I was pleased, earlier in the debate, when Archbishop Peter Jensen declared himself sceptical of all gods except one. You're nearly there, Dr Jensen! I congratulate him for that because he's getting very close ... he just needs to go that one god further.

More generally, the burden in this debate falls on the other side to persuade the house to carry a motion that "Atheists are wrong." To do that, they had better demonstrate to you that some god or other actually does exist.

In fact, though, they seem to have shown a lack of faith. None of the traditional arguments for the existence of God have been relied upon - they seem to have no faith in those arguments.

Indeed, no argument of any kind for the existence of a god was developed by them in any concerted way.

Instead, their argument seemed largely an attempt to persuade you that you don't properly realise what you owe to religion, particularly Christianity. In fact, I acknowledge that the world does not yet realise what it owes religion. But unfortunately for my opponents, it's beginning to suspect the truth.

Jane Caro rubbed that in. With its long record of persecutions, cruelty, hypocrisy, anti-intellectualism and misogyny, religion (and specifically Christianity) is clearly all too human. It is man-made, not divinely established and guided.

Christianity showed itself as a persecutorial religion as far back as the fourth century, once it gained official power within the Roman Empire.

This continued during the medieval period; and then into early modernity, where it did not cause wars, it certainly made them worse.

To the thinkers of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment, there had to be a better way. In the seventeenth century, after the Thirty Years War and other religious strife, we see some thinkers saying, "Enough" and wanting to separate religion from the workings of a secular state.

Today it is critical that religious doctrine be kept out of the exercise of state power, that we maintain a distance between religion and the state.

From the tone of the speakers for the motion, you'd think that religious believers and the faiths they support occupy the high moral ground - but do they?

In addition to religion's record of violence and persecution, the Roman Catholic Church in particular has engaged in hundreds of years of disparagement and repression of perfectly normal and healthy forms of sexual expression.

Yet when it's confronted by genuinely unhealthy forms of sexual expression - I mean the sexual abuse of children by priests in Ireland and elsewhere - it responds with moral obtuseness, false priorities and general mismanagement, then with downplaying, blame shifting and spin-doctoring.

This church and the other Christian churches do not have the appearance of organisations established and guided by an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love.

Much of the argument from the affirmative speakers relies on what is supposed to be a moral malaise in the contemporary world, as if this can be attributed to atheists. Much of what they said was just empty moralising. Nothing follows from it about the existence of a god.

I do agree that there are grave moral challenges in the world today: the burden of global poverty; the phenomenon of climate change and the resistance to doing anything about it; and in Australia, the callous and xenophobic treatment of refugees.

But none of these genuine challenges have anything to do with atheism. Indeed, the source of the problems is likely to come very much from elsewhere.

I submit that no good argument has been offered by the affirmative speakers for believing in any sort of god, including the popular concept of an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving and providential Creator of the universe.

The churches themselves do not appear to be established by an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love.

And the world we live in does not appear to be created by an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love, either. It has never been properly explained why such a being, which is supposedly powerful enough to prevent the suffering in the world, and should be motivated to do so, has not only allowed suffering but allowed so much of it.

As we survey all the world's horrible circumstances, the endlessly varied kinds of excruciating pain, the deep suffering and sheer misery, inflicted on so many human beings and other vulnerable living things, it is not believable that a God of Love would have remotely adequate reasons to permit it all.

And it's no use responding to such questions with talk of free will. If free will means anything, it means being able to act in accordance with your own nature and values.

God is supposed to have free will, and yet we are assured by theologians that God will never act malevolently because it is not in his nature to do so. God will always freely choose to do good.

Well, why wouldn't God create other beings with benevolent natures who will also freely choose to do good? Heaven is supposed to be like that, so why isn't Earth?

And anyway, only a relatively small amount of the suffering there has been in the world over hundreds of millions of years could possibly have anything to do with the free choices of human beings.

Why has an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love brought about the world's current life forms through the process of biological evolution, which has, as God could have foreseen, led to untold misery in the animal world? Why would God choose this as the process to bring about beings like us?

Biologists tell us that the evolutionary process inevitably produces design flaws - often painful or debilitating for the creatures concerned. These are present everywhere in the natural world, and in fact in the human genome itself.

These flaws are just part of the evidence that life on Earth has diversified over time through the blind process of evolution, rather than being the product of a guiding intelligence.

So why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love choose a process that foreseeably produces so many atrocious outcomes for the creatures involved?

Why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God of Love choose the cruel, brutal operation of evolution, in which species supersede each other? You can't reconcile the process of evolution with the existence of such a god.

Doubtless there are people in the audience who don't call themselves "atheists" but are, at this stage, not persuaded that any gods exist. I want to address you for a moment.

You may not like some of the connotations of the word "atheist." You may think that some other word or phrase better conveys your emphasis - maybe you call yourself an agnostic or a sceptic or a humanist, or just "not religious."

If you call yourself a "humanist", for example, perhaps you go one idea further in your philosophy than just atheism.

But those questions of nuance, connotation and preferred self-description should not make you vote for a motion that atheists are just wrong.

If the motion is carried, it says to the world that this house believes a god's existence has been demonstrated. If that has not happened, then I submit that you cannot, in good conscience, support a motion that "Atheists are wrong."

I don't claim to have proved, once and for all, that no gods exist. No high-profile atheist makes that claim - not Richard Dawkins, not Christopher Hitchens or Sam Harris - and neither, generally, do philosophical atheists in universities. Atheists don't usually make such an overweening claim.

But we do claim that no satisfactory argument has ever been put for believing in any kind of god. Furthermore, there are good reasons to see religion as man-made and at least to rule out the popular idea of an omnicompetent God of Love.

Atheists are not wrong when they decline to accept the God story. On the crucial points, atheists have got it right.

Russell Blackford is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Evolution and Technology, and conjoint lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Science at the University of Newcastle. He co-edited, with Udo Schuklenk, 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). His next book, Freedom of Religion and the Secular State, will be published later this year.