Atheist campaigner Christopher Hitchens appears to have emerged the winner of yesterday’s debate on religion with former Prime Minister and Catholic convert Tony Blair.

The two went head to head in Toronto to debate whether religion is a force for good in the world.

Hitchens, author of the book ‘God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything’, argued that religion had caused misery throughout the ages by aggravating many of the world’s conflicts.

He likened God to a “divine North Korea” and questioned how good it was for the world to “worship a deity that takes sides in wars and human affairs, to appeal to our fear and to our guilt”.

“To terrify children with the image of hell … to consider women an inferior creation. Is that good for the world?” he said.

Blair argued that religion was a force for good because faith motivated many people to do good works.

He pointed to Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot as evidence of the fact that even if religion disappeared from the world, religious fanaticism would not.

He insisted that in spite of some of its “strange and outdated” ideas, religion still offered people a “benign progressive framework by which to live our lives”.

"The proposition that religion is unadulterated poison is unsustainable," he said.

Already before the debate, most of the 2,700-strong audience at the Munk Debate were on Hitchens’ side, with 57% saying they disagreed with the premise that religion was a force for good, 22% saying they agreed and the remainder saying they were undecided.

When the audience was asked to fill in ballot papers at the end of the debate, it appeared both had managed to win over some of the undecided, with 68% siding with Hitchens and 32% with Blair.

Hitchens, who has final stage oesophageal cancer, told the Globe and Mail newspaper that he had arranged his chemotherapy around the debate so that he would not be “demoralised”.