Being a part of Western culture it is impossible to remove all influence of christianity on my worldview. However, I don’t believe in any deities.
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I can’t begin to speak for God… Consequently, I’m less certain about distinguishing between what parts of creation are trivial and which are important.
Regarding Deimos and Phobo, how do their diameters and distances compare? The point is not about stimulating and merely assisting, it is about the very possibility or impossibility of discovering certain things.
Starting from the moon’s origin and up until now, Luna has been capable of eclipsing the sun. That’s because the moon has been receding away from Earth all this time. You could get total eclipses, glancing eclipses, and including eclipses that revealed the corona of the sun and many other features that eclipses provided. And with space telescopes we use disks in the lightpath to occult the photosphere in a similar manner. Yes, our path of knowledge would’ve probably been different had the moon been closer in or further out around this era. Likely, the timing of discoveries would by different. But I’m not sure about the ‘impossibility’ of discovering certain things. That is, I suspect the total difference in knowledge would be ‘trivial’.
I think you are overlooking that we are talking not about individual improbable events, but meaningful groups and meaningful series of improbable events, and this as well:
“Meaningful” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. That needs to be properly explored. I can ascribe meaning to the position of stones in Stonehedge. However, I’m not sure I can ascribe more meaning to the position of the moon than I can to a grain of sand. From some perspectives, it’s all awesome. Sand, by itself is pretty interesting and tells many things. And when heated, sand helps form glass, something that telescope makers used to map the heavens.
This makes sense. NOMA supports your worldview by virtue of the fact that religion plays no part in your thinking.
As one who doesn’t believe in any deities, do you identify as a philosophical materialist?
Hear, hear! I’m fully on board with that.
Might personal pet peeve over the years has been religious presuppositions masquerading as science (“Scientific YEC” being a particularly obvious example).
NOMA is a worldview shared by theists. Gould discusses how NOMA is the worldview used by John Paul II (i.e. the Pope).
I identify more as a skeptic. If there is compelling evidence for something other than the material then I would accept it.
Is it necessary that the evidence be empirically verifiable within MN?
I think the best label would be “compelling evidence”. I’m not a robot, so I don’t necessarily shy away from subjective evidence. However, the more independent the evidence is the more compelling it is.
Since God is personal, it has a lot to do with personal evidence, evidence that is meaningful to the individual, but that can poo-pooed by anyone else so inclined. God is not merely an abstraction only to be discussed in the academic third person, and those who know him cannot produce or induce evidence upon demand for the unbeliever. They can, however, if both parties are willing (and cordial 
), relate past personal evidences.
That brings us full circle. It seems that people are claiming that God is more than just personal, and that we can find evidence of God outside of personal experience. ID proponents claim that we can find evidence of God’s actions in the field of biology, for example. You may or may not think that we can find evidence for God separately creating kinds of plants and animals. In the Bible, God is described as performing miracles that could be seen by many people.
Of course, I am using a very wide brush that will certainly not apply to every Christian, so I hope no one takes offense. The best way I can communicate my thoughts on this matter is to have people ask themselves what it would take for them to believe in a deity they currently don’t believe in. I suspect that we would have very similar answers . . . or not. 
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Since God is personal, we can easily infer that those parts of creation which are more important are those which involve persons, say,
as opposed to one on Mars that no one will ever see.
Cordial is good.
Where does ID theory fit into this scheme? For example, Walter ReMine developed a hypothesis that would’ve demonstrated positive evidence for a designer had his idea actually worked out. (He called it the designer the ‘Biotic Messenger’). I would suggest that there are potentially, a number of ways the universe might’ve played out that would make the work demonstrating design influences much easier. That’s not to say the lack of these cases means there is no designer, or that there are other constraints on a designer that make a particular case impractical. It’s just that one needn’t be a believer in a particular religion (or any religion) to be convinced that ‘something else’ was at work.
Of course, it’s entirely possible that this situation’s uncertainty is exactly what was intended by the designer and that could possibly be accommodated into Christian beliefs (@swamidass comment?). In fact, all this data fits perfectly well with my Ironic Designer hypothesis.
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Scripture tells us that we can find evidence in both cosmology and biology:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm+19:1-4&version=esv&interface=amp
…not to mention a lot of others with respect to beauty.
I think there are a number of ways to interpret those passages, Dale. I know many Christians with a different view on that. Can’t one find God’s handwork in a grain of sand? I’ve met a number of Christian’s who have. And some who see His works in the areas of the universe beyond our local light sphere.
More than possible. Since it’s personal and about love and joy, you may recall the Kierkigard analogy?
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Certainly. My view is not different than that and absolutely includes it.
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So it isn’t just personal evidence?
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This is true. Confirmation bias is a universal condition but the extent varies by person. Humans are strange creatures.
Still we must admit that sometimes, the problem is the evidence, not the person’s beliefs. I think one way to assess whether that’s the situation is to make the case to a number of people of varying experiences and to be as objective as possible. That approach has real limitations but it does go a long toward managing personal biases (disentangling the observer from the phenomena). This is where I think the ‘moon currently being in just such an orbit for purpose X’ proposition doesn’t make the case. It’s an interesting hypothesis and it could be true, but I don’t think there’s a strong enough case to move it into the ‘likely’ category.
Aside: I think many belief systems include rationalizations for why others don’t arrive at similar beliefs. It’s probably necessary for those people or systems who expect “epistemic closure”.
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(redundant and hence deleted… I was working on different devices five miles apart. )
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Correct, not exclusively. Scripture also tells us that we are responsible to be sensitive to ‘general revelation’. General revelation - Wikipedia
I would not categorize NOMA as a worldview. NOMA defines boundaries for integrating (or not integrating) ideas derived from science and ideas derived from religion. Theists take different positions on how they integrate (or don’t integrate) ideas derived from the two different realms. I don’t see how NOMA even applies to people who don’t have any beliefs derived from religion.
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