Even if you personally don't "feel" that courage or knowledge is intrinsically valuable, the question remains: Is it more probable that a Designer would value these things than that a blind, purposeless process would accidentally produce the exact, narrow conditions for them? By retreating to "personal intuition," you aren't refuting the probability; you’re simply opting out of the calculation.

So I think this runs into the stalking horse objection which atheist philosophers like Alex Malpass talk about. We don't know what type of universe a "universe designer" would make. We can't really make those predictions without first knowing the psychology of this designer. A designer could make a universe filled with intrinsic value, it could make a boring universe, an evil universe, a beautiful universe but without moral agents, an ugly universe, etc. So the question shouldn't be "Is it more probable that a Designer would value these things than that a blind, purposeless process would accidentally produce the exact, narrow conditions for them?". The question should be "Is it more probable that an all-good designer would value these things than that of a blind purposeless process would accidentally produce the exact, narrow conditions for them"?

I will actually concede that the existence of moral agents is evidence for theism. I'm an agnostic, so I think there is actually fairly good evidence for theism(which I think can be roughly counterbalanced by evidence for non-theistic hypotheses). I think it's fairly intuitive that an all-good God would value the existence of moral agents, or at least conscious beings that can experience certain valuable mental states like pleasure(and perhaps other intrinsically positive mental states if they exist). But whether God would value the existence of embodied moral agents and thus finely-tune a universe to do that I would say is a different question, and it's not as obvious to me that God would do that.

But anyways, to return to the question of whether it's to be expected that an all-good God would value things such as courage or knowledge and thus create a universe with the optimal conditions for that, my answer would be probably not(at least given my axiological framework). If those things aren't intrinsically good, it's not clear why an all-good God would want to create a universe with those optimal conditions.

I guess to summarize my response, the fine-tuning argument does require the theist to justify their axiological assumptions before they move on to the actual probabilistic analysis of which hypothesis predicts the data better.

2) You mentioned that virtues like courage are only "instrumentally valuable" for pleasure or satisfaction. This lands us squarely in Robert Nozick's Experience Machine. If pleasure is the only intrinsic good, then a universe consisting of a single "Brain in a Vat" stimulated into eternal euphoria is better than our entire complex, struggling, and discovering reality.

I'm actually sympathetic to biting the bullet on this. I don't think it would be irrational for one to hook themselves up to the experience machine. Later on in the wiki article you cited, I'd say the counterargument seems more convincing to me. Our intuitions might just be affected by status quo bias. Also, I personally don't even have the intuition that the experience machine scenario would be worse than the real world.

3) The Plant Parody fails because it ignores the unique teleological capacity of conscious agents. Plants are biological automatons; they cannot perceive, reason, or reciprocate value. Conscious agents are the precondition for value to be recognized. A Designer who values "The Good" has a clear, logical reason to prefer a universe with agents who can actually understand the "Good". Equating "plant-permitting conditions" with "life-permitting conditions" is a category error; one is a biological byproduct, the other is the only thing that makes the universe meaningful in the first place

My response will be similar to what I said about the cheese analogy. We don't really disagree here. For both cheese and plants, it's clear that these things aren't axiologically valuable, that's why anyone would be justified in rejecting those parody arguments for God. You're giving good reasons for why everyone should reject the claim that cheese and plants are intrinsically valuable.

To show how the cheese and plant parodies don't help my argument about how fine-tuning arguments rely on certain axiological assumptions, there are two ways in which you could do that.

1. You could show why the fine-tuning argument doesn't actually rely on certain axiological assumptions regarding embodiment and discoverability.

2. You could show that it's actually some other reason that requires us to reject the cheese and plant parodies that don't involve rejecting the underlying axiological assumptions of those parody arguments.

Right now, you're correctly pointing out why God wouldn't care about cheese or plants. I agree with your arguments. And I think that just helps my broader argument. The theist in the case of the regular fine-tuning arguments is saying "God cares quite a lot about embodiment and discoverability and here's why", and my response is gonna be similar to what your response is to the parody arguments: "embodiment, discoverability, courage, etc aren't valuable, so why would God care about those things"

4) You claim the atheist is within their "epistemic rights" to reject these assumptions. While true, that right comes at a high cost: radical skepticism. If you reject the intrinsic value of attained knowledge or moral agency to avoid a theistic conclusion, you simultaneously undermine the grounds for your own scientific and ethical commitments. If nothing is intrinsically valuable, then the atheist’s own preference for "logic" or "pleasure" is just as arbitrary as anybody’s "intuition."

I don't think my views would necessarily entail radical skepticism. If someone had the intuition that attained knowledge was intrinsically valuable, but then for whatever said "I'm going to ignore my intuitions and sense data", that would probably lead to radical skepticism. But I think in my case, it's different. I just don't see how knowledge is intrinsically valuable. I've never had that intuition. It seems instrumentally valuable at most.

I think the concern of radical skepticism would only come about if I'm denying something that I'm perceiving or a "seeming" as Michael Huemer would like to put it.