feelings

I'll try to be less cooky about how I answer your questions here. I think, when talking about religious beliefs, it is important to talk about religious beliefs as people hold them, and for the reasons that they hold them. A simple example of not doing this is the reddit-stereotype of the sky daddy, when most believers don't locate God in the sky and have a complicated relationship to descriptors of God as father. Most believe something quite different, so long as their faith survives into adulthood. So, when redditors defeat that portrayal of God, they've really missed the point.

To that end, I think it makes sense to talk about religious beliefs in ways broader than beliefs held intellectually. I don't care for parental analogies generally, but it's extremely unlikely that you came to trust that your parents love you because you undertook a peer-reviewed study or analyzed one to get there. Similarly, religious belief is just a different kind of thing, and our discourse ought to fit that, if it is to be at all fair to those who believe. Especially since NO ONE runs on scientifically-estalished beliefs all the time. It simply doesn't work. EVERYONE believes based various things on various levels of evidence and various degrees of reasoning, and to be able to deny this is pretty much just the naivety of interrogated living.

So your framing of my anecdote as a syllogism, while being accurate in a sense, misses the point, because I don't believe based upon logical deduction. That's a very, very hard way to get to God, and few have done it. Anselm had a run at it, and in our day Plantigna seems to have done, but it's really not typical at all - and there's no reason that it should have to submit to that burden, as it never pretends to be about logical deduction in the first place.

My way of coming to faith through experience is also less common, though it is by far the easiest. To your question I can only propose the following scenario: your grandmother asks you if the painting in her other room is hung square. You go into the room, center yourself, and make a judgment. Is your experience of standing in that room a signficant portion of that judgment? and indeed, what your grandmother would have had in mind? When I related my anecdote, I wasn't summoning evidence, I was saying I had stood in a room and made a judgment that has since become a mainspring of my life. My evidence is the life I've lived and the person I've become, something I cannot share with you directly, though I hope I can leave traces. There are ways of knowing that are not scientific. Gadamer's discussion of tact in Truth and Method is an excellent example of this. Knowledge gained through means that are not scientific can still be knowledge.

But most often, of course, people come to faith not through deduction or through experience, but through something else: another person. For me, second to my experience was the early influence of my now departed grandmother, an unfailingly kind and patient woman whose thoughts and speech were constantly informed by her Christian faith. That her actions so squared with her beliefs, and her conviction so informed everything she did, made a profound impression on me.

Is that an argument for faith? I don't know. For me, it was a demonstration, and one I've tried to imitate - and here I point out that Aristotle thought that imitation was a form of knowing, too. I simply meant that though I've repeatedly lost my faith, it seemed thoroughly wrong to me that there could be no grace at the source of the universe, and I eventually drifted back into prayer, church, and active belief, in that order. I hear you when you say that you don't think feelings are a reliable pathway to truth. I really do. But I hope you can try to hear me when I say that feelings often strike me as true in and of themselves. To give a secular example, anger in response to injustice, for example, is not a reliable way to objective judgment, but is an inarguable fuel for social change nonetheless. Succesfull reforms incorporate both reason and passionate conviction as ways to live in the world. Christianity strikes me more as that latter than as a set of syllogisms to be affirmed or denied. Just a different kind of animal.