The good thing about most atheists is that they have a high bullshit meter. For that reason, they do fairly well against, for instance, the ontological argument (which it's highly likely there's a flaw somewhere but no one knows where!) and certain kinds of cosmological arguments which go into timelessness etc. which to me they also seem to be a bit weak. (Kalam.)

The bad thing is that sometimes it goes too far, and they can't be bothered with philosophy, because they think in terms of material evidence and science. Nothing wrong with liking science, just try to make sure it doesn't get you hating philosophy, in my opinion. Many atheists think that philosophy is pointless and even hate it, they themselves say this.

Possibly as a result of this too developed bullshit meter, we have people like Richard dawkins who don't understand the five ways of aquinas.

He thinks that the reasoning is like, "Well, the infinite regress can't go on forever... let's terminate it, why not. call the terminator god. that explains it. it sucks so bad to not know the answer, this will make me feel better."

Thus he writes: Why call the terminator god? (Or, as atheists say, why not the tooth fairy or the flying spaghetti monster?). There's no reason why the first cause must be all powerful and omniscient.

However, there ARE reasons, and actually books and books have been written on why the first cause has the divine attributes.

I feel that since Dawkins and many others tend to think that christians are dumb and irrational (Before there was science, people used to call thunder god, and rain god as well, etc.) there's even less motivation to study the arguments.

The problem is that the arguments, even on the basic level, are quite complicated... it took me a long time to get a fairly decent gist of them, and still there's way more. Since the arguments are very complicated, it's hard to find decent explanations on the net (I speak for myself.) Now, most atheists don't like philosophy, so they rather study science instead. All of this results in them not understanding many of the theist's arguments. Since philosophy is a big part in religion, there's this clash.

I've noticed that this is quite prevalent (I used dawkins as an example since he is a big name) especially on the internet and in this board too. Some of it is the fault of theists, some of it on the fault of atheists. Not saying ALL atheists are like this, some of them did go over the arguments and think they're not convincing.

Another thing is that not many people are willing to stick with the arguments and try to understand it, because it seems that this society is naturally more a scientific one and not a philosophical one, which is yet another factor in this mess...

These are just some of my thoughts on this... there's probably way more factors haha.

At the end, I must say it saddens me that so few people understand the arguments, because there could be good objections to them, and also, we can't get a good debate... Many people just say, "Well if god created everything, who created god?" as if this is a good objection, lol. (Dawkins argues similarly in his book.)

Imagine that I am wrong, and god doesn't exist. No one is going to be able to convince me that I am wrong, because no one understands the arguments that pulled me into this in the first place! So that's another bad thing in all of this.