Rational Arguments for God and Apologetics

I recently finished reading Julian Baggini's Atheism: A Very Short Introduction (from Oxford's "Very Short Introduction" series). Toward the end of the book, he gets into arguments for & against religion. I think he makes a good point about arguments for the existence of a god:

Pick up any introduction to the philosophy of religion and you'll see a number of traditional arguments for the existence of God. ... [T]o my mind it is not worth spending too much time on them for the simple reason that these arguments don't provide the reasons why people become religious. This isn't just my view, but the honest opinion of many religious people who give much thought to these arguments. For instance, Peter Vardy, a Christian philosopher and author of several leading textbooks in the philosophy of religion which consider these arguments, calls them 'a waste of time'. Russell Stannard, the leading physicist who wrote a book called The God Experiment on evidence for God's existence, says, 'I don't have to believe in God, I know that God exists -- that is how I feel'. In other words, evidence and arguments are neither here nor there -- it is personal conviction that really counts.

Baggini then explains that these arguments were never intended to prove that a god exists, but instead were apologetics:

The function of such arguments is not to show that God exists, but to show that belief in God does not require any irrationality. It is about reconciling belief and reason, not showing belief to be justified through reason.

I agree with this analysis. As proofs, the arguments for a god are quite weak. They make a lot more sense as efforts to show that belief in a god can be consistent with a rational approach to life.

(cross-posted from the Philosophy & Religion discussion board at IMDb.)