I found this post from Simple Apologetics through Brian Auten’s Apologetics 315 Twitter feed, which discusses what Christians can learn from atheism with respect to bearing the burden of proof for Christian truth claims.

Excerpt:

For instance, many atheists also call themselves “free thinkers”, a title suggesting that they are not beholden to any one perspective, but always open to following wherever reason and evidence may lead. As the current description of “Freethought” on Wikipedia reads:

Freethought holds that individuals should not accept ideas proposed as truth without recourse to knowledge and reason. Thus, freethinkers strive to build their opinions on the basis of facts, scientific inquiry, and logical principles, independent of any logical fallacies or intellectually limiting effects of authority, confirmation bias, cognitive bias, conventional wisdom, popular culture, prejudice, sectarianism, tradition, urban legend, and all other dogmas. Regarding religion, freethinkers hold that there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of supernatural phenomena.

Of course Christians will disagree about the basic tenets of freethought in regards to religion, but the first section of this description is one that nearly everyone should be able to gladly affirm. (We might want to broaden what counts as a legitimate basis for our opinions to include testimony from others, memories, and other ‘properly basic’ beliefs, but I digress).

In this regard, atheists (and others) who denounce a fideistic approach to religion are doing religious people a great service. Whenever the claims of faith are said to be outside of rational investigation, it creates a great challenge for everyone else. To take a small scale example, I once knew a student who would occasionally cancel Bible studies because “God told me that we should not meet today.” The truth of the matter was more likely that she was behind in her homework! Her ‘prophetic’ explanation was frustrating and a conversation stopper, but it also came across as fairly disingenuous, and it eroded the trust in our relationship.

A similar, but more significant, problem exists when Christians say “you just have to take it on faith” or “you just need to believe” or “pray about it and it’ll become clear to you” when confronted with difficult challenges to their beliefs. These words initially sound good, and pious, and noble, but upon reflection (or hearing them one too many times), they start to sound like an intellectually lazy way of avoiding the problems. When atheists (or others) criticize Christians for this, they are calling us to a higher level of reason, thoughtfulness, and conversational engagement with other viewpoints.

This process—of going from conviction, to being challenged, to doubt about our own ideas, to investigation, to fresh conviction—should be celebrated. It is okay to not have answers and it is okay to change our minds as we continue to learn and grow. Going through the emotionally wrenching experience of uncertainty is necessary if we are to process the complexity of contemporary challenges to religious belief (or, alternatively, the current arguments against atheism).

Many people know that I don’t get along well with fideistic Christians and that I can barely keep myself from running out of the church because there is often very little thinking and arguing going on in there. Everywhere I look I see postmodernism, religious pluralism, socialism, and moral relativism. Feelings have replaced thinking, and everyone afraid to offend other people by expressing and defending an idea as correct. Part of that is because no one knows why they believe anything, anymore, and they are too busy having fun to study anything to see if they are right.

But, as I wrote before, the Bible’s definition of faith is “trust based on evidence”. In that post, I give three lines of argument that faith is NOT  something you either prefer to believe or not, apart from evidence and arguments. The  Old Testament and New Testament agree that people need to rest their trust in God based on arguments and evidence, “that they may know for certain”. That phrase is quoted in both the Old and New Testaments. Know For Certain.

That’s actually why Jesus performed miracles. He made assertions about the spiritual world, and then he gave evidence of his authority to make those pronouncements by healing the sick, etc. and even by rising from the dead. The question for us today is – since we can’t perform miracles, are there any alternatives left to us that can take the place of miracles? And the answer is yes. We can use philosophical arguments, and hard evidence from science and history.

Positive arguments for Christian theism

• The kalam cosmological argument and the Big Bang theory
• The fine-tuning argument from cosmological constants and quantities
• The origin of life, part 1 of 2: the building blocks of life
• The origin of life, part 2 of 2: biological information
• The sudden origin of phyla in the Cambrian explosion
• Galactic habitable zones and circumstellar habitable zones
• Irreducible complexity in molecular machines
• The creative limits of natural selection and random mutation
• Angus Menuge’s ontological argument from reason
• Alvin Plantinga’s epistemological argument from reason
• William Lane Craig’s moral argument

Responses to arguments against Christian theism

Rebuttals and refutations of arguments against Christian theism are listed here, e.g. – the problems of evil and suffering, the problem of the unevangelized, the problem of religious pluralism, the problem of divine sovereignty vs. human freedom. You can also find some positive historical arguments for Christianity in particular on that page. Formal academic debates featuring prominent atheists like Christopher Hitchens and James Crossley abound on Youtube. There is no excuse for not being prepared to explain and defend.