A friend of mine has been having issues with one of his neighbors because their daughter is good friends with my friend's daughter and go the the same school. The daughters are around 8 years old and the neighbors are devout Christians and my friend, like me, are atheists.
The crux of the issue is the neighbor's daughter is inescapably Christian out of no coincidence that her parents are also Christian. And she is always asking my friend's daughter to engage in her Church's activities but she doesn't want to. Now it's creating some friction in their friendship now and recently it blew up where the Christian girl, upset after another attempt to invite, got rejected and threw out my friend's daughter of her house. Of course my friend's daughter was also upset and cried about it.
After hearing this story from my friend, I told him it's been a really long time since I've debated anyone regarding Christianity or God or the concept of religion. I have no problems with anyone who believe in that stuff as long as they understand that it has nothing to do with what is true and understand what it means to believe in something. Predictably, these are the people who employ the "let's change the definitions of some key terms mid-argument and create a straw-man argument."
What these people do is first start of a debate over God with the implicit acceptance that the definition of "true" is what is experienced as sensory perception. What I mean by that is when we physically debate, we speak and there are sound waves traveling that carry the ideas of the speaker and the debating partner also hears the sound waves and accept the fact that what they hear is true. What they are doing is in order to enter into a debate, they must accept that sensory perception is valid.
What I'm getting at is until people can accept a framework in which things can be allowed to be true or false, communication is pointless. The only framework we have is sensory perception. We must implicitly accept that what is perceived is a valid experience. Now, I know what everyone will come out of the woodwork and say, "Well, how about if someone looks at the sky and says the sky is green?" The sky isn't green, it's blue and how can you resolve that their experience of seeing the sky is a valid experience? It can be a valid experience if they also agree on a spectrometer that the frequency that is called blue by me is also called green by him. The words 'blue' and 'green' are no different than the word 'blue' and 'azul' in the Spanish language. They're just labels that attach to something that can be objectively measured. Now, if that person is inconsistent between the spectrometer reading for blue and the color of the sky, then that person is rejecting the framework because he wants to be in a position to be never wrong, or more precisely, to pass along what is knowingly false as true. Again, communication with such a person is pointless since there is a rejection of a methodology of evaluating what is true or false.
This is basically what Christians do with God. If it is true that God exists, then we must first define what existence is. Everything that exists, outside of God, must be perceived. So to include God in the set of objects that can be perceived (the realm of existence), God must also be perceived. But after thousands of years, there has been no evidence of God. Yes, dinosaurs don't exist today, but at least there is evidence of their remains that they did exist at one time. I'll leave it up to the paleontologists to explain it in detail that dinosaurs did exist.
So the main problem for those who claim God exists is they lack any evidence. They'll try to make the argument that the evidence of God is everywhere (e.g. the sun, mountains, clouds in the sky, green pastures, etc.) but that is just a red herring. All those things, including rape, murder, and all things considered 'bad, which also should be included in the theists' evidence of God, can be perceived without the knowledge of God. We already have scientific explanations on the origins of the Earth, Sun and the galaxy.
Usually, the 3rd and last desperate attempt to cling go their faith is 'You can't prove there isn't a God.' This is what I call 'Prove a negative' argument. These are difficult to do because in science, because there is always the possibility that new evidence could come along and disprove an existing theory. I call it, 'It only takes one.' What I mean is if you make a proposition about something, all it takes is one counter-example as evidence that the proposition is false. This leads to the inherent problem with proving a negative.
In an attempt to evaluate a statement, like "God exists" as true or false, the correct starting position is to assume the statement is false and then collect evidence and reason and logic in an attempt to discover that it could be true. The Christians do not do this. Their starting position is to assume the statement is true and then leave it up to someone else to do the hard work.
Once this 'stalemate' occurs, the believers incorrectly conclude that their stance is equally valid as the non-believer. In other words, "I can't prove God exists but you can't prove He doesn't exist. So there! We're both the same." Wrong. They are not equally valid statements. Using that logic, I can simply make up anything like "My Flying Purple Rhombus" and tell them to prove it doesn't exist.
The 'Prove to me it doesn't exist' argument actually gives everyone the same pass to make up something and claim victory over the non-believers.
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