I have long thought that dialogues between atheists and religious believers (especially monotheists as in Christianity) could be fruitful for both groups.
For atheists, it could bring into question their demand for empirical proof that God exists before they would believe, since by definition God is non-material and not subject to the dictates of materialism. For Christians (and other monotheists), it could bring into question their domesticated and comfortable, thus greatly limited, ideas of God.
For example, in my poem, “God Loves Atheists,” these lines focus on the problem of theists having marginal or even distorted ideas or images of the God of Jesus Christ, even to the point that God is an atheist regarding all the meager and self-serving ideas about Himself:
God loves atheists,
His unknowing images,
loving them to death
or rejecting ideas
of God so convoluted,
so completely cramped,
caved in upon themselves,
but believed by so many
believers that even God
is an atheist to such
pathetic presumptions
and withered, shrunken
concepts of what He is.
Has God ever been called an atheist before? I hope what I mean comes through the poem. Atheists, with their critique of belabored ideas of God, can help Christians realize that God wholly transcends their images and ideas of Him, that God is not tame or just “nice,” but is a somewhat wild God, wildly and madly in love with all the humans he has created, including atheists who reject his very existence.
Perhaps atheists, in seeing the passion and contemplative wisdom of Christians who realize that God always eludes our control of Him by our words and ideas, and that He is a desert God who confronts the good and the evil within each of us, can begin to wonder, even question, their presuppositions about what it would take for them to believe in God. That physical evidence is contradictory to the very notion of God, and that we can know through additional means than only scientific empiricism. Reasoning, faith, imagination, mystical experience are some of those ways.
From my faith perspective, I hope that atheists would re-imagine their assumptions and avoid the dead-end of scientism in approaching the existence of God question. Perhaps allowing a little ambiguity to exist would help them understand more deeply how and why devout Christians have been willing to both live and die for their faith in Jesus Christ.
The Christian God is strange, even absurd to conventional thinking, but it is a sacred absurdity, not the absurdity of a Camus or Sartre where life is meaningless, without purpose, and death brings instant oblivion.
I wonder how many atheists secretly, perhaps even to themselves, wish the astonishing Christian story were true. And for Christians, it is. For atheists who are truly seekers of truth, it can become so.