the reason i ask this question was because my religious studies teacher was talking about how no ordinary person has ever seen an atom (except from pictures that could just be drawings) and yet we are taught that they exist... this is kinda a leap of faith to think the whole world is made up of things so small we can't see them
Slightly OT but your religious studies teacher is an idiot.

It's perfectly true that no one has seen, or ever will see, an atom. But people can readily see rather a lot of evidence that is neatly and consistently explained and simplified by the theory that atoms exist, and furthermore there are perfectly doable experiments that would prove that atoms did not exist (assuming that they did not).

Therefore although a belief in atoms involves a faith of a sort (faith that our sense data do not deceive us, faith that we have the reasoning abilities that we think we have, a belief that there is not some even better theory that explains all our sense data without postulating the existence of atoms, and so on) it is foolish to equate that faith to a faith in God. For the two to be the same there would have to be features of the real world that could be readily observed and that were most elegantly and satisfactorily explained by the existence of God.

Which it seems to me there are not.