I really admire the clarity and thoroughness of your argumentation here. From the premises which you (appear to) take as a given, you make a very strong case that gap-closing is not necessarily a particularly effective or laudable goal or, if it happens, a particularly good metric of improvement.

For full disclosure, I'm an atheist and also really admire the clarity and thoroughness of the arguments developed by Christian Apologetics, so you can't infer much about whether I think all the premises are justified. But regardless, I think it's very valuable to think through the consequences of a perspective, so I both appreciated and enjoyed your post.