Welcome, Audrey! It’s great to see here a younger person (an inference based on your picture), a woman (of whom we don’t have nearly enough posting here), and an Eastern Orthodox Christian (of whom we don’t have many posting here, perhaps none at all). I’m respectful of the Orthodox tradition (which has much overlap with my own Anglican tradition), and who knows, I may end up there some day.
I like your generic definition of God, which keeps the discussion at a level that is not likely to degenerate into quarreling about Noah’s Flood and so on – as all too often has happened on sites where science and religion are discussed.
I have not read the book by Luke Barnes mentioned above, but there are other books which make fine-tuning arguments, including Nature’s Destiny by Michael Denton (and six other shorter books by Denton published by the Discovery Institute). So you can add those to your long-term reading list.
I agree with some of the others about the need to distinguish between philosophical and scientific arguments. It might be the case, for example, that there are no valid scientific arguments to God, but that there are valid philosophical arguments to God – arguments which start from accurate descriptions of the world as given by current science. For the traditional Christian, “scientific” arguments for God in the modern sense (using the meaning of “science” currently operating among most scientists) are not all that important, since there were already arguments for the existence of God coming from theologians and philosophers long before modern science arose. So even if there is no way directly from scientific facts to God, it doesn’t mean there is no way of reasoning to God. You can find such reasoning in the Church Fathers and in Aquinas and probably (though I have not consulted the texts) in the medieval Orthodox tradition.
On the other hand, it might be argued that the particular discoveries of modern science, including those that suggest a finely tuned universe and those that indicate the astounding complexity (far beyond anything William Paley ever dreamed of) of living systems, though not sufficient to prove the existence of God, should incline a dispassionate observer to at least suspect some overriding design proceeding from some sort of intelligence.
I look forward to hearing more from you here. And if you know others from the Orthodox tradition who have religion/science questions, or have already done some study in this area from an Orthodox point of view, by all means send them here.
I’ll now reply to a comment by one of the others who responded to you:
As stated, this sentence implies that intelligent design is incompatible with the existence of “evolution.” But that depends on the meaning of “evolution.” Intelligent design is not incompatible with “evolution” in the sense of “descent with modification” (which is what Darwin talked about), and it’s not even incompatible with “universal common descent” (as ID proponents such as Michael Behe and William Dembski have made clear). It’s incompatible only with utterly unguided and unplanned evolutionary change.
Matthew seems to realize that “design” and “evolution” aren’t necessarily incompatible, however, because in his next sentence, he suggests that an intelligent designer “chose to design by means of evolution.” However, without an unpacking of what Matthew means by “evolution”, it’s hard to say what that involves. Certainly there are people, such as Michael Denton (apparently a Deist) and Francis Collins (an evangelical Christian) who would say that God creates through evolution. But it appears that Denton and Collins conceive of the workings of evolution in at least partly different ways.
Sorting out all the different proposed ways of combining a doctrine of creation with notions of evolution is a large task, and one I’ve spent about 15 years on, so if you’re interested in that combination, be prepared to do lots of reading!
Once again, Audrey, glad to see you posting here!