I agree that empirical knowledge is always helpful. But forcing a philosophical question into an empirical mold can be misleading. Such an approach might be based on scientism or neo-positivism, which would likewise amount to a massive confusion or self-deception.

One of the questions that's come up is, "Who sees the world more clearly, the atheistic naturalist or the average theist?"

Go ahead and present the scientific experiment that demonstrates that theists see the world more clearly than atheists.

Another question that's come up is whether atheists or theists are deluded.

Go ahead and present the scientific evidence that atheists are deluded, whereas theists who think that Jesus walked water, rose from the dead, and was the only begotten son of God whose mother was a virgin, and that the world will end "soon "with God's judgment of humanity, whereupon we'll end up in paradise or in hell forever isn't deluded. I'd love to see the empirical data that deals with both sides and that lands on saying that atheists are more deluded than theists. Go ahead and show that you're only being "empirical" in making that preposterous claim.

The replication problem shows that many of these social sciences have been quite corrupted by capitalism. So even if you could present studies that show this or that, there would be an additional question of whether the studies are actually empirical and scientific or are just rushed and pseudoscientific. The bolder the social scientific finding these days, the more bogus it's likely to be.

I'm not the one who's making personal attacks here. You brought up the question of whether atheists or theists are deluded. My article says that atheism isn't necessarily progressive, and I said in response to your first comment that we can expect that atheists might be less happy than theists, since this would be consistent with atheism's truth. Atheists would just be bearers of bad news.

But you said that the unhappiness of atheists would be due to mental illness and to cognitive distortions. I then said it's unwise to indulge in such personal attacks by appealing to psychiatry since if anyone's deluded it's bound to be the theist who claims to believe in ten crazy things before breakfast. In reality, of course, most theists aren't deluded because they don't really believe what they say they do. They only pay lip service to these crazy notions to fit into some social club.