David Hume, whose influence on Adam Smith was very great, was a philosophical skeptic. Smith himself was a Deist, a Scottish moral philosopher who relied on supposedly neutral human reason to make his cases, both economic and moral. The economists of the nineteenth century were generally agnostics (Jewish and Christian), never theologically inclined, frequently Darwinian, and almost always utilitarian in their defense of markets. This has remained true in the twentieth century, F.A. Hayek, for example, is devoting the remaining years of his life to a study of what he regards as one of the most important intellectual questions of all time: How did man, who was a selfish animal wandering alone or in small packs, ever develop the idea and institutions of a market? The slow evolution of man out of the jungle somehow made a huge leap of progress -- a discontinuous leap -- into civilization with the idea of voluntary exchange, in contrast to war and conquest, Hayek has always been an evolutionist, and now, at the end of a successful intellectual career, he has decided to concentrate on the relationship between evolution and economics. He is spending his time mastering a whole new field for him, cultural anthropology. In short, his religion is showing. For anyone who ever read his works carefully, it always has.
The Hope of Unity
Religion is seen by atheists and skeptics as a permanent barrier between men. Religious ideas cannot be fused. They cannot be compromised. There is no common ground of appeal by which differences may be reconciled. It is the faith of skeptics, agnostics, and non-Marxian atheists that reason, the arbiter of all human thought, is of one piece. It is the post-Kantian religious commitment of rationalists to believe that the human mind is basically a universal constant. It is the quest for constants, in terms of this one Constant, that has beguiled economists for two centuries.
Professor George Stigler of the University of Chicago, one of America's more influential teachers, writes: "The reason for assigning such an austere role to economics is this: it is the fundamental tenet of those who believe in free discussion that matters of fact and logic can (eventually) be agreed upon by competent men of good will, that matters of taste cannot be reconciled by free discussion. Assuming this to be true, it is apparent that if value judgments were mixed with logic and observation, a science would make little progress." (Stigler, The Theory of Competitive Price [Macmillan, 1942], pp. 15-16.) Hayek has stated something very similar: "Yet if we have not convinced them [interventionist economists], the reason must be that our arguments are not yet quite good enough, that we have not yet made explicit some of the foundations on which our conclusions rest." (Speech in What's Past is Prologue [Irvington, N.Y. Foundation for Economic Education, 1968], p. 41,) Why is it, then, that Stigler, a radical empiricist (facts-to-theory logic) and Hayek, a logical deductivist (theory-leads-to-properly-interpreted-facts logic) cannot agree about the proper role of theory, not to mention monetary policy? And why can't either of them seem to convince Keynesians concerning the evils of State regulation? And why can't all of them convince the socialists about the benefits of private ownership? And why can't all of them convince the Marxists that revolution is not the way to achieve economic utopia? Because all human thought is religious, and inescapably value-laden. There is no neutral logic, no zone of common ground, no all-encompassing human logic to which all parties can appeal a decision. In short, there is not now, nor has there ever been, nor shall there ever be unity--moral, intellectual, cultural, philosophical-among the rationalists in general or the economists in particular.
Restraints on Reason
The mind of man is capable of extraordinary feats. The ability of men to link the intricate logic of mathematics (almost an artistic process) and the observed regularities in the external world is nothing short of a miracle, a fact admitted by Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Eugene Wigner ("The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences," Communications of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. l3 [i960], pp. 1-14). Yet at the same time, the ability of men to get lost in incomprehensible, inapplicable, totally hypothetical mental universes has been demonstrated for millennia. The most erudite, incomprehensible debates of medieval scholastics--all forgotten, all covered with the dust of history--were in no way more complex, more hypothetical, or more useless to life than any issue of Enonometrica, the mathematically oriented economics journal. In fact, a game is played by editors of these academic journals. They cannot read the articles that appear in their own publications, and they generally hire professional mathematicians to check the accuracy of the symbolic logic of the essays. (John Kenneth Galbraith, who unfortunately writes bad economics in superb English, let this academic cat out of the bag: Economics, Peace, and Laughter [New American Library, 1972], p. 44n.)
The inescapable epistemological problems of all human thought bedevil economists, except that economists seldom consider basic questions of epistemology. "How can l know?" is not a popular question among economists, especially the mathematically inclined economists, The reality of Kurt Gödel's theorem, that no system of human reasoning can be simultaneously consistent and complete, has seldom bothered economists, although it has confounded the best theoretical physicists and mathematicians of the world. How can reason check reas0n's errors? How do we appeal to a "highest" reason? How can the observed data of the external world -- if there really is an external world -- be interpreted accurately by the logic of the mind? Are the facts distorted by the very process of filtering them in observation? Why should mathematics relate to the external world? Is there such a relationship, or are we fooling ourselves (Hume's ancient challenge)? How can we know for sure?
Because men's minds are so creative in their flights of fancy, including fancy and fanciful mathematics, they lose their balance. But how are we to discover balance? What is balance? What is an unbalanced mind? We may be able to recognize an unbalanced equation, but can we recognize an unbalanced application of a balanced equation in the real world of human action? And by "we," I mean all rational observers in a particular academic discipline. Given the demonstrated inability of academicians to agree about anything except the need for more pay, fewer classes, and larger pensions, we have reasons to be skeptical.
Reason, in short, is not the judge of the universe. Nor is chaos. Nor is evolution by means of natural selection. God is the judge. Through His written revelation of Himself, His law, and His creation, He has provided Christians with the criteria of balance. He has enabled us to ask the proper questions concerning scarcity, the limits of the State, the nature of debt, the lawfulness of just weights and measures, the immorality of monetary inflation, the requirements of warfare, and so forth. We can have balanced analyses because we have revelation-restrained minds,
Common Grace
We can use the discoveries of atheistic economists, just as we can use the discoveries of atheistic physicians, chemists, biologists, and physicists. We dare not use them unselectively. In fact, we cannot use anyone's discoveries unselectively, since all human thought involves selection and evaluation. The question facing us as Christians is this one: What criteria must we use in a faithful selection of ideas? What standards should we use to sift the wheat from the chaff in economics? The answer should be obvious, although in our era apparently it isn't: the Bible. We need to immerse ourselves, as decision-making economic actors, in the economics of the Bible and the economics of hypothetically neutral rationalism. We need to weigh the economics of rationalism in the balance. But we need to know which questions to ask, and what kinds of answers God's law provides. To serve as judges, we need to know God's law. We are to serve as judges (l Corinthians 6). Our days on earth are to prepare us for judgment, as both recipients and dispensers of judgment.
Atheists have discovered important facts. They are created beings working out God's cultural mandate (Genesis 1:28; 9:1-7). They have been restrained in the rebellion of their own speculations. They have discovered truths, despite their official relativism and denial of permanent truth. We must now take their work and put it to effective use in every area of life. Economics, on the day of judgment, will be Christian economics and only Christian economics. Between now and then, it is our task to restructure our economic theories and observations, so that when that final day arrives, what we have produced in the name of Christ in the field of economics will bear a close resemblance to what God announces as valid economics, by which our actions will be judged. There is progressive sanctification in the field of economic theory and practice, just as there is in every other area of life.
Biblical Economics Today Vol. 2, No. 2 (April/May 1979)
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