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Of course a belief in God can be arrived at rationally. It simply cannot be arrived at deductively, nor is it meant to.
You bring up Romans 1. Paul says that since creation makes it clear there is a God, men are without excuse. So if someone looks at creation and concludes, "there is no God," I don't think you are going to argue them into theism. It takes a change of heart.
When I was a college student, I was an avowed creationist. Evolution was ridiculous, of course. Those scientists just had an agenda. Satan had blinded them, of course. They were ignoring the obvious.
Well, then, years later, as I continued to study the Bible, I came to understand that the Hebrews who wrote the Tanakh don't process thoughts like you and I do because they were not a bunch of Westerners trained in the scientific method. Their entire frame of reference when writing is different from how we as Westerners read it.
See, to an ancient Hebrew, if you were to explain to them something like how crops grow, they would look at you like a calf looks at a new gate. Those details don't matter to them. God did it. That is the big picture. Can't you see that, silly American? You spend all this time explaining the details of how God did it. What does that matter?
It also occurred to me that God chose the Jews as his chosen people. Not the Greeks. Not the British. Not any Westerners, but rather the Hebrews of several thousand years ago herding sheep and growing grain out in a desert backwater. That means something.
It also occurred to me that God is not just the God of scientific, linear-thinking Westerners, but of everyone who ever has lived, most of whom are not highly-educated, and that his Word is tailored primarily to them. Not because it is a faith for the stupid, but rather because He loves all people, not just the ones with special knowledge, and wants them to hear and understand the Gospel and be saved.
That bears out when comparing Christianity to, say, Buddhism, which has a much more developed, detailed, and well-rounded worldview. God did not give us his Word so that we could have such a sophisticated worldview. It is nice to have, but as Paul says in Corinthians, the gospel is a stumbling block to the wise.
The root of Christianity is not a high-faluting philosophy that explains everything in the world, but rather a relationship with a person.
So after arriving at those kinds of conclusions, at some point later I was reintroduced to the whole creation vs. evolution debate. Except, this time the stakes were not as high, because I had come to understand that God was God regardless of which conclusions I came to. And while the scientific mainstream view certainly has a lot of holes and unanswered questions, nobody would ever come to the conclusions that the world was spontaneously created 6,000 years ago, or that there was a global flood that created most of the world's geological features, unless they first read it in the Bible.
And these creationist outlets are not shy about that. They clearly say that the world has to be 6,000 years old and there has to have been a global flood, because that's what they see in the Bible, and if it's not true, then Christianity is not true either. And with those kinds of stakes, there is absolutely no way you're going to get intellectual honesty out of people.
If someone is in a position that their faith is going to be crushed if they have to accept that creation science is a load of hooey, then there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that is going to sway them, and they will keep on arguing until either they are blue in the face or everybody else just gives up out of apathy or fatigue.
The reason I cannot stand this is because it makes it rather straightforward to argue that Christianity is false to the uncommitted observer. And based upon my experiences, such a conclusion would stem from a wholly erroneous and procrustean understanding of the meaning and purpose of God's written Word. They are totally missing the boat, and making their foes' arguments for them.
