Best arguments are the arguments that deists have always used, such as Aristotle. Prime mover arguments, cosmological arguments etc.
Which are pretty good.
However, theism itself is indefensible. Even if one accepts the existence of a deity through some philosophical or logical pathway, there's no way to know the deity's will, his mind or his goals, hence theism is completely untenable.
I don't know. I suppose if I had made all this crazy bullshit I'd probably have a vested interest in it.
Deists were harsh critics of religion, and thought God was only an external cause, not something that would be part of every day life. They rejected revelation and used only what could be rationally discovered. They had a real love of science. Science however, gave a pretty good explanation for a lot of the mysteries deists use for evidence of God, so deists became atheists. In practice Deists and Atheists are pretty similar.
As such, this created real polarization where now we just have atheists vs. theists.
It seems redundant to say that a finite individual cannot appreciate the mind and intention of an infinite one, but unfounded to claim that it cannot successfully strive towards that end, especially collectively over periods of time.
cont.
why can one not interpret a theistic reality platonically/ archetypically as a means to develop a conceptual compass for moral behavior reasonably and honestly?
cont.
Your broad stroke dismissal and mischaracterization to me seems both illiterate and propogandic, verging on straight trolling
The problem is that I don't see how human beings could do that without some form of religious revelation or spiritual insight, philosophy itself seems unable to go further than deism, you can't prove that for example christianism is true with hard philosophical arguments so theism seems to be outside what we would really call reason.
Religious revelations are based on faith because none have been proven true and spiritual insight has never provided evidences of being an actual source of knowledge. (Lack of consensus, impossible to rationally or empirically testify it, no even a coherent theory on how actual spiritual insight would works or can be isolated from ordinary magical thinking)
Agreed. Thank you for taking this seriously, makes it worth putting in the effort to respond properly.
I'm not advocating untestable subjective experience as a means to determining the structure of physical reality. I'm referring to the philosophically rigorous practice of using the archetype/ platonic form of the perfect individual as a standard for ethical systems, which is a theistic mindset despite the lack of physical creationism.
cont.
the deistic/ theistic distinction lies at whether or not an ethically perfect individual is interventionist. It doesn't seem obvious either way, there are sophisticated arguments for both. imo you'd have to be freakishly well read and a meditative guru to claim with entire confidence one over the other, and both seem useful anyway.
cont.
It seems to me definitively theistic to base social behavior on an ethical system of the perfect individual. The mere basis of its attributes to explain physical action seems a legitimate form of intervention.