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Last night, I learnt something I didn't expect too, whilst taking part in a chat/phone-in discussion on Radio Five Live with Richard Bacon. The subject was whether agnosticism is a cop-out.

Oh no it isn't! Oh yes it is! If you were not hanging on the dial at midnight, you get the picture. I suppose such programs are mostly about entertainment. People listen in, latch onto an expression or opinion they agree with, and then side with that particular party. The host is there to stir it up, and throw in some wit. Whether anyone learns anything new, or even wants to do so, is pretty questionable. I can't remember what I said - it was well past my usual bedtime - though came away pretty sure that any contribution to the greater good would be measured as marginal.

Except that one shouldn't underestimate the listeners. For that is what I learnt. One of the callers was a lady. She described how she didn't believe in the doctrines of Christianity, but did its ethics - particularly the ethic of loving neighbours. Quite naturally and unaffectedly, she described caring for old folk in her locality, particularly someone with Parkinson's disease.

I came away rather moved by her story, heard amidst the knock-about. Whatever their worth, her story, at least, was certainly worth broadcasting.

The fourth and last Reith Lecture from Michael Sandel was broadcast this morning. He returned to his big theme, that faith in markets as the primary mechanism for the common good has been sorely tested, but we’ve yet to find a new way of establishing that good.

The dominant model has been what might be called ‘market mimicking government’. Essentially this means that when markets fail, governments step in to create the conditions that, with luck, encourage markets to produce the right goods. The problem is that such an approach is based upon cost-benefit analysis, and that aspires to a kind of monetary science, which apart from often being flawed in itself, can’t capture the values that we’d want to see instantiated in a society.

For example, to facilitate cost-benefit analysis in the US, $3.7 million has been assigned as the value of a human life, bar those people aged over 70, who are valued at $2.3 million. The arbitrary boundary at 70 alone shows such evaluations make little sense.

Also, cost-benefit analysis curtains democratic debate by disqualifying it, unless, that is, such debate trades in the ‘facts’ of cost-benefit analysis. Further, it begs a question: is the main function of government to correct for market failures? Sandel’s contention is that such a view of government is too narrow and too humble. Democracy is about more than being a handmaiden to markets, and if government is taken to be that then the solidarity of the ‘demos’ and strength of democratic institutions are slowly undermined.

To put it another way, you must have controversial moral arguments in public because ‘the non-judgemental impulse is an anti-democratic impulse.’ You can see how the non-judgemental attitude came about – to reduce civic strife and to keep politicians out of the purposes individuals might set for their lives. But things have changed now, Sandel believes. Obama’s election is one sign that there is a hunger for a politics that consciously reflects values, for a politics of the common good.

What would that look like? We need to think of ourselves less as consumers and more as citizens. To be a citizen is to change ‘habits of the heart’ not just to make different choices. That’s the level at which good citizenship takes place, at which the common good is explored. For example, universal health care comes about when citizens realise that they have a duty of care; or mitigating climate change comes about when citizens’ attitudes towards the planet and nature change. New laws follow that change of heart, they don't precede it.

More broadly, a politics of the common good would work to rebuild the infrastructure of public life: municipal not membership health clubs, better public transport not more private cars, and similarly in relation to schools and so on. Such a shift can’t happen overnight, but it starts when we exercise our civic virtues once again – which I suppose, in terms of debate, is what the Reith lectures are all about.

The questions from the audience critiqued Sandel’s juxtaposition of markets and citizenship. Several people argued that markets are part of citizenship, and vice versa, because they are a very effective distribution mechanism of public goods. Sandel’s response was not ‘no markets’ but ‘less markets’: resisting the call to extend the reach of markets is the point in time he believes we’ve reached.

Another line of questioning asked about how to overcome the deep divisions that emerge in public debates about moral issues such euthanasia or creationism. Sandel replied that one crucial civic virtue is a willingness to engage and listen. I imagine he'd add that such an attitude does not preclude making judgements about people's views, given that such is the essence of moral debate. However, it would resist the rush to simplification and demonization.

Karen Armstrong is always a good read. But I’ve been particularly keenly anticipating her new book because I’d guessed that in it she would address head on what I take to be the fundamental issue in contemporary religious discourse.

She does. In The Case for God: What Religion Really Means, she turns her scholarly but lucid prose to the rise of the new atheists – although she does so, not by tackling them directly, but by going back to basics, all the way, in fact, to the pre-history of humanity’s engagement with the transcendent. She tells the story of our attempts to understand the ineffable, stressing that until the early modern period, nearly all religions, most of the time, realised that God, or the Dao, or Nirvana was literally indescribable, and so could be only manifest, if it could be manifest at all, in a way of life.

That last point might be challenged as a question of history. However, the theological point for us now is that an error took hold soon after the Renaissance. This was the conviction that religious truths could be proven by reason, tested by evidence and timelessly captured in a text or doctrine. Hence, the spiritual mess we are in, of which the new atheism is but a part, alongside fundamentalism, and the almost complete loss in mainstream religion of the apophatic – the practice by which any declaration of what God is must be followed by the declaration that God is simultaneously not that too.

As you read this story, what’s at stake emerges in a number of intellectual shifts that have taken place. For example, the word ‘belief’ now means a declaration of what is taken to be factually correct, whereas before it meant a whole-hearted commitment to a person or tradition – as in ‘I believe in you.’

Alternatively, religion that is based upon reason (as opposed to using reason as a way of discerning a path to that which lies beyond reason), as well as religion that stems solely from observing the natural world – in other words, deism and pantheism – are bound to be spiritually limited, since reason or nature contains it. Moreover, such approaches lead to atheism, since the theological element comes to seem superfluous – a kind of supernatural extravagance when reason or nature alone will do.

Or again: it is commonplace now to view God as a kind of supreme being. ‘He’ is taken to be like us – in goodness, powers or knowledge – only infinite in capacity. Such anthropomorphisms, though, were anathema to the great theologians of history, from Augustine to Aquinas, as well as their equivalent theological giants in other traditions. At best, we can speak of God provisionally and analogically, for God is no being at all.

Perhaps the most common mistake today is to view religion as primarily an individual affirmation of metaphysical beliefs, rather than to understand it as a way of life that is practiced with others. It is within and from such practice that any beliefs emerge, those beliefs being incomprehensible aside from the way of life. There is nothing mysterious in that, per se; it is not a kind of intellectual avoidance strategy. Rather, the point is that it is the way of life that is the primary source of the insights, the metaphysics being an always inadequate attempt to distil them – though metaphysics in itself is a vital exercise in discernment.

Authentic religion, then, is characterised by being kenotic – that is other-oriented and self-emptying; unknowing – like Socrates who did not seek to prove anything but to bring about a change of mind based upon a realisation of wise ignorance; and spiritual – in the sense of being a labour of love through which someone comes to see the transcendent in the everyday.

Of course, religion has always led to bigotry too, particularly when it has been aligned with political power, which invariably corrupts its way of life. But today, in particular, Armstrong’s argument is that we need to rediscover the agnostic joys of intuiting that which is ultimately beyond us. You do see it, in fact, in the writings of some physicists like Paul Davies, for whom the unfolding mysteries of the cosmos yield ‘astonishment.’ Or the words of some philosophers like Karl Popper, who derived great happiness from the occasional glimpses of truth his intellectual struggles afforded. Or the poems of the Romantics like Wordsworth, who came to ‘see into the life of things.’

Today, Armstrong concludes, we collectively might be entering a kind of cloud of unknowing about those things that have traditionally been captured in the best myths and practices of religion. It’s the perhaps inevitable result of the ‘knowing’ produced by science, which though invaluable in its own way, has unbalanced us. This is, therefore, a dangerous time. It is hard to give up on the lust for certainty. Violence – physical and intellectual – is a constant threat.

But these are fascinating times in which to live too. Although the religious impulse has been profoundly challenged by modernity, so much so that even religious people systematically forget that God is not God if not unknown, writers like Armstrong – and the fact that she sells books by the bucket-load too – suggest it never quite died. Thank the whoever for that.

It is no new observation to remark that the modern media plays the role that religion would have fulfilled in premodern times. The rituals of consuming news mark the day as matins, mass and evensong did before; websites are like rosary beads perpetually clicking through our fingers. Editors are like bishops; journalists priests. Moreover, the news tells us about our place in the world, shapes our understanding of the world, quite as effectively as Biblical stories, laments and images must have done for the Medieval mind.

When a global event occurs, such as the death of Michael Jackson, 'the meaning of our participation in the event is shaped by the whole vast dispersed audience we share it with,' as Charles Taylor comments in A Secular Age. The past was not dissimilar with the celebration of Easter or Ramadan. The whole Christian or Islamic, or whatever, world participated together. It was exceptional time, which is why people will now remember where they were when they heard that Michael Jackson had died. These moments show that our lives are still shared, exterior and enchanted, as well as isolated, interior and rational, as modernity would have us believe.

There's the element of Greek tragedy in the mix too. The last day or so has been like watching a new play at the Dionysian festival: a life cut short, ruined by success, trapped though he was supposed to be the one enjoying all the freedoms wealth and fame affords. As the best tragedies are, it is simultaneously comic: MJ the grotesque, we voyeurs.

That said, there are differences. Events like Michael Jackson's death catch us unawares. They are not like religious rituals whose patterns, participation and framing are designed to deepen our humanity. Instead, they feel chaotic and neurotic, as people flounder to make sense of what's happened or as others indulge in spectacles of mourning. There is strictly no space for silence.

The media works differently too. Whilst yesterday's viewing and listening felt like a massive wake - what with phone-ins for sharing your favourite MJ moment and back-to-back airings of the archives - the media is impatient, unlike the measured cycles of a festival or service. Twenty-four hours on and the event itself is yesterday's news. Today, we have the manhunt, the blame-game, the search for a cause and explanation - a kind of demythologization.

Also, already, the media is asking itself whether it went over the top. It's self-obsessed: the world of celebrity has nothing but itself to interest itself. 'Knowing not himself, he wanted only himself,' Ted Hughes wrote of Narcissus. Couldn't the same be said of media culture today?

(Photo: Sjors Provoost)