Atheists, what are the most convincing theist arguments you heard of?

[Neo-Scholastic]

---

The Great Commission is to share the Good News of Jesus Christ - to  share to our own personal experience and point the many changed lives of others. Apologetics were never meant to convince non-believers to come to faith. That is the work of the Holy Spirit speaking through the sublime. Our God is a wounded God. His compassion was born of agony and injustice. He gives comfort and counsel to us in our times of need. The role of apologetics is just to demonstrate that the trust we put in the hope of our hearts is reasonable.

Many of you are not convinced. Similarly the skeptical objections are not persuasive. I see only various combinations of non-sequiturs and straw men. What remains, for me, is not some abstract 'argument from ignorance' but rather the abiding presence of an ineffable Other, the all-encompassing love that reaches out to me even though I deserve nothing. As John 4:19 says, we love Him because He loved us first. That is His invitation to all those who, like me and so many others, see beauty, knows compassion, and whose hearts cry out from the darkness.

---

But YOUR god is a strawman. How can skeptical observations be persuasive, when what you believe is an emotional belief, not based in logic or reality?

In a particularly resonate line from the movie Rango - "No man can walk away from his own story." Everyone starts from their own experience. I believe it is right and proper for people to approach reality with their whole being. There is a place for logical analysis. But not when listening to Bach, staring out over the Ocean, reflecting on personal existence alienated from the a larger world that is wholly Other, or finding inexplicable peace hidden in crushing defeat and anguish. That is the human condition. No doubt, these have an emotional component but they also represent kinds of unmediated knowing - approaching reality on its terms and not our own. After those fleeting moments of numinous insight, sober reflection does not ask if those experiences are real, for that is to deny one's own reality; but rather, what they mean and live fully by rationally incorporating them into one's life.

But of course, YMMV.