Christian Response to Atheism

Atheism is not monolithic, but several central commitments recur across its major expressions.

No God Exists. "Strong" or "positive" atheism affirms this proposition as true; "weak" or "negative" atheism merely lacks belief in God. Most contemporary public atheists — Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris — function as strong atheists who actively argue against God's existence.

Naturalism and Materialism. The natural physical universe is all that exists. There are no souls, spirits, angels, afterlife, or miracles. Mind is what brains do; consciousness is an emergent property of matter. Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell (2006) and Consciousness Explained (1991) represent the most developed philosophical account of this position.

Science as the Reliable Path to Knowledge. Religion offers no knowledge that science cannot in principle provide. Dawkins's The God Delusion (2006) and Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World (1995) press the case that scientific method — not revelation — is the only reliable tool for investigating reality.

Religion as Human Construction. Faith is explainable through evolutionary psychology (Dennett), social cohesion, fear of death, or parental authority projected onto the cosmos (Freud). These explanations, if sufficient, are taken to debunk religion's truth-claims.

Morality as Human-Made. Ethics arise from evolution, social contract, or individual and cultural agreement. Many atheists are moral realists who hold that moral truths are objective in some sense (Harris's The Moral Landscape, 2010). Others, following J.L. Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), embrace moral error theory — there are no objective moral facts at all. Friedrich Nietzsche saw this consequence more clearly than most.

Death Is Final. Personal extinction at death. No afterlife. The decades of conscious life are all there is.

Jesus. Most atheists accept the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth while explaining the resurrection by natural means: legend, hallucination, or sincere but mistaken grief.

Sources: Dawkins, The God Delusion; Hitchens, God Is Not Great; Harris, The End of Faith; Dennett, Breaking the Spell; Mackie, The Miracle of Theism.

The core question atheism raises is the existence of God. From that single question flow several others: where the universe came from, whether morality has any objective grounding, whether human beings have meaning beyond what they construct, whether the historical claims of Christianity stand or fall under scrutiny, and whether the problem of evil makes belief in God irrational. Each section below addresses one of these questions in turn, engaging the strongest versions of the atheist argument rather than caricatures of it.

Atheism's central claim is the non-existence of God. The argument is typically built from several convergent lines.

The Success of Methodological Naturalism. Phenomena formerly attributed to gods — lightning, plague, the origin of species — are now explained by natural causes. "God-of-the-gaps" reasoning retreats as the gaps close. Richard Dawkins argues in The God Delusion (2006) that Darwinian evolution, in particular, removes the appearance of design that once seemed to demand a designer.

The Problem of Evil. A perfectly good and omnipotent God should not permit gratuitous suffering. The world contains apparent gratuitous suffering — Auschwitz, childhood cancer, natural disasters. Therefore the perfectly good and omnipotent God of classical theism does not exist. J.L. Mackie pressed the logical version of this argument in The Miracle of Theism (1982); evidential versions (Rowe, Draper) argue that even if the argument is not logically watertight, the sheer scale and distribution of suffering makes theism improbable.

The Diversity of Religious Belief. Mutually contradictory revelations across cultures suggest that revelation is human projection rather than divine self-disclosure — an observation David Hume developed in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) and Bertrand Russell sharpened in Why I Am Not a Christian (1927).

Lack of Evidence for the Supernatural. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" (Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World, 1995). Christopher Hitchens summarized the evidential challenge memorably: "What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence" (God Is Not Great, 2007). Claims of miracles, answered prayer, and divine intervention, when subjected to controlled investigation, reliably fail to replicate.

Taken together, these lines of argument form a coherent intellectual challenge that deserves to be answered with care — not dismissed.

Sources: Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion; Mackie, The Miracle of Theism; Dawkins, The God Delusion; Hitchens, God Is Not Great; Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World.

Most atheists accept the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth. The "Jesus mythicist" position — that no such person existed — is held by a small minority including Richard Carrier (On the Historicity of Jesus, 2014) and is firmly rejected by the academic consensus, including by non-Christian scholars. Bart Ehrman, a skeptical New Testament scholar who does not accept the resurrection, dismantled the mythicist case in Did Jesus Exist? (2012).

The mainstream atheist account treats Jesus as an ordinary first-century Jewish apocalyptic preacher who gathered a small messianic following, was executed by Pontius Pilate, and whose disciples — through some combination of grief-induced visions, wishful thinking, and gradual legendary development — came to believe he had risen. The Gospels, on this account, are dated too late, written by anonymous authors with theological agendas, and are too theologically motivated to function as reliable historical sources. Ehrman's textual-criticism work (Misquoting Jesus, 2005) is frequently cited to undermine confidence in the reliability of New Testament transmission.

What this account struggles to explain: the rapid rise of resurrection belief among Jewish monotheists for whom resurrection-of-a-single-person before the final judgment was a completely novel theological category; the conversion of Paul, who actively persecuted the early church and explicitly claims to have encountered the risen Christ (Galatians 1:13–17); the conversion of James, Jesus' own brother, who was a skeptic during Jesus' ministry and became a leader of the Jerusalem church; the empty tomb; the willingness of the earliest disciples to die for what they claimed to have seen; and the early pre-Pauline creed of 1 Corinthians 15:3–7, which scholars date within five years of the crucifixion and contains the names of living eyewitnesses.

Sources: Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?; Dawkins, The God Delusion (ch. 3); per contra, William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (3rd ed., 2008); N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (2003).

Atheism has no category of "sin" in the theological sense. Wrong actions exist, but as offenses against persons or society — not against a holy God. Several competing frameworks occupy the space that sin once filled.

Evolutionary Ethics. Morality is the byproduct of social-cooperation pressures across millennia. What we call "right" is what our genes have conditioned us to prefer because it served reproductive fitness. E.O. Wilson developed this account; Sam Harris's The Moral Landscape (2010) attempts to ground it in the flourishing of conscious creatures rather than raw evolutionary preference.

Social Contract. Morality is the agreement we make — explicitly or implicitly — to keep civilization functioning. Hobbes, updated into secular humanist frameworks, gives us rights and obligations without needing God to authorize them.

Existentialism. Sartre and Camus: morality is the meaning we make in a universe that offers none. We are condemned to choose, and our choices construct the values we live by.

Importantly, several thoughtful atheists have acknowledged the difficulty this creates for objective moral facts. J.L. Mackie opens Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) with the declaration "There are no objective values" — moral error theory, a coherent and honest atheist position. Friedrich Nietzsche saw the consequence more clearly than any other atheist thinker: with the "death of God" comes the collapse of the moral framework Christianity bequeathed to Europe. The Madman of The Gay Science §125 (1882) is not celebrating; he is warning. "We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers... Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us?"

The Christian critique is not that atheists are immoral — many are deeply morally serious. It is that the moral seriousness they exhibit cannot be fully grounded within the framework they have adopted. When an atheist is genuinely outraged by injustice, that outrage presupposes a standard outside themselves. Where does that standard come from?

Sources: Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong; Nietzsche, The Gay Science §125; Harris, The Moral Landscape; per contra, William Lane Craig's moral argument in Reasonable Faith.

There is no salvation in atheism — because there is nothing to be saved from, no one to save us, and no destination toward which to be saved. Death is final personal extinction. The decades of conscious life are all there is. Several positive frameworks exist for living well inside this constraint.

Stoic Dignity. The rational person faces extinction with calm acceptance. Marcus Aurelius, the Stoics, and their secular descendants counsel equanimity in the face of what cannot be changed.

Hedonist Enjoyment. Maximize experience while it lasts. Epicurus's version — tranquility and the pleasures of friendship and philosophy — is more nuanced than the caricature.

Project-Based Meaning. Invest in projects — relationships, art, science, justice — that outlast the individual. Dawkins's "we make our own meaning" and secular humanism generally occupy this space. The individual dies; the work continues.

Cosmic Perspective. Carl Sagan's pale-blue-dot framing: meaning comes from being part of the cosmos's brief and remarkable self-awareness. We are, as Sagan put it, "a way for the cosmos to know itself."

Notable: many atheists who think hard about death do not find these frameworks fully satisfying. Christopher Hitchens's Mortality (2012), written during his terminal cancer, is honest about the difficulty. Bertrand Russell's A Free Man's Worship (1903) describes building meaning "on the firm foundation of unyielding despair" — a phrase that captures the existential weight these frameworks must bear.

Thomas Nagel — an atheist philosopher at New York University — argued in Mind and Cosmos (2012) that the standard materialist account fails to explain consciousness, cognition, and value. His conclusion is not theism, but it is a candid acknowledgment that materialist naturalism cannot easily account for the features of human experience that matter most.

Christianity's offer is structurally different: not built on despair, but on the bodily resurrection of one historical man — and his promise of the same to all who trust him.

Sources: Hitchens, Mortality; Russell, A Free Man's Worship; Nagel, Mind and Cosmos; per contra, 1 Corinthians 15.

Atheism has no scriptures, but several texts function as canonical references in popular and academic atheist discourse. The list below is offered not as a list of errors, but as a reading guide — Christians who critique atheism without engaging these works are critiquing a caricature.

David Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). Still the most rigorous philosophical critique of the cosmological, teleological, and ontological arguments for God's existence. Hume's Philo and Cleanthes represent a debate that William Lane Craig and Alvin Plantinga have continued in 21st-century academic philosophy.

Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian (1927). The 20th-century classic: a series of lectures laying out historical, philosophical, and ethical objections to Christianity. Russell is careful and often penetrating, even where he is wrong.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science §125 (1882); Beyond Good and Evil (1886); Twilight of the Idols (1888). The most penetrating 19th-century account of what losing God would cost European civilization — by an atheist who saw the consequences more clearly than the cheerful materialists around him.

J.L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (1982). The most rigorous 20th-century academic critique of theistic arguments. Mackie is a careful philosopher who deserves careful responses.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (2006). The popular bestseller of the New Atheist movement; strongest on biology and evolution, weakest on philosophy of religion. Alvin Plantinga's review is worth reading alongside it.

Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007). Rhetorical force and wit more than philosophical depth. Hitchens's indictment of religious violence and institutional corruption often lands even when his positive atheism does not.

Sam Harris, The End of Faith (2004) and The Moral Landscape (2010). The post-9/11 case against religion's public role, plus Harris's serious attempt at a scientific grounding for moral realism.

Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell (2006). Religion as a natural phenomenon explained through cognitive science and evolutionary biology. The most philosophically careful of the four New Atheists.

Responses worth reading: Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies (2011); William Lane Craig, On Guard (2010); C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952) and Miracles (1947).

God Is Not Hidden — General Revelation

“because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse,”

— "because what may be known of God is manifest in them, for God has shown it to them. For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse."

“The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge.”

— "The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork. Day unto day utters speech, And night unto night reveals knowledge."

“Nevertheless He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness.”

— "Nevertheless He did not leave Himself without witness, in that He did good, gave us rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and gladness."

God Has Spoken — Special Revelation

“God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds;”

— God has spoken in the prophets and finally in His Son. The question is not whether God is silent — it is whether we are listening.

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”

— "And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."

“For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty.”

— "For we did not follow cunningly devised fables when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of His majesty."

The Resurrection Is the Hinge

“For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures,”

— Paul's pre-Pauline creed, dated within five years of the events: "For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures."

“And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty.”

— "And if Christ is not risen, then our preaching is empty and your faith is also empty." Paul does not ask for belief without evidence; he stakes everything on a historical fact.

“Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.”

— God "now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead."

The Fool's Heart and the Honest Heart

“The fool has said in his heart, "There is no God." They are corrupt, They have done abominable works, There is none who does good.”

— "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God.' They are corrupt, They have done abominable works, There is none who does good." Note: "fool" in the Old Testament (nabal) denotes moral folly — practical rebellion against God's authority — not intellectual deficiency. Scripture's claim is that atheism is finally a moral posture, a willing suppression of what creation and conscience make evident.

“But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.”

— "But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him."

Salvation Is Offered Even to the Doubter

“Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!"”

— The father of the afflicted boy cried out: "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" Christianity has always had room for the man who believes incompletely and honestly says so.

“Then He said to Thomas, "Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing."”

— Jesus to Thomas: "Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing." Christ did not rebuke Thomas for wanting evidence. He gave it.

The table below compares the atheist position with the Christian witness of Scripture on eight key questions. Atheism's answers flow consistently from its starting point — no God exists, the physical universe is all there is, and human beings must find or make meaning within those boundaries. Christianity's answers flow from an opposite starting point: a personal God who created, spoke, and entered history in His Son. The disagreement is root-level, which is why the differences extend to every domain of human existence.

1. The Universe Demands an Explanation

The Kalam cosmological argument — revived by William Lane Craig from medieval Islamic philosophy and defended rigorously in Reasonable Faith (3rd ed., 2008) — runs as follows:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore the universe has a cause.

The second premise is supported both by Big Bang cosmology and by the philosophical impossibility of an actually infinite series of past events (a "Hilbert's Hotel" style argument: an actually infinite past would make the present moment unreachable). The cause of the universe must be uncaused (or the regress is infinite), timeless and spaceless (since it preceded time and space), enormously powerful, and personal — because only a personal agent can freely choose to initiate a temporal effect from a timeless state. An impersonal set of conditions would produce an effect without a beginning or produce it necessarily, not contingently.

This argument does not yet arrive at the God of the Bible — it arrives at a category strikingly closer to theism than to materialism. Lawrence Krauss's A Universe from Nothing (2012) — the most prominent atheist response — redefines "nothing" as the quantum vacuum, which is not nothing at all but a physically structured field with properties and laws. This does not address the philosophical question; it merely relabels the explanandum.

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”

— "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." If the universe had a beginning, the question of what preceded it is not eliminable. The Bible's opening sentence is not a myth; it is a metaphysical claim that modern cosmology has confirmed is worth making.

2. The Problem of Evil Cuts Both Ways

The argument from evil is the most emotionally and intellectually powerful in the atheist arsenal, and Christianity acknowledges it honestly. The book of Job does not explain suffering — it confronts God with it. The imprecatory Psalms bring raw anguish to God. The cry of dereliction from the cross — "My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?" — is not a philosophical solution to evil; it is God entering suffering.

The argument depends, however, on the reality of objective moral evil. If materialism is true, what is "evil" but matter behaving in ways one organism finds inconvenient? There is no objective difference between a predator killing prey and a murderer killing a child — only the reactions of the surrounding organisms. J.L. Mackie himself acknowledged in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) that without God it is difficult to anchor objective moral facts. The argument from evil borrows moral realism — the premise that some things are genuinely, objectively wrong — to deny the very God who provides the only coherent grounding for moral realism.

The Christian response is not to deny the difficulty of evil. It is to point to a God who entered the suffering — at the cross, bearing the full weight of what is wrong with the world — rather than remaining safely outside it. The resurrection does not explain suffering. It promises that suffering will not have the last word.

3. The Resurrection Is the Best Explanation of the Historical Data

Multiple historical facts command broad scholarly assent across the range from conservative to skeptical, defended by N.T. Wright (The Resurrection of the Son of God, 2003), William Lane Craig (Reasonable Faith), Mike Licona (The Resurrection of Jesus, 2010), and Gary Habermas:

• Jesus was executed under Pontius Pilate — attested in non-Christian sources, including Tacitus (Annals 15.44) and Josephus (Antiquities 18.3).
• His tomb was found empty — reported first by women, whose testimony would have been culturally unwelcome and therefore unlikely to have been invented.
• His disciples sincerely believed they had encountered him alive after death, not merely as a comforting vision but as a bodily presence they could touch.
• The early creed of

  “For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures,”

  , dated by scholars to within five years of the crucifixion, lists named eyewitnesses — including five hundred at once — most of whom were still alive when Paul wrote.
• Skeptics were converted: James (Jesus' own brother, a non-believer during the ministry) and Paul (an active persecutor of the church) both became leaders of the movement after what they described as encounters with the risen Christ.
• The disciples were willing to die for what they claimed to have witnessed — not merely for a belief, but for a specific historical claim.

No naturalist alternative — mass hallucination, wrong-tomb theory, swoon theory, legend — accounts for all these data points simultaneously. The hallucination hypothesis does not explain the empty tomb or the conversion of Paul. The wrong-tomb theory does not explain why the Jewish or Roman authorities did not produce the body to end the movement immediately. The legend hypothesis collapses against the early dating of the creed. The resurrection hypothesis accounts coherently for every data point. As Craig puts it: this is not a proof that demands intellectual submission — it is an argument that makes the resurrection the best explanation of the historical evidence.

4. The Moral Argument

If God does not exist, objective moral facts are difficult — perhaps impossible — to ground. The options are:

Evolutionary morality: "Ought" reduces to "what our genes prefer." Most atheists, including Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape, reject this because it cannot generate genuine moral obligation — it merely redescribes natural inclination. Harris's attempted solution (morality as facts about the flourishing of conscious creatures) imports the very moral realism it was supposed to explain: why ought we care about the flourishing of conscious creatures?

Moral error theory (Mackie): There are no objective moral facts. The Holocaust was not objectively evil — only condemned by the cultures that condemned it. Few atheists are willing to accept this conclusion, and for good reason: it is morally catastrophic.

Secular Platonism (Wielenberg): Moral facts are objective but not grounded in any mind or will — they just exist as brute facts about the universe. This is a coherent position but it faces the question of why these free-floating moral facts map so precisely onto the character of a personal, good God.

Christianity provides a clean grounding: moral facts are objective because they reflect the character of a personal, holy, perfectly good God. The atheist who is genuinely outraged by injustice is, on the Christian analysis, perceiving something real — the gap between what is and what ought to be — and that gap presupposes a moral standard outside the universe. As C.S. Lewis observed in Mere Christianity (1952): the person who complains that something is unfair has just presupposed a law of fairness that they didn't make and can't explain without reference to a Lawgiver.

If you are reading this as someone who does not believe God exists — or who is genuinely unsure — this section is not written to argue you into a corner. The previous sections have made the case as carefully as space allows. What follows is an honest invitation.

The previous arguments may not have settled every question. That is fine. Christianity has always had room for honest doubt.

“Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!"”

— When a desperate father brought his son to Jesus, Jesus asked if he believed. The man's answer has echoed for two thousand years: "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" That is not a contradiction. It is the most honest prayer in the Gospels. Christianity does not require you to have no doubts. It asks whether you are willing to bring your doubts to the right person.

“Then He said to Thomas, "Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side. Do not be unbelieving, but believing."”

— Jesus did not rebuke Thomas for wanting evidence. He offered evidence: "Reach your finger here, and look at My hands; and reach your hand here, and put it into My side." The God of Scripture is not afraid of investigation. He invited Thomas to put his fingers in the wounds.

“for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,”

— The diagnosis applies regardless of worldview: "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." The wrongs you have done in your own life are real wrongs, not merely evolutionary misfires or social-contract violations. Something in you already knows this.

“For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

— "For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord." Atheism affirms the first half of that sentence: there is a cost, and it ends in death. The gospel offers the second half.

“But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.”

— "He who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him." Honest seeking is honored. The promise is not given to the already-convinced but to the diligent seeker.

“Jesus said to him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me."”

— "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." If He is who He said He is, this claim matters more than any other claim in human history. If He is not, He is the most arrogant and destructive teacher who ever lived. He does not permit the middle option of merely admiring his ethics.

“that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.”

— The simplest possible response: confess Jesus as Lord; believe in the resurrection. Not intellectual capitulation — investigation followed by honest conclusion. Examine the historical case for the resurrection. Consider whether materialism really accounts for consciousness, morality, and meaning. Weigh the evidence, then come honestly to the cross.

The God of Scripture is not threatened by your questions. Examine him.

Many atheists are intellectually honest, morally serious, and have arrived at their position through genuine wrestling — sometimes including the painful experience of the church behaving terribly, or of prayers that seemed to go unanswered, or of a universe that seemed indifferent. The Christian response to that kind of atheism should not be dismissal or condescension. It should be honest engagement: with the arguments, with the pain, and with the evidence.

The arguments for God's existence and the historical case for the resurrection deserve careful engagement — not slogans. Read the Gospel of John alongside The God Delusion. Read 1 Corinthians 15 alongside The Demon-Haunted World. Read N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God alongside Bart Ehrman. Take the evidence seriously enough to follow it wherever it leads.

The God who has spoken in His Son is not threatened by your questions. Christ said,

“But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him.”

— "he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him." That is the simplest experimental claim any atheist could test. Seek honestly, and see what you find.