Haha for my philosophy class at Christian college I had to write a paper arguing that it is reasonable to believe in god that is due tomorrow. As I hold the exact opposite position as the one I am supposed to be arguing for, this was a weird assignment. I basically had to argue against my own beliefs.
To give you guys an idea of what I am dealing with here's my prompt:
Your second essay, of at least 1000 words, will be the product of a "performance task." A performance task is an assignment that involves an authentic, "real-world" situation, a role for you to play in this situation, high stakes, and opposition.
For your specific performance task, you are to imagine yourself living in an ordinary community in the United States 10 years from now. A situation has arisen in this community in which some "New Atheists" in town have launched an aggressive public relations campaign (bankrolled by some local wealthy secular humanists) to persuade the members of the community to stop engaging in religious activities (which these new atheists see as worthless at best and dangerous at worst). As part of their campaign, they have employed a variety of media (Internet, radio, TV, newspapers, advertising, etc.) to communicate various messages that imply that there is no God and that belief in God is irrational. As a prominent Christian in the community, you have been asked to take on the role of representing the Christian faith in an ecumenical town hall panel discussion (which will include representatives of all major world faith traditions along with agnostics and atheists) focused on the question of whether belief in God is rational (justified, reasonable, or warranted). At stake in this discussion is the local cultural climate, which, due to the efforts of the new atheists, has become less and less favorable to belief in God and religious activities based on such belief. Your opposition is, of course the organized group of activist new atheists.
Since each of the panelists will be asked to give a defense of his or her point of view, you will need to prepare a position paper suitable for the audience of fellow community members that will be in attendance at the town hall meeting. Your position paper should consist in a well-reasoned and persuasive defense of an affirmative answer to the question, "Is belief in God rational?” Since the audience will consist in a mix of different kinds of people with different religious, ethnic, racial, socio-economic, and educational backgrounds, in order for your remarks to be sufficiently accessible to a high percentage of them, you will need to refrain from using sophisticated and complex argumentation and instead employ a brief appeal to simple arguments for God's existence and to religious experience as bases for knowledge of God . At the same time, you will need to reply to objections you anticipate will be forthcoming from the non-theistic panelists (of the sort you would find in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Harris's The End of Faith). Finally, you should also touch on the themes of Pascal's Wager, evidentialism, and the nature of faith.
The New Atheists are coming and they're gonna persecute us!
This is a "high stakes" situation that we need to train our Christian soldiers for!
I felt like such an idiot writing my paper and I packed it with apologetic arguments I keep hearing. There is nothing like attempting to argue for theism to realize how hopeless it is. I could easily debunk everything I wrote in my paper and I felt like everything I wrote was a little tongue in cheek as if I was satirizing apologists' arguments. I don't understand how seemingly intelligent people like William Lane Craig could find theistic arguments convincing.
Topic: Completing deconversion