It's not that the typical theist response is going to make no sense in some absolute way. I'm sure they have plenty of good arguments to make. If you want to learn about what makes for a good argument, then their responses will be very helpful.
This is merely a case of the bottom line. Arguments reached by arguing backwards from a desired conclusion are not useful as statements about the world - their use is as a sort of verbal theater. If you want to evaluate their claims fairly, you should try to understand what arguments and circumstances were most influential to them.
Epistemically useful arguments, arguments that aren't games or politics, aren't like combat. Instead, they are like inviting your enemy into your own home, to see what you see.
If you want to evaluate their claims fairly, you should try to understand what arguments and circumstances were most influential to them.
If someone doesn't pursue this question about themselves, for themselves, it's useless for someone else to (merely) ask it, as even if somehow you learn the truth, it probably won't have the form of a good argument. Arguments need to be designed, they won't describe the structure of a system as complicated as human mind (with influences of culture), unless there are laws of reasoning firmly in place that ensure that be...
I am about to graduate from one of the only universities in the world that has a high concentration of high-caliber analytic philosophers who are theists. (Specifically, the University of Notre Dame, IN) So as not to miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I have sent out emails asking many of them if they would like to meet and discuss their theism with me. Several of them have responded already in the affirmative; fingers crossed for the rest. I'm really looking forward to this because these people are really smart, and have spent a lot of time thinking about this, so I expect them to have interesting and insightful things to say.
Do you have suggestions for questions I could ask them? My main question will of course be "Why do you believe in God?" and variants thereof, but it would be nice if I could say e.g. "How do you avoid the problem of X which is a major argument against theism?"
Questions I've already thought of:
1-Why do you believe in God?
2-What are the main arguments in favor of theism, in your opinion?
3-What about the problem of evil? What about objective morality: how do you make sense of it, and if you don't, then how do you justify God?
4-What about divine hiddenness? Why doesn't God make himself more easily known to us? For example, he could regularly send angels to deliver philosophical proofs on stone tablets to doubters.
5-How do you explain God's necessary existence? What about the "problem of many Gods," i.e. why can't people say the same thing about a slightly different version of God?
6-In what sense is God the fundamental entity, the uncaused cause, etc.? How do you square this with God's seeming complexity? (he is intelligent, after all) If minds are in fact simple, then how is that supposed to work?
I welcome more articulate reformulations of the above, as well as completely new ideas.