Auntyevology wanted me to contribute. Wish I could, no time. I will say this, however. Patrick needs to learn some history of science: atheism provides no special advantage to empirical inquiry, and may itself stand in the way of the growth of knowledge. From Roger Cotes’s Preface to Newton’s Principia:
“Without all doubt this World, so diversified with that variety of forms and motions we find in it, could arise from nothing but the perfectly free will of God directing and presiding over all. From this fountain it is that those laws, which we call the laws of Nature, have flowed; in which there appear many traces indeed of the most wise contrivance, but not the least shadow of necessity. These therefore we must not seek from uncertain conjectures; but learn them from observations and experiments. He who thinks to find the true principles of physics and the laws of natural things by the force alone of his own mind, and the internal light of his reason must either suppose that the World exists by necessity, and by the same necessity follows the laws proposed; or if the order of Nature was established by the will of God, that himself, a miserable reptile, can tell what was fittest to be done. All sound and true philosophy is founded on the appearances of things; which if they draw us ever so much against our wills, to such principles as most clearly manifest to us the most excellent counsel and supreme dominion of the All-wise and Almighty Being; those principles are not therefore to be laid aside, because some men may perhaps dislike them. They may call them, if they please, miracles or occult qualities; but names maliciously given ought not to be a disadvantage to the things themselves; unless they will say at last, that all philosophy ought to be founded in atheism. Philosophy must not be corrupted in complaisance to these men; for the order of things will not be changed.”
source here:
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Principles_of_Natural_Philosophy_(1729)/Preface