Thanks for engaging with me. I'm afraid you'll have to say more than that though to convince me. Of course I know about Occam's Razor and how it can be applied to God. So do the theist philosophers. My uncertainty comes from general uncertainty about whether or not that is the right way to approach the question, especially given that Occam's Razor is currently (a) unjustified and (b) arbitrary. Also, I think that it is better to be too open-minded and considerate than to be the opposite.
A. We have a good explanation of why they would be wrong.
Such explanations are easy to come by. For example, on any politically tinged issue, we have a good explanation for why anyone might be wrong. So would you say we shouldn't take seriously expert opinions if they are on a politically sensitive topic? You would advise me against e.g. asking a bunch of libertarian grad students why they were libertarians?
B. Philosophy is not a discipline that reliably tracks the truth. Or converges to anything, really. See this. On topics that have been debated for centuries, many don't even have an answer that 50% of philosophers can agree on. In spite of this, and in spite of the base rate among the general population for atheism, 72.8% of these philosophers surveyed were atheists. If you just look at philosophy of religion there's a huge selection effect because a religious person is much more likely to think it's worth studying.
Your conclusion from this is that the philosophers are the problem, and not the questions they are attempting to answer? You think, not that these questions are difficult and intractable, but that philosophers are stupid or irrational? That seems to me to be pretty obviously wrong, though I'd love to be convinced otherwise. (And if the questions are difficult and intractable, then you shouldn't be as confident as you are!)
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.