What I said is that the fine-tuning argument does not commit you to any particular religion. In demonstrating how we can understand the designer, I gave theological arguments about God as an example.

Buying some of the theological arguments about God, even if they are employed by theists, still does not commit you to a particular religion. You can agree to the omnipotence and omnipresence of the designer but not its moral interest in the good of humanity, for example. See Spinoza's Ethics for an example of a thinker who subscribes to this and fleshes out an entire system with this in mind. (There might be some controversy on this point, but Spinoza scholar Steven Nadler calls Spinoza an atheist. It's not a stretch to say that you could agree to all the arguments made in Ethics but still not subscribe to any religion.) And of course, as I said in the last comment, you can still go to Aristotle's discussion of the unmoved mover as an example of a thinker who predated Christianity and had no affiliation with any traditional monotheistic religion. The point is that we need not commit to any religion but can still make arguments about certain properties of the designer.

>Now you bring the problem of evil into the dialogue, as if that somehow brings the designer within reach of our understanding, when if anything it moves the concept even further beyond our reach.
>Not to mention that with the problem of evil, you're dragging morality into this, another framework of thought just like religion, and closely coupled with it, that science does not deal with or recognize. All the while claiming that fine tuning can stand on its own.

I only introduced the problem of evil so I could give a pithy description of an argument we can make that clearly does not commit us to any mainstream religion but still reveals something to us about the nature of the designer. This is just one clear example of how we could come to understand something about the designer, if you buy the argument.

But maybe this is the crux of the contention you're having with me - implicit in what you've just said is that when you say understanding, you only mean scientific understanding, and likely that when you say explanation, you only mean scientific explanation. As I said before, the fine-tuning argument does indeed move us out of the realm of science and into metaphysics. So the sense in which we can understand or explain things about the designer is no longer scientific, but metaphysical. But that's fine - understanding need not be scientific understanding, and explanations need not be scientific explanations.

Just to elucidate what exactly I've been defending:

The fine-tuning argument does not commit us to a particular religion (we can easily imagine that there is a designer but that no religion is true). It offers an explanation of why the universal constants are what they are (by design as opposed to chance or necessity). It does not shut down further discussion - we can still ask questions about the nature of the designer (see paragraphs 2 and 4 of this comment). The design theory has no predictive power, yes, just like how other explanations of why the universal constants are what they are have no predictive power.