Chapter 6: Chance
Christian Economics: Student's Edition
[Updated: 1/18/18]
The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord (Proverbs 16:33).
Point one of the biblical covenant is God's transcendence, yet also his presence. This is the biblical concept of God's original sovereignty. It asks: "Who's in charge here?"
Proverbs 16:33 is clear: there is no such thing as chance. But men do not believe this. This is why they gamble. They cast lots. They roll the dice. They play cards for money. They bet on horse races. These are what economists call zero-sum games. Winners win at the expense of losers. There is no net increase of wealth. Men's ability to predict the outcomes of zero-sum games is limited to statistical probability. The outcomes may seem to be part of a statistical pattern, or they may seem to be statistically random. This is an illusion that is due to men's lack of omniscience. No event is ever based on chance. The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord; he turns it wherever he will (Proverbs 21:1). Any theory of causality that denies this also necessarily denies the clear teaching of the Bible. This denial began early, when Eve listened to the words of the serpent.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, Did God actually say, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden'? And the woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.' But the serpent said to the woman, You will not surely die (Genesis 3:1--4).
Eve began with her own view of God's word. She and Adam were not to eat from this tree. She added this: or touch it. The serpent countered: she would not die. He lied. She was deceived, Paul said (I Timothy 2:14). She ran an experiment to see who was right.
Adam was not deceived. He was self-conscious. He saw that nothing bad happened to her after she ate. So, he ate. In short, he decided that the outcome of eating was not predictable. He decided to run an additional test. The outcome would be either life or death. Either God had told him the truth or else He was a liar--or at least very badly misinformed. The serpent was either a liar or well informed. Adam decided to test who was right: God or the serpent. But, from his preliminary assessment of Eve's condition, he favored the serpent. He had no coin to flip, but he would not have flipped it if he had owned one. Who would risk death for the sake of better knowledge about outcomes if he thought the odds were 50-50? Only a fool.
A fool says in his heart that there is no God (Proverbs 14:1). Adam did not say there was no God. He did say in his heart that the Being who had given the command regarding the outcome of eating from the tree was no more a sovereign God than the serpent. Actually, He was less sovereign. We know this was Adam's view, because Adam decided to test the two predictions. If Adam was in a position to test God's word, then he was in charge of evaluating the accuracy of God's word. He decided to run an empirical test. This test was based on Adam's assumption that God's word in this case was more like 30-70. Or maybe 20-80. In fact, given the enormously high stakes, the accuracy of God's word was so low in probability that the outcome probably was what the serpent said. God's word was wrong. Humans would not die.
Adam appears to have been an early polytheist. There was God's word. There was the serpent's word. Which one was the true god with the true word? Were they both merely potential divinities? Adam would run a test to find out. There was the tree. There was a probable outcome of the test. The outcome was not random, i.e., indeterminate. But it was certainly not 100% predictable, he believed. He concluded that the reliability of God's word was dependent on Adam's test. The test involved covenantal disobedience. But if God's word was not 100% reliable, then God was not sovereign. If He was not sovereign over the creation, then He was not the Creator described in Genesis 1. He was a big, fat fibber. Adam concluded that the universe needed Adam to provide an objective assessment of God's lack of reliability. How? By running an experiment.
The experiment blew up in his face. It therefore blew up in our faces.
The issue of cosmic origins is inescapably connected to the issue of sovereignty. This is why the Book of Genesis is all about sovereignty. It is about origins. It says that God created the universe out of nothing. This is why He is sovereign. He is the original owner.
The modern world of academic humanism denies this story of origins. The humanist is not polytheistic in the way that Adam was. He is far more consistent. He does not run tests of God's word vs. the serpent's word. He denies both the existence of God and a serpent that represented Satan. He teaches that the universe was not created. It arose out of the Big Bang approximately 13.7 billion years ago.
Asks a child: But who set off the Big Bang? The cosmic evolutionist says: You are a child. I choose not to answer this. That is like asking who created God. But it really isn't. The substance that blew up/out 13.7 billion years ago is not said to be of infinite duration by cosmologists. Then how did it get there to blow up/out? What blew up/out? We are back to the journalist's big five questions: who, what, when, where, and why? To which is added: how?
Neither of these rival systems of origins explains how something came out of nothing. But biblical religion teaches that there was someone creative before there was something created. There was purpose before there was creation. The humanist denies that there was purpose prior to the appearance of man. There was no cosmic purpose 13.7 billion years ago. Cosmic purpose arrived with homo sapiens, unless there is some smarter alien race out there somewhere. If there is, then there will have to be either a showdown or a working agreement over which race's concept of purpose is correct. This is the survival of the fittest.
In the long run, there is no purpose, says the cosmic evolutionist. There is only the heat death of the universe. I will get to this in Section E.
Point one of the biblical covenant is God's transcendence, yet also his presence. This is the biblical concept of God's original sovereignty. It asks: "Who's in charge here?" How does this apply to the humanists' theory of the chance origins of the universe?
There was no cosmic purpose before man evolved. This was Darwinism's most important confession of faith. There was no intelligent design. There was no unintelligent design. There was only the Big Bang. It led to the creation of timeless, unbreakable laws of nature, coupled with random developments in nature. Nature is a mixed amalgam of law and chance. Humanists do not agree on the answer to this question: Which is more fundamental, law or chance?
They really do not care about the answer with respect to evolution prior to man. What they care about is this: There was no purpose prior to man. This is a denial of the Bible's account of creation. The Bible declares that God had purposes before the creation. Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him" (Ephesians 1:3--4). This doctrine is anathema to the Darwinist.
Christian economics begins with the doctrine of God's creation of the universe out of nothing. Non-Christian economics begins with the doctrine of Darwinian evolution. Christian economics begins with the doctrine of God as cosmic Owner. Humanist economics may begin with the autonomous individual, or the autonomous state, or a mixture. But it categorically rejects God's original ownership as the foundation of economic theory.
Humanist economics teaches that randomness or chance is the test of any theory. A theory proposes cause and effect. It is tested by statistical techniques that rest on the doctrine of randomness. The only rival theories of coherence rest on coherence that is outside of time and which proposes human omniscience as an ideal measure of coherence. This means a world without profit or loss. It is called equilibrium. This means that a hypothetical mental world which can never exist is the measure of the relevance of every economic policy or theory of causation. Modern economics is an unstable mixture of randomness, meaning 100% incoherence, and omniscience, meaning 100% understanding by humans.
While Austrian School economics as developed by Mises and Hayek rests on the doctrine of man's evolution, it begins with purposeful human action as the foundation of economic science. Mises titled his magnum opus Human Action (1949). This is why Austrian School economics is closer to Christian economics than its rivals. It focuses on what individuals think and do. It does not focus on aggregates as determining economic events.
The only source of economic coherence is mankind, humanists believe. A few economists say that the pure free market can provide all of the coherence required. Most free market economists say that there must be some civil government. Most economists are Keynesians. They say there must be government regulation. There must be some central planning, mainly by central bankers. There are few socialists remaining, and virtually no Marxists. But all are agreed: there is neither cosmic nor social providence. Men and their institutions provide the coherence. Everything else is ruled by chance.
Point two of the biblical covenant is hierarchical authority. It asks: "To whom do I report?" How does this apply to the humanists' theory of the chance origins of the universe?
The humanist denies that there is a chain of responsibility outside of time's limits. Hierarchies begin and end with mankind. This means only two economic hierarchies: the state and the free market. They are autonomous. They influence each other. The state provides courts and enforcers, which rest on violence. It provides military defense. But there is no appeal above the state. Nothing threatens the state with negative sanctions, other than another state or armed revolutionaries.
There is no guarantor of ethics other than state officials. The supposedly impersonal market cannot enforce morals. There is no free market court that can settle issues finally. Any market-derived system of law enforcement turns into a state. The bully starts a gang. Successful gang leaders become regional warlords. These warlords invade the free market. There is no market-derived ethics that can be enforced predictably.
Economists deny that their theory of market operations is in any sense dependent on a theory of morality. Markets are impersonal, economists insist. So, they insist that their theory of how markets operate is equally impersonal, equally value-free.
Most people find it hard to believe that the theoretically autonomous free market can produce righteous outcomes. The masses will not grant legitimacy to such an idea. They will not obey such a system of law. Self-government is close to non-existent apart from legitimacy. Without self-government, men face either anarchy or tyranny. Anarchy never lasts long.
Men appeal to power to settle disputes. They seek stability. They seek legal predictability. They want a hierarchical court of appeals that is grounded in unchanging ethics: right vs. wrong. But humanist economics as a science offers no theory of ethics, only efficiency. Men want to know that there is some trustworthy agency of law enforcement that will rule justly. Humanistic economic theory cannot provide either the philosophical or institutional basis of such a system within the framework of economic profit and loss.
Point three of the biblical covenant is law. It asks: What are the rules? How does this apply to the humanists' theory of the chance origins of the universe?
Men want to know that they live in a world that is at bottom grounded by ethics. They want to believe that honesty is the best policy. They want to believe that righteous behavior produces profits, and that criminal behavior produces losses. They want to believe that economic causation is ultimately ethical. They teach their children that this is the case. But humanistic free market economists cannot affirm this. They say that economic analysis is value-free, having no connection with ethics.
Socialists for two centuries came to readers and voters with this message: The free market produces evil results. It allows wealthy people exploit the poor and defenseless. We need to place limits on the free market. Production should be in terms of use, not profits. Economic inequality is unjust. The state must rectify these evils. These arguments persuaded millions of voters. The voters did not become socialists, but they voted for the construction of welfare states in the West. Intellectual defenders of the free market have been unable to persuade most voters to vote the welfare state out of existence. The economic interventionists claim to occupy the moral high ground. Free market economists let them occupy this rhetorical high ground. They say this in response: Economic science is value-free. They invoke the myth of neutrality. They have continued to lose the argument against the welfare state. Welfare implies a system of morality.
Is there a God-revealed, God-enforced ethical system? If so, does it speak plainly to economic issues? Hundreds of millions of Christians want to believe in yes answers, but their religious leaders do not know much about economic science as taught in universities. Those few economists who oppose the welfare state do not understand the Bible, nor do they cite it as an authoritative source of ethical information. So, Christian laymen do not know where to turn for guidance on economic issues, whether personal or political.
Point four of the biblical covenant is sanctions. It asks: What happens if I obey? Disobey? How does this apply to the humanists' theory of the chance origins of the universe?
Men want to believe that there is meaning governing their lives. They impute meaning to the world around them. They want to believe that their subjective evaluation of the world is connected to its actual operations. When they pursue some goal, they want to believe they are not fooling themselves.
There is cause and effect in economic affairs. Why is this the case? People make accurate predictions about the outcomes of certain policies. But how is this possible in a world governed by chance? What meaning does chance offer to mankind or to individuals. No God lies behind the seeming chance events of the world, the humanist believes. The economist teaches that economic theory is meaningful only if it allows an economist to make better predictions. Better predictions than what? Flipping a coin? In this case, the meaningfulness of economic theory is defined only in terms of chance. Meaning is a predictable deviation from chance.
Then the question arises: Is this pattern good or bad? Is it right or wrong? Is it something that the government should encourage with positive sanctions or discourage through negative sanctions? The economist may have an opinion, but it is not a scientific opinion, he says. He cannot evaluate the outcome in terms of ethics. Economic theory is value-free, he says. But, he insists, so is all other social theory. Social scientists are in the same theoretical boat, he says. They cannot make interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility.
Humanists insist that the operations of the world around us are a mixture of absolutely fixed impersonal laws and absolutely unpredictable random events, also impersonal. There is no God who evaluates the meaning of all events in terms of His plan and His providence. Individual decisions are based on human freedom. This is the basis of personal responsibility. But to evaluate the rightness or wrongness of any action or outcome, a person needs a fixed ethical system of cause and effect. The economist denies that such a system has any relevance for economic theory. He denies that it even exists. Then how can someone accurately assess the outcome of his economic decisions? By means of his personal system of ethics, he is told. But how can the decision-maker know if there is any connection between his system of ethics, economic causation, and its effects on society? The economist says that economic theory cannot answer this question.
What is the role of personal ethics, personal evaluation, and objective outcomes in an evolving universe that is governed by the interplay of fixed impersonal law and meaningless random events? The humanist cannot say. Man is personal, he says. Man imputes meaning, he says. Yes, you say, I do this. But how do I know if the meaning that I impute to events and outcomes has any meaningful relationship with impersonal natural law and impersonal natural randomness? The economist, like the ethicist, says that he just cannot say, either scientifically or logically.
Point five of the biblical covenant is succession. It asks: Does this outfit have a future? How does this apply to the humanists' theory of the chance origins of the universe?
Every Western theory of the cosmos offers a theory of the future of the cosmos. But the Darwinian future is exceedingly bad news. The world is dying. There is a steady, irreversible movement from stored-up kinetic energy to dissipation. This is the second law of thermodynamics at work. The process is called entropy: the movement from order to disorder. This is modern man's definition of time: the dissipation of order, including heat. Especially heat. The end of this process is called the heat death of the universe. Wikipedia's entry for Heat death of the universe says this.
The heat death of the universe is a plausible ultimate fate of the universe in which the universe has diminished to a state of no thermodynamic free energy and therefore can no longer sustain processes that increase entropy. Heat death does not imply any particular absolute temperature; it only requires that temperature differences or other processes may no longer be exploited to perform work. In the language of physics, this is when the universe reaches thermodynamic equilibrium (maximum entropy).
This is the most widely shared cosmology among humanistic scientists in the West. It points to universal death, in which electrons whirl around protons, or not, depending on your theory of electrons. But there is no progress. There is no now and later, no here to there. There is no meaningful change because there is no one and no thing to impute meaning. Cosmic impersonalism without man returns to cosmic impersonalism without man. There is no one to ask: What was that all about?
How long will all this take? Wikipedia says this.
From the Big Bang through the present day, matter and dark matter in the universe are thought to have been concentrated in stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters, and are presumed to continue to be so well into the future. Therefore, the universe is not in thermodynamic equilibrium and objects can do physical work., §VID. The decay time for a supermassive black hole of roughly 1 galaxy-mass (1011 solar masses) due to Hawking radiation is on the order of 10[100] years, so entropy can be produced until at least that time. After that time, the universe enters the so-called Dark Era, and is expected to consist chiefly of a dilute gas of photons and leptons.§VIA With only very diffuse matter remaining, activity in the universe will have tailed off dramatically, with extremely low energy levels and extremely long time scales. Speculatively, it is possible that the universe may enter a second inflationary epoch, or, assuming that the current vacuum state is a false vacuum, the vacuum may decay into a lower-energy state. §VE. It is also possible that entropy production will cease and the universe will reach heat death, §VID. Possibly another universe could be created by random quantum fluctuations or quantum tunneling in roughly 10 10 10 56 {\displaystyle 10^{10^{10^{56}}}} 10^{10^{10^{56}}} years. Over an infinite time, there would be a spontaneous entropy decrease via the Poincaré recurrence theorem[citation needed], thermal fluctuations, and Fluctuation theorem.
This is humanism's latest alternative to this scenario:
When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world' (Matthew 25:31--34).
Which sounds more plausible to you?
It does not matter how long the heat death of the universe takes to arrive. The universe was 100% meaningless at the beginning, 13.7 billion years ago. It is relentlessly heading back toward 100% meaninglessness. Meaninglessness giveth, and meaninglessness taketh away. Blessed be the name of meaninglessness. This, we are told, will be the final resting place of chance. It is the final triumph of chance. The cosmic impersonal laws of the universe will be swallowed up by chance. The laws will rule over nothing; chance will be all in all. When whirl is king, it brings forth only randomness.
When Adam substituted his judgment for God's, he picked up a much heavier philosophical burden than he had calculated. Then he died.
When Adam imputed meaning to the serpent's word, he downgraded the meaning of God's word. He ate. Then he died. It took time, but he died--just as humanists say the universe is dying. This was God's curse on Adam. It was also His curse on the universe.
A Darwinian economist cannot extract more meaning out of the Darwinian cosmos than any other Darwinian scientist can. There is no meaning, other than man's, as far as we know, he says. God does not impute meaning, he says--no meaningful meaning, anyway, i.e., no authoritative meaning. There is no God, he says. Or if there is, He does not speak a meaningful word to economists.
It is on this philosophical foundation that modern economic theory rests.