Note: this is a slightly revised version of what I presented at the recent Intelligence Squared debate in Sydney, arguing for the proposition, "Atheists are wrong" - hence its rhetorical style and brevity. This is the first of a series of pieces I will be posting in coming weeks on atheism, theology, ethics and the media.

It seems that we have reached a point in our national life where we are utterly incapable of reaching any kind of minimal moral consensus on fundamental questions.

What are the threats that we face in common? Where are those sources of corruption, perversion, addiction and even servitude that we ought to protect ourselves and others from? What virtues ought we to have and instil in others in order to make a robust civil society? What are our obligations to others - those living (including those who come to us from without our borders), dying and not yet born? What constitutes a good life? What ends do politics and the economy serve?

Such questions were once the subject of ferocious political and public debate; and, for better or worse, the Left and the Right believed there were answers, and that they had them.

What is most concerning about our current condition is not simply that the twin political pillars of Left and Right have sunk into a quagmire of craven expediency - a common malaise in the West diagnosed acutely by Tony Judt and Phillip Blond, among others.

Nor is it simply that ideas are now somehow regarded as suspect, if not positively toxic, within the political process, or even that politicians of whatever stripe seem to have resigned themselves to the belief that there are no political answers any more.

What ought to be of greatest concern to us today is that the questions themselves have become irrelevant. They simply fail to move us. It is as though we are living with a bastardized version of Francis Fukuyama's thesis of the "end of history."

So desperately impoverished are our political and moral imaginations after decades of market fundamentalism and the creeping gains of a culture-corrupting liberalism - which has systematically replaced the Common Good with individual rights, education with skills-acquisition, obligation with self-determination, and a hierarchy of values and virtue with the fetishisation of mere choice - that we have mistaken the walls of our moral imaginations for the achievements of progress itself.

Under these conditions, to adapt Clausewitz's famous definition of war, politics has become the extension of egoism by other means rather than an essentially moral and educative practice. On this point, Herve Juvin's analysis of the collapse of the social "Body" and the emergence of the political reality of "bodies" is exemplary:

"Politics used to subject bodies and lives to a common destiny or ideal; politics now must submit to the varied, fleeting and capricious destinies we give to our own lives ... the advent of the body legitimizes politics in the body's service, places its satisfaction, its activity, its enjoyment over all that might only be means to those ends: law, rules, society, kinship."

And so, without the guiding concept of a "Common Good" our social life is governed by the anomie of private interests, the inscrutable demands of "well-being" (which for us has come to mean little more than health, safety and pleasure) and the vicissitudes of mere fashion.

There are few things today more fashionable, more suited to our modern conceit, than atheism. In fact, far from being radical or heroically contrarian, the current version of atheism strikes me as the ultimate conformism.

This is especially apparent in the case of the slipshod, grotesquely sensationalist "New Atheism" - invariably renounced by principled, literate atheists like James Wood, Thomas Nagel, John Gray, Philip Pullman and the late Bernard Williams - which poses no serious challenge to our most serious social ills and so has no other alternative but to blame our social ills in toto on religion.

Now, I don't want to be misunderstood. I am not claiming that atheism is necessarily the cause of our modern predicament, much less that it is the root of all evil. To make such a claim would be to accord this variety of atheistic chic with too much importance, too much weight.

In a way, I think where atheism fits in our cultural moment it is more incidental than that. Our real problem today is the impoverishment of the modern mind, our inability to think properly about such elevated things as the Good, Beauty, Truth, Law, Love, Life, Death, Humanity, the End or Purpose of things, even Sex itself, without such ideas being debased by an incurious and all-pervasive nihilism.

And hence it is altogether unsurprising that, when we can't even think clearly about such lower-order goods, the highest Good, and what philosophy once regarded as the ultimate object of human contemplation - namely, God himself - is beyond our imaginations.

Moreover, it is equally unsurprising that when the New Atheists do speak of "God," their god is just as vulgar and petty and agonistic as their conceptions of morality, gender, politics and sex. When they speak thus about "God," are they not just seeing what is worst in ourselves?

And here we confront a desperate contradiction at the heart of so much atheistic hyperbole (accurately identified by Bernard Williams and others). The New Atheists rely heavily on the thesis that religion is the enemy of progress and human flourishing, and that once the last vestiges of religion are done away with, humanity will be far better off.

But they also claim that all religion is "man made," and self-evidently so. This begs the question: if religion is indeed this all-pervasive source of corruption and prejudice and moral retardation, where do they believe that religion itself comes from, if not the human imagination? And so, as Bernard Williams puts the question:

"if humanity has invented something as awful as [these atheists] take religion to be, what should that tell them about humanity? In particular, can humanity really be expected to do much better without it?"

And so, it would seem that we are left with an unavoidable choice: either these atheists are really misotheists, God-haters, who rage against the very idea of God, the Good, Truth and Law, and so desperately try to will God out of existence; or their oft-professed faith in the inherent human capacity for progress is without justification; or the history of religion reflects the extraordinary human capacity to pursue the Good, as well as its equally pronounced tendency for Evil, idolatry and nihilism.

It is apparent, is it not, that the current batch of chic atheists are but a symptom of a more general cultural decline, the steady impoverishment of what Hilaire Belloc perfectly described as "the Modern Mind," which ceaselessly explains away its own moral deficiencies by projecting them onto God and banishing him into the wilderness.

It is just as apparent why such an atheism - with its cartoon versions of history, its theological illiteracy, it fetishisation of science, its hostility to the humanities and aesthetics, its flattened-out brand of morality as mere "well-being," its cheap gags and mode of incessant piss-taking cynicism - should appeal so powerfully to a culture that has grown accustomed to the vulgarities and trivia enshrined in the modern media.

The emergence of a form of chic atheism, precisely as a media-fuelled and driven phenomenon, was anticipated by Hilaire Belloc with staggering clarity. Writing in 1929:

"the 'Modern Mind' dislikes thinking: the popular Press increases that sloth by providing sensational substitutes. Disliking thought, the 'Modern Mind' dislikes close attention, and indeed any sustained effort; the popular Press increases the debility by an orgy of pictures and headlines ... In all these ways and twenty others the popular Press as we have it today thrusts the 'Modern Mind' lower than it would otherwise have fallen, swells its imbecility and confirms it in its incapacity for civilization and therefore for Faith."

And this atheism, I believe, will continue to flourish to the extent that moral disintegration, nihilistic capitalism, anti-aesthetic liberalism and a kind of ubiquitous piss-taking cynicism remain the dominant forces in our common life.

I often hear atheists insist that they do not need God in order to be good. But if I am in any way accurate in what I have argued here, we are faced with a far more destructive possibility: that without God, there simply is no Good.