I'm trying to get you to dig deeper and seek out the truth of whether there really is a god or not and not just be satisfied with your personal definitions and understanding. God wants you to know he is there and to look past just what your senses can touch and your mind can comprehend. As a follower of God I want you to know him as I do and to believe. Not for myself, but for you because God loves you and therefore I do.
Yeah, I've believed all that stuff before. It felt good, and I'm sincerely jealous, in many ways, of people who can still believe it. If I ever end up believing it again, however, it will not be because of unsound intellectual arguments like Platinga's. It will probably be because of a strong emotional response to the loving bonds of a community of believers who trust and support each other and sing songs about how wonderful God is. Or something like that. The point is that faith is not won by logic -- especially not by
bad logic, which is pretty much the only kind that can support it. (If it were supported by
good logic, it wouldn't be faith.) Faith, to the contrary, is won by emotion.That's not a bad thing. I'm not anti-faith, and I'm not anti-religion. (I am anti
some religions, or some aspects of religions.) On the whole, I think most religious communities do a lot of good for a lot of people. They have a lot of really wacky beliefs, some of which are harmful (e.g., the anti-gay stuff).
But they also motivate people to love and to forgive and to be charitable. If I were trying to convert people to Christianity, that's what I would emphasize. A single good deed, done in the name of your religion, is worth more than a thousand flawed syllogisms, IMO.
Attempts to justify Christian beliefs by using reason and evidence might make sense to people who are already Christians. Such people might be sufficiently biased in favor of such arguments to find them persuasive. But to a non-believer, such justifications will always fail, and anyway seem to miss the point. Nobody has ever kneeled and prayed and asked Jesus into their heart based on a careful weighing of the evidence. They've done so by
letting go of such limiting trifles as mere evidence. It follows that doing apologetics a la Platinga is nearly always futile -- although at least Platinga gets paid for it.