What if we're all wrong though?

[tackattack]

I don't think I have the perspective to correctly answer every instance. I'll give an example of what I think and give it my best shot. We'll continue your father analogy:
1- Father sets rules to follow (laws of nature, morality, forgiveness) and provides a home withing those rules. Child learns about his enviornment through trial and error (volcanoes go boom, nuclear waste is bad, killing is bad, breaking the rules makes life harder). When we're talking enviornemtal issues (natural disasters, mortality, etc.) we're still haven't become masters of our enviornment. In fact, we're quite toddler like in our destructive tendencies toward our enviornment. You're assuming that God see's death as a bad thing. From a transcendant perspective with eternity as your lifespan, that doesn't follow that mortal death is any different than a snake shedding it's first skin.
2-A premature death from an omniscient perspective could be preventative. Maybe they'll grow up to be a hitler, and we only need one or 2 of those throughout history to learn from that. Perhaps a lifetime of suffering would be worse than a relatively short life. Perhaps the sheeddding of the mortal coil teaches others who are still alive to appreciate life more, to ease other's suffering, to provide for other's needs more actively.
3- Let's use that same scenario and work on the interactions between several billion of those children..Children by nature are learning to overcome their instinctual self-serving survival instincts to form communities. We learn things like empathy and develop social structure. We identify laws which develop the whole and punish crimes. We learn that there are consequences for self serving problems (like crackheads making babies that are addicted to crack, deformed, etc.) and develop into a more mature society.

I think a major point of contenction between atheism and theism is a willingness to accept there is more after we die. I'm hungry and I'm going to eat dinner now, more later.