CHRIS UHLMANN, PRESENTER: The words "best-selling" and "philosopher" usually don't appear in the same sentence, unless you're Alain de Botton. The thinker, author and TV presenter has clearly tapped a deep need - applying philosophy to life. He's a staunch atheist, but in his latest book, Religion For Atheists, he's argued there's much the secular world can learn from faith. I spoke to him earlier in Melbourne.

Alain de Botton, welcome to 7.30.

ALAIN DE BOTTON, AUTHOR, "RELIGION FOR ATHEISTS": Thank you so much.

CHRIS UHLMANN: What on Earth would an atheist need religion for?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: The assumption is if you don't believe in anything, you will be completely uninterested in the whole spectra of religion. But my argument is that, actually, religion is full of useful, interesting, consoling ideas that could be of appeal even to someone who has absolutely no interest in being a believer.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Which bits of religion would you save?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: They do community really well. They bring people together around a shared set of values, and that works well. They're also very good on ethics. They're good at reminding us to be nice and to be kind - we're not so good outside of religion. That's not to say religious people always are like that, but there's a mechanism in place. Religions are great at educating people. One way to look at religions is, these are the world's foremost educational machines, and part of the reason they're so good is that they recognise in order to reach somebody you can't just sit them in a classroom at the age of 15 or 20, and just pour in some knowledge, and then it's going to stick there forever. Education is an ongoing thing, and it needs to accompany you throughout your life, and it needs to reach you through all the arts.

CHRIS UHLMANN: You were talking before about teaching people to be good and teaching people to be kind - would you go far as to seek to save sin as an idea?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: What I'm trying to rescue there is the idea that we, as human beings, start off a little bit broken - not quite perfect machines ready for happiness and eternal, you know, good times. We sometimes believe, in the modern world, that with science and technology at our disposal we can make life perfect. What all the religions do - especially Buddhism and Christianity - is they start by saying look, life is really challenging, human beings are not perfect. Angels are perfect, sort of, but humans are not perfect. So life's going to be challenging in all sorts of ways - and oddly, I think, as a secular person, that's quite a nice starting point. I would rather someone tells me look, "Life is going to be challenging", than it's supposed to be all perfect and you run into problems.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Are you yearning for the ritual, the mystery, the awe that used to be part of religion which now seems to be completely stripped out of our daily lives?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: It's funny you you mention "awe", because I think awe is a very important emotion...

CHRIS UHLMANN: And you see that in architecture, don't you?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yeah, I mean, what most religions do is they take people - at certain time of the year, calendar, week - and they put them in a place, and they say, "You are very small in the larger perspective - in the cosmos, in the eyes of God", whatever it is. Religion relativises us, make us small. And though feeling small could seem like a bad thing - like, "Eh, don't make me feel small!", oddly, being made to feel small by something amazing - religious people would call that God, but you could call that the universe or nature or the ocean - it has a really calming effect on us, and we don't do it enough. We tend to live in cities, where the achievements of other humans dominate, and where we slowly lose our minds to envy and anxiety until something can just pull us out and reintroduce a wider timeframe and a wider sense of space.

CHRIS UHLMANN: You're a very passionate person, aren't you? I get a sense that you are yearning for something in religion that you think you might have lost yourself?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: I'm genuinely an Atheist, and are not questing for God or a replacement or a spirit or anything like that, but I think the secular world has not worked out all the answers - and particularly when it comes to organising the inner life. I'm really interested in guidance. How do we cope with the fracturing of society? How do we cope with the big hurdles of our life: falling in love, falling out of love, falling ill, watching people around us die. These are big challenges, and the secular world kind of leaves us on our own. There is no one in the secular world to whom you can turn, as an institution to help you with these challenges. If you showed up at a university and you said, you know, "I've come here to study the great works of mankind because I want to learn how to live and die." They would think, "Hey, you're crazy!"

CHRIS UHLMANN: But the question you ask - "How do I live a good life?" is fundamental to philosophy, isn't it? It's the question that has been asked throughout the ages - and do you think part of the problem now is that we've deified science, and it doesn't even ask those kinds of question. It answers "what" questions, not "why" questions.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Absolutely, absolutely. This... science can do wonderful things - send rockets to the moon, etcetera - but it does not give us consolation, it does not give us a meaning as such. I'm all for using science, but for slightly different ends to the ends that scientists use. When I go to an observatory with a scientist, the scientist will say look, there's the galaxy BW-103 and I'm thinking, I don't really care for the specific name for the galaxy. What I'm taking away from this is a neo-religious or, if you like, a humanistic truth which is, "My goodness, we're small in a vast universe", and that has implications for us. So, I think we can use the material of science - not for scientific ends, but for, as I say, humanistic ends, to help us to live.

CHRIS UHLMANN: How would your father react to the sorts of things you're saying, because he was a militant atheist, clearly, and now you're trying to rescue some of the things which he would have thought would have been perhaps be just fripperies.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: You know, I grew up in a very atheistic household, and since then we've grown up now with a world where there are some very fierce atheists out there who point out not just that religion is wrong but that it's ridiculous. And there's a real dialogue of the death going on between, on the one hand, religious people who feel terribly sorry for atheists because they're all going to hell, and at the same time there are atheists who feel terribly sorry for religious people because they're so stupid in their eyes. Both of those positions are caricatures and are not really valid, and what I'm saying, as an atheist, is you might have no belief but, you know, absolutely take an interest in this stuff. This is, you know... I think religions are far too useful, complex, intelligent to be abandoned simply to those who happen to believe in them. They're for all of us, especially nonbelievers.

CHRIS UHLMANN: How do you move from taking the ideas and then applying them in some sort of practical way for a secular world?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: There are all kinds of areas. One of the things that religion does is to remind us that we need to make appointments with important ideas. They all give us calendars, and they say, "It's all very well to have things you care about, but unless you put them in your calendar, they're going to slip out of the net." I'm very inspired by... Zen Buddhists, every September they go and have a little moment where they worship the moon - the festival of Tsukimi. You stand on a special platform, you look up at the moon and things fall into perspective, you talk about friendship, etc. Or the Jewish Day of Atonement. A wonderful day where you forgive people, you confess your errors - not only to God but to other people. You literally say, "I'm really sorry for that thing I did to you back in March", or whatever. These are just examples...

CHRIS UHLMANN: We have to do that more regularly than once a year though.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: (laughs) Probably once a quarter or once a month. These are examples of things that, without particular reference to the supernatural, an atheist, a secular person could probably get an awful lot out of.

CHRIS UHLMANN: What about just returning silence to our lives?

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Yeah, I mean, you know, for a long time the idea of a monastary seemed a peculiar thing, like, "Why were these guys going off to sit on their own for so long?" I think anyone who's bought a smart phone in the last five years is probably now getting a sense of why we need silence - of why we might need spaces where we are completely out of touch. In the religious understanding, we need silence because it's only when there's silence that we will be able to communicate with God. Translated... what I take away from that, is when there's silence you're able to talk to the deepest parts of yourself, and those things are inaccessible, those parts are inaccessible in the hubbub of the city. And again, religions are terribly useful in marking out moments, you know, and giving us a sense that if you're not spending half an hour on your own in silence a day, you will be in trouble, spiritually - and I know from my own life that's probably true. It's very hard to achieve, but it's a wonderful goal, and we should probably be building replacement monasteries or places of silence - that is a legitimate ambition for modern society.

CHRIS UHLMANN: Alain De Botton. Thank you.

ALAIN DE BOTTON: Thanks so much.