Benevolent Creator God?

[R00tKiT]

Well, the teleological argument itself is one based on perceived evidence.  IOW, design is inferred based on someone's interpretation of how the universe works.  So this is not an argument to be made without the use of evidence.  Your interpretation of design in the universe is an opinion, but there are other interpretations and other hypotheses. 

To say "the appearance of design in the universe warrants a designer" is not really an opinion, it's a valid analogy based on the simple observation that things don't arrange themselves or serve some goal without an agent behind.

Now, arguing that a snowflake is "designed" is pretty weak since we know what happens on a molecular level to cause crystalline formation of ice and we can repeat this with variable results by varying the conditions.  

How does the fact that you know something about the formation of snowflakes weaken the design hypothesis....? Just because you know how something was formed doesn't mean there is no supernatural agent that intended for it to form.... non-sequitur.

 Another similar approach is that of intelligent design, which has been demonstrated to be absolutely false from just about everything claiming to be designed, such as eyeballs.  These arguments are weak largely because those making the arguments don't have the imagination to form theories of evolutionary development.

Evolutionary development is irrelevant to these arguments. As I said before, a deity can operate through the very mechanisms of evolution. To say otherwise would be personal incredulity.

Well, Einstein, in order to formulate SR, still relied on big chunks of classical mechanics, electromagnetism, etc. all of which are based on empirical data. 

No, he didn't.  His fascination with light began as a boy when he saw the light glinting off of the water.  He formed these thought experiments as a way of imagining what was going on.  He didn't use science or math until his ideas were already formed and he knew he needed mathematics to confirm his hypothesis would work so the scientific community would take him seriously.

....?? 
I'm sorry but there is more to Einstein's biography than what you read in some pop-sci article. His original paper on special relativity is titled "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" and he mentions Maxwell's name in the same paper. He was familiar with Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism. Einstein certainly wasn't some isolated loon who was having fun imagining thought experiments , as you seem to present him above, he still received a standard physics training, a PhD degree, and familiarized himself with the major works of his predecessors, like any other physics graduate...

Physics, like any other experimental science, can't be done in a vacuum, Einstein's thought experiments definitely helped him, but they aren't the whole story.

Now you say a deity acts through natural processes.  Well, how are we to tell the difference between a deity's actions and just plain natural processes?  How are we to determine that the laws of the universe are they way they are because of a deity or because that's just how they are?  And how are we to determine when a message is divinely revealed?

Under theism, everything is a deity's actions, nothing get out of God's will. "Natural processes" or "laws" are just labels we put to make sense of the world around us. We either argue that a universe is an effect to a cause, and that infinite regress is impossible, or we don't. Once we establish the existence of a first cause, we can infer some of its properties from its creation (the universe). If we obtain benevolence, it's even possible to argue for theism, not just deism.

Yes, it's only valid because that's the only way it can work.  If you are arguing something not known to exist in the observable universe, you really have only one tool left, and that is logic.

I agree. Many people here though don't seem to welcome purely logical arguments.