It sounds like they are beginning to question god's existence themselves. I might have said something like that during my transition.

I was quiet about my disbelief for 3 years and then slowly came out to others. It did cause some losses in relationships but also helped with some. A few of my work colleagues are also closet nonbelievers or at the level of not believing the Xian things but still considering deism.

People just get stuck in obsolete Aristotelian logic, probably because we were all indoctrinated in it in HS Geometry, and it appears reasonable. We now know that things can be both A and Not-A at the same time, and we now observe that things can happen with no discernible cause. So the arguments are phrased "If this, then that" and then proceed to QED.