Christianity is based on the notion that the gospel account of the miracles of

Jesus is true. This is what you have to reject to reject Christianity, you don’t
have to prove the universe to be absent of God. In the same way that you don’t
have to go find that Satan or Zeus or any of the thousands of other dead Gods
are absent from the universe. But Christianity is a textual claim about the
veracity of the Bible. Consider what this amounts to: Bible scholars agree that
the first gospels were written decades after the life of Jesus. Decades. And of
course you don’t have the original manuscripts. We have copies of copies of
copies of ancient Greek manuscripts which have thousands of discrepancies
between them. Many of which show signs of later interpolation which is to say
that people added passages that then became part of the cannon. There are
whole books of the cannon, like the book of Revelations, which for hundreds of
years were not included because they were deemed false gospel. There are
other whole books, like the Shepherd of Hermas, which you probably haven’t
heard of, but for centuries it was considered part of the cannon, and then was
later considered as false gospel. Generations of Christians lived and died being
guided by gospel that is now deemed both incomplete and mistaken. Think
about that.

But this process cobbling together the supposed authority of the work of God is
a very precarious basis to assert the claims of Christianity. But the truth is, even
if we had multiple contemporaneous claims of the miracles of Jesus this would
not be good enough. Because miracle stories abound even in the twenty first
century. The south Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba ascribes all the miracles of
Jesus to himself. He reads minds, he foretells the future, he raises the dead, he
was born of a virgin. Sathya Sai Baba is not a fringed figure, you may have not
heard of him but they had a birthday party for him a few years ago and a million
people showed up. There are vast numbers of people who think he’s a living
God. So Christianity is predicated on the claim that miracle stories, exactly of
the kind that today surrounds a person like Sathya Sai Baba, become specially
credible when you place them in the pre-scientific religious context of the 1st
century Roman Empire, decades after their supposed occurrence, as attested
to by copies of copies of copies of ancient Greek and largely discrepant
manuscripts.
We have Sathya Sai Baba’s miracle stories attested to by thousands upon
thousands of living eye witnesses and they don’t eve merit an hour on cable
television. Yet you put a few miracle stories in an ancient book and half the
people on Earth think of a legitimate project to organize their lives around it.
Does anyone else see a problem with that?