Even if theism is a failure, it's still superior to atheism

[Jehanne]

I have often found people tend to confuse maths proofs for empirical evidence.

It's a mixed bag. On the one hand, you have theorists, such as Paul Dirac, who predicted the existence of the positron and is precise properties; after that, the experimentalists simply had to go look to find it. On the other hand, there was the ultraviolet catastrophe, where an established theory which described phenomenon at low energies broke down completely at higher energies. It got replaced.

In the absence of experimental evidence and/or observation, it's extremely difficult to tell which end of the spectrum one is dealing with. Beats guessing, in my opinion.