Can Atheists Worship/love the Divine? Yes.

[Tempus]

If God exists, and we don't believe he exists, but still believe that if he existed, he would be worthy of highest honor, then we would have Worshiped God.

So if people acknowledge the hypothetical maximally great being as worthy of worship, and turns out the maximally great possible being is real, they would have worshiped that being.

I think get what you're saying. Regardless of whether someone exists we can still recognise that if they do exist they're worthy of praise / honour / worship / love / etc.

That's not the issue I have. I just think it's silly to talk of worthiness. Worthiness isn't objective, it's determined by an observer's criteria which itself is determined by their expectations and desires. You can't quantify a subjective value (worthiness in this case) an observer projects on another being the same way to could the distance between two points. Sure, you can note the majority of people think person X is worthy of respect, but what does this tell us about his actually worthiness? What we're quantifying here is people's perception of his worthiness, not the actual quality of worthiness itself. An analogy would be 70% of people guessing the height of someone to be 180cm. Their value judgements don't actually determine the person's height which is an independent value regardless of whether 50%, 70% or even 100% believe otherwise. With the persons height we can just measure them to get an answer, but we can't do that with worthiness.

I wouldn't worship anything voluntary or otherwise. I don't worship or honour Socrates... so? Why would I? Acknowledging and appreciating something doesn't mean you need to place it on a pedestal. And what is this worship giving me anyway? It sure isn't giving this maximally great (whatever that means) being anything since it's apparently already perfect in every single way. A perfect being would by definition need nothing since needs arise from deficiency. Unless it's perfectly deficient?

In answer to your thread title question, atheists can't worship gods. You actually need to believe (regardless of whether you know or not) something exists before you can worship it. If an atheist believes in god... well, they're no longer an atheist. Acknowledging that if something existed it would be X, Y and Z isn't the same as believing it exists. Therefore, no, atheists can't worship gods - at most they can acknowledge they would if they believe god(s) existed, which would, as before, make them no longer atheists.