The last decade has seen a surge in fashionable atheism, led by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. But in this piece in the Spectator, the UK’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, tackles their intellectual superficiality.

He makes the point that the New Atheists have been lamentably weak at facing up to the ethical and moral implications of their atheism.

Sacks writes: “Whatever happened to the intellectual depth of the serious atheists, the forcefulness of Hobbes, the passion of Spinoza, the wit of Voltaire, the world-shattering profundity of Nietzsche?

“Where is there the remotest sense that they have grappled with the real issues, which have nothing to do with science and the literal meaning of scripture and everything to do with the meaningfulness or otherwise of human life, the existence or non-existence of an objective moral order, the truth or falsity of the idea of human freedom, and the ability or inability of society to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond?”

Religion, he points out, “has social, cultural and political consequences, and you cannot expect the foundations of western civilisation to crumble and leave the rest of the building intact”.

“That is what the greatest of all atheists, Nietzsche, understood with terrifying clarity and what his -latter-day successors fail to grasp at all,” Sacks writes.

As he says, Nietzsche warned that the loss of Christian faith would mean the erosion of Christian morality.

“No more ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’; instead the will to power. No more ‘Thou shalt not’; instead people would live by the law of nature, the strong dominating or eliminating the weak. ‘An act of injury, violence, exploitation or destruction cannot be “unjust” as such, because life functions essentially in an injurious, violent, exploitative and destructive manner.’”

But when the new atheists are asked where we get our morality from, Sacks points out, they become uneasy. “They tend to argue that ethics is obvious, which it isn’t, or natural, which it manifestly isn’t either, and end up vaguely hinting that this isn’t their problem. Let someone else worry about it.”

As Sacks says, after replacing belief in God with belief in the Nation or in the socialist State, and the destruction caused by those idolatries, “we have turned to more pacific forms of idolatry, among them the market, the liberal democratic state and the consumer society, all of which are ways of saying that there is no morality beyond personal choice so long as you do no harm to others”.

However, the costs of even this milder idolatry are beginning to become obvious.

Sacks writes: “Levels of trust have plummeted throughout the West as one group after another — bankers, CEOs, media personalities, parliamentarians, the press — has been hit by scandal.

“Marriage has all but collapsed as an institution, with 40 per cent of children born outside it and 50 per cent of marriages ending in divorce. Rates of depressive illness and stress-related syndromes have rocketed especially among the young.

“A recent survey showed that the average 18- to 35-year-old has 237 Facebook friends. When asked how many they could rely on in a crisis, the average answer was two. A quarter said one. An eighth said none.

“None of this should surprise us. This is what a society built on materialism, individualism and moral relativism looks like. It maximises personal freedom but at a cost.”

All of this has been obvious for decades, centuries even if we go back to a generation of earlier, more intellectually honest atheists. But today’s atheists, for whom unbelief in God seems to be little more than a fashion accessory, seem utterly unable to even acknowledge the questions posed by their philosophical stance, still less address them.