What, in your opinion, is the best or most effective argument FOR the existence of god?

I was so curious as to the opinions of others about this question, that I had to come back on here and ask (I have been gone from here for about a month and a half or so, have been extremely sidetracked and disillusioned; I keep jumping from different activities as my mainstays, so there for a while I was on here for 6 hours a day, then I got burned out and went to reading for several hours a day).

So what is the best or most effective argument for the existence of god? I would have to say that, in my opinion, I think it would have be the teleological argument, or the argument from design. Even with the challenge of having to explain *against* natural mechanisms of self-structuring (like Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking that Victor Stenger talks about in God: The Failed Hypothesis), or all of the flaws, errors, and irregularities in the "creation" itself, and its seeming randomness and majority lack of order. (I always find myself wondering about what we know must exist way out there in space; why create that?) This seems to go hand in hand with the constants argument (I know there must be some other name for it), you know, where they talk about the dials being just so that we're in a Goldilocks zone.

Anyways, what's your take on this?

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Permalink Reply by Alan Marcus on October 9, 2009 at 12:17am
Thanks, I've had the conversation enough that it always comes down to this.

BTW, when did the big chicken/egg controversy get solved? I sure didn't see that one! Of course, sexual reproduction as we know it starts with an egg...
Permalink Reply by Stephen Moore on October 9, 2009 at 1:37am
Or, to put it another way, chickens evolved from egg laying not-chicken ancestors. Therefore, the egg came first.

Granted, the question is supposed to be a kind of koan, or a riddle, but I say Hah! to that. Science FTW mo-fo! ;o)
Permalink Reply by Stephen Moore on October 9, 2009 at 2:00am
Aww, shucks. I don' mean to be no spoil sport.

But it is fun to see the look on people's faces when you give them a simple answer (with a straight face) to a supposedly unanswerable question. :^)
Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on October 9, 2009 at 4:27pm
The correct answer is: neither. The not-chicken came first.
Permalink Reply by Jaume on October 9, 2009 at 7:00pm
What about this one: the egg came before the rooster.
Permalink Reply by Glen Sutton on October 13, 2009 at 11:56am
Even my 7 year old son asks, "If God created us who created God"? I have been asking that same question myself since I was a kid and have never been given a satisfactory response. Like you said Alan, if there is a designer god, then who or what created that god? Logically, a god just doesn't make any sense.

But then where did the energy and matter come from? Is it even possible it just always existed?
Permalink Reply by Billy Deaton on October 8, 2009 at 11:59pm
The kind that obfuscate the explanation of God so complexly that I just give up trying to machete through their thicket of assumptions and poor reasoning.
Permalink Reply by Rosemary LYNDALL WEMM on October 9, 2009 at 12:27am
Larry, I think he means that the best argument is one that is so dense that he cannot understand it. Big words and technical lingo can confuse many people into assuming that the argument hiding in their somewhere has to be a "good" one.
Permalink Reply by Billy Deaton on October 23, 2009 at 8:10pm
ah, sorry for the late response. I was addressing the original poster and yes, Rosemary nailed it. Many times deists will try to convince me there is a god with such a mess of reasoning it's like trying to untangle a knot of a million Christmas bulbs only to find upon straightening the line and plugging them in, that they don't work.

I'm metaphor heavy in this thread, man.
Permalink Reply by Langston on October 9, 2009 at 9:56am
Otherwise known as attempting to "blind with science"
Permalink Reply by urizen9 on October 9, 2009 at 1:37am
It seems we are arguing for at least 2 things when talking about G... One is a collection of generic forces that cause interesting things to happen in and out of the universe in whatever shape and collection with or without unity.

The other is that this collection looks like my middle aged uncle.

Skip the levity and and see the absurdity - where it maybe, or if there is any.
Permalink Reply by urizen9 on October 9, 2009 at 8:49am
I noticed that in the atheist designation a social concern dominates as well. As in trying to ease the poor shm...s burden from all the crap these god-business types put on them. This angle hasn't occurred to me before.
The Pastafarian reference is great.

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