectics is an example of not being able to ask questions once you get to God? Or perhaps you mean that the supposed history of tension between religion and science you outlined is an example of Hegelian dialectics. I am not a Hegel scholar, but I thought dialectical tension is a good thing, not a bad thing?

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1801.05016