The first one is all that's necessary to show atheism fails - empirical adequacy.

Its demonstrable by using IF , THEN statements.

IF atheism is true , THEN the universe is either eternal, or "nature" caused it to begin or it leaped into existence out of nothing uncaused.

Ok - let see if there is any evidence to support any of those scenarios:
1. the universe is external: False

A portion of the the evidence:

"Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me ... I should like to find a genuine loophole."
Arthur Eddington
"The End of the World: From the Standpoint of Mathematical Physics"
Nature, vol. 127 (1931) p. 450

-Arthur Eddington - "The beginning seems to present insuperable difficulties unless we agree to look on it as frankly supernatural."

-Stephen Hawking: "In real time.....the universe had a beginning."

-Steven Hawking: "It has been interesting to watch the change in the climate of opinion on singularities. When I was a graduate student, almost no one took singularities seriously. Now, as a result of the singularity theorems, nearly everyone believes that the universe began with a singularity. In the meantime, however, I have changed my mind: I still believe that the universe had a beginning, but that it was not a singularity."
Text of `Origin of the Universe' by S.W. Hawking
(Copyright 1988 Stephen W. Hawking. All rights reserved.)

-Dr Guillermo Gonzales: "Like Einstein, most astronomers of the early twentieth century, including the young Hubble, believed in a static and eternal universe. Even after Einstein conceded his error in the late 1920s, many scientists would not accept the implications of an expanding universe-namely, that it can into existence sometime in the finite past."
The Privileged Planet, Gonzales & Richards.

"The picture today is more complete and much richer. The cosmos began 13.7 billion years ago with the big bang." " In our journey back to the beginning of creation, cosmologists first travel through the well-established history of the universe back to the first microsecond; then to within 10-34 second of the beginning, ..."
Scientific American, Sep 2009

-Dr. Robert Jastrow-who until his recent death was the director of the Mount Wilson observatory once led by Edwin Hubble: "Now we see how the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy."

-Dr. Robert Jastrow- "Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. . . . That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact."

- Einstein tried to avoid such a beginning by creating and holding onto his cosmological "fudge factor" in his equations until 1931, when Hubble's astronomical observations caused him to grudgingly accept "the necessity for a beginning."
A. Vibert Douglas
"Forty Minutes With Einstein"
Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada
Vol. 50 (1956), p. 100

"Many once believed that the universe had no beginning or end and was truly infinite. Through the inception of the Big Bang theory, however, no longer could the universe be considered infinite. The universe was forced to take on the properties of a finite phenomenon, possessing a history and a beginning." Chris
LaRocco and Blair Rothstein, University of Michigan http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm

The present location and velocities of galaxies are a result of a primordial blast known as the BIG BANG. It marked: THE BEGINNING OF THE UNIVERSE! THE BEGINNING OF TIME!" Terry Herter, Cornell University http://web.archive.org/web/200607182...o101/lec29.htm

"That radiation is residual heat from the Big Bang, the event that sparked the beginning of the universe some 13 billion years ago." Craig Hogan, University of Washington http://www.washington.edu/newsroom/n.../k032102a.html

Ok - so an eternal universe is ruled out via evidence - that leaves atheism:
1. nature causing the universe to begin
2. an uncaused universe

Lets examine the remainin 2 options for atheism:
1. "nature did it" - what natural forces cause time, space and matter to leap into existence from nothing? There are none - so this option fails.

The last: an uncaused universe.
Preposterous scientifically and logically as this violates the Law of Causality.

So this leaves us a universe that began due to a cause;
1. The universe CANNOT be eternal or static because:

1. The First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics: this says that matter cannot be created or destroyed, it just changes form. The universe contains a FINITE about of energy/matter. The universe still contains usable energy so therefore, the universe cannot be eternal because all the usable energy would have been used up by now.
2. The Cosmic Background Radiation: A static and eternal universe would not have the afterglow of its beginning.
3. Universal Expansion: The universe is still expanding. If the universe was static and eternal it would not be expanding. If it were eternal all the matter in the universe would be an infinite distance apart. Expansion requires a single point of origin in order to have a place to expand from.
4. The Cosmic Rebound Theory is false: Charles Bennet of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center;" The universe will expand forever. It will not turn back on itself and collapse in a great crunch." There is not enough matter in the universe to collapse it back again, therefore the universe had a beginning.
5. This assumes no energy would be lost in each successive crunch/bang.
6. There is no evidence for a Big Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang.
7. The Kalam Cosmological Argument:
a. An infinite number of days has no end.
b. But today is the end of history(history being a collection of all days)
c. Therefore there were not an infinite number of days before today.
d. Another way of saying this is one cannot add anything to infinity. But tomorrow we will add another day, so the number of days must be finite. Thus a finite number of days has a beginning.
Therefore I conclude that the universe had a beginning. An infinite anything within the material universe is theoretically possible, but not actually possible.
8. The Law of Causality: the universe is one big effect, an effect has to have a cause. This is the foundation of all science. If you reject this then you reject science itself and we cannot go any further.

The universe is finite, therefore it had a beginning. Relativity demands a beginning to space-time-matter and has been mathematically verified to 5 decimal places and confirmed by the above empirical evidence (which Relativity predicted such as expansion as well as others, such as parallax (which Relativity predicted also).