Agnosticism IS the most dishonest position

[R00tKiT]

Except that we do know, lol.
https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/a...flake-made

I didn’t see ”hand-designed by a god” mentioned anywhere in that article. Even if god were the one who set all the natural laws in motion in order to allow for snowflakes to form, it’s still a natural formation that is no mystery to scientists. 

I really think you didn't understand a word I've written. Something that is of no mystery to scientists is nevertheless there because a supposed god wanted it to be there. The fact that we know a process only means ... that we know the process. we still have to account for the prior causes that brought the whole thing.

What you know is the how, not the why. You've only got half of the answer through science, you're gonna have to delve into philosophy and theology for the other half.

Do you believe each snowflake was hand designed by a god?

I didn't say hand designed, I simply said designed, which includes all the intermediary, implicit steps that took place, like crafting every law of chemistry out there to allow its existence.

Correct, which means the formation of snowflakes is still a blind and natural process, lol. You’re still equivocating.  And, I’ll ask again and maybe a real answer this time: how weak is god that he has to fine tune the entire universe and all of its physical laws, just to get a snowflake to form?

Your question is ill-formed. "The entire universe and all of its physical laws" seems a lot of work only to us, I'll make it clearer : there is no logical problem with a god bringing a slice of pizza into existence through billions of years of extremely complicated quantum operations. "billions of years" and "extremely complicated" are an additional unnecssary cost only for creatures, not for a deity with infinite resources. Wasting time and resources is undefined for any entity with infinite attributes.

Another point is that, nobody claimed the snowflake was the central purpose of fine tuning, and I frankly don't get why you're framing the question in such a way to assert that. But clearly a supposed god allowed the snowflake to be there, in "the background", or as an acceptable result of his laws intended for a higher purpose, so he did design it implicitly.

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And though people understand somewhat more than rats, it seems very likely that there are all kinds of things beyond what our brains can handle.

And that's why the so called skeptics should greatly adjust their posture with regards to the supposed prophets. There are things about the universe that we will never know, demonstrably so. A fortiori, anything about purpose is absolutely beyond us, billions of layers away. 
As a result, any existent deity already revealed itself. And that's my central argument in this thread.

The first part of this seems certain to me. Science will never and can never address certain things that humans need. I was raised without religion, so I don't necessarily think that we should turn to theology when we ponder the non-science questions. Still, the fact that religion has been a fundamental part of the human psyche for all of history means that I'm not one of those people who just want to toss it all.

I don't see any other way to treat these non science questions. Philosophy didn't bring one bit of an answer with regards to anything metaphysical. Contemporary philosophy doesn't seem to concern itself with such questions anymore.

And from what I could read in this forum, people do misunderstand basic aspects of theology, and arrogantly think that their "rational thought" higher ground will somehow save them when it comes to cumulative arguments about why a historical figure might very much be really a prophet.

If I'm understanding you right, this is an Aristotelian concept, and so perhaps something I can get a handle on. To pass  a quality on to different things, the causal force must possess that quality.

Exactly. It's something entirely reasonable to assume. And with this principle, it becomes possible to know more about a first cause of everything. We already know a good deal of what "everything" looks like, it's safe to infer some attributes about the preceding cause, at least the most obvious ones.