Personally, I found C.S. Lewis' use of natural drives somewhat interesting. It explains that everything man has a natural drive for has some counterpart to fulfill this drive. For hunger, there is food. For sex, there is sex. Therefore, what does this say about man's innate desire for something more than the observable world?

Boyd talks about probably the one thing that convinced him was that rationality seems to exists or that we desire it to exist which is along the same lines (among other things like meaning). He asks how you would explain if you found a tribe in the Amazon that has never had any contact with the outside world, but this tribe desires snow and waits for the snow to come.

I have been thinking about starting a thread on this.

Come on, you have to be able to see the obvious and glaring retort coming a mile away.

Evolution can explain this as well.

not really. or not very convincingly.

Wow. Do people really write this stuff with so little understanding of what we have natural drives for.
We don't have a drive for food or sex. cheeez.

Taking this to heart:
In my experience, the teleological argument wins hands down in terms of persuading the casually interested.

Craving for food occurs when there's no food. Craving for sex when there's no sex. Craving for God...?

to you

Evolutiondidit.

I think this may be the best for several reasons. In a sense, it can be found in the Bible, not as a formal argument, but simply the appeal to physical reality as evidence for God ("The heavens are telling of the glory of God").

You even find non-Christians making the argument, such as Cicero. Plantinga puts the idea of being convinced of God's existence from nature as a "properly basic belief" - it's so obvious and so intrinsic to human nature that a formal argument isn't necessary for one to be rational in believing.

And Romans 1:20 seems to say that God is Himself active in convincing people of His existence from the things that have been made.

Edit: I was going to post on this but decided not to, but will briefly mention it here. I recently read Hume's Enquiry Concerning Natural Religion, which is often cited as the death blow of the teleological argument. The truth is that it virtually confirms the argument as at least powerful, if not valid. The "Hume" character in the dialogue, Philo, who made all the objections to the argument, in the end basically admits that the order we see indicates a designer. It's amazing to me how so many people think Hume destroyed the argument. It's a very interesting paper to read - at one point he foreshadows Darwinism in a very eerie way, and it seems Darwin himself was a big fan of Hume - he was also a big fan early in his life of Paley, who supposedly wrote his book in response to Hume.

I agree! C. S. Lewis was ******ed and obviously knows nothing!

And food exists to resolve hunger. Sex exists to resolve that craving.

Some people have a craving for sex with little boys or to chop people up into little pieces and eat them. I fail to see where you're going with this.

with God, comes priests. so God does satisfy the craving for little boy sex.

i feel really bad about this, so i'm gonna put it in a spoiler box:

Who are you agreeing with? CSLewis was a bright guy and knew a lot. That he knew little on this topic doesn't get exploded into either of your conclusions, you need to be fairer with writers, he was trying his best.

well, at least you disagree with Lewis.

I was joking. I think C.S. Lewis was brilliant. You said something about him having little understanding when he wrote what he did, and I gave a sarcastic response.

You got levelled pretty hard.

Confirmed.

My apologies, I was being facetious.

It's a poor argument - pretty much just dressed up question begging. Did CS Lewis really advance this as an argument? Do you have a source, by any chance?

Like Jib said the big bang is a description, a theory to help us understand the details of the universe's beginning.

We're not defining anything first, we're solving a logical problem. We don't get out the infinite regress by defining God, we define God after we get out of infinite regress. DUC?

At this point I'm beginning to think you don't understand what infinite regress actually means...

Forgive me for saying, but that's not a major problem.

They are all absurd. You can't argue a being that created the universe into existence. If the creator of the universe wished to be known to all, he would be known to all.

I think the question is are they all equally absurd?

I don't know if this is an argument, but before I became an atheist i rationalized the conflict between science & religion by convincing myself that the big bang was gods chosen method of creating the universe, and that evolution was gods chosen method of creation, etc.
So when a theist says they don't dispute evolution for eg. because it just so happened to be gods way of creating life, i think thats the best theistic argument, because they're actually accepting scientific theories (but have forgotten to cut god from the picture)

Equally? I suppose not. Which is the least bad? I dunno... what are the major arguments again? Cosmological, argument from design, ontological..? What am I forgetting as far as the "major" arguments go?

Really? Here's one:

1. If you read this post, then god exists.
2. You read this post.
3. God exists.