Can atheists replicate a religious culture — perhaps with culture tout court? "It was no coincidence," writes de Botton, "that during the period of revolutionary government in France in 1792, only three days separated the declaration of the state's official severance from the Catholic Church and the inauguration of the Palais du Louvre as the country's first National Museum." However, admiring the gilded 14th-century figure of the Virgin and Child looted from the cathedral of St Denis does not provide the same psychic nourishment as the veneration that the statue was crafted to inspire.

It is the same with tourism versus pilgrimage, museums versus shrines, or the Jewish Passover meal or Catholic Mass versus the "Agape restaurant" that de Botton would like to take their place. The hopes that literature might stand in for scripture — that Middlemarch could replace the Psalms — have been disappointed. "It may be," he writes, "that we are expecting too much of our own secular artists, requiring them not only to impress our senses but also to be the originators of profound psychological and moral insights."

It is difficult not to conclude, after reading Religion for Atheists, both that faith brings enormous benefits to the believer, and that a godless culture will always be barren because the numinous is intrinsic to the nature of man.