Chapter 24: Design
Update: 1/13/20
Christian Economics: Teacher's Edition
For this is what the Lord says—he who created the heavens, he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited—he says: “I am the Lord, and there is no other. I have not spoken in secret, from somewhere in a land of darkness; I have not said to Jacob’s descendants, ‘Seek me in vain.’ I, the Lord, speak the truth; I declare what is right” (Isaiah 45:18–19).
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?"
Here, we learn the following facts. First, God looked forward to the world beyond days one through three. He looked to an inhabited earth. In Genesis 1, we learn that on day four, He created the orbs in the sky. They would be used as the basis of calendars: signs, seasons, days, years. This looked forward to the creation of man. God needed no calendar. Man would. On day five, He created animals. On day six, He created man. God showed purposeful action. He had a plan before He began to create. This testifies to the existence of cosmic order. The universe has God-given purpose. It has had this from the beginning.
The existence of purpose testifies in turn to the existence of design. God designed the universe. Charles Darwin was wrong. So was Immanuel Kant, who offered a theory of the evolved cosmos. The universe was created by a series of sovereign decrees by God. He spoke. The creation responded. He spoke it into existence out of nothing. Before the first day, God had a design for history. Paul wrote:
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. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved (Ephesians 1:3–6).Isaiah said that God revealed this to him: God had not spoken in secret about Jacob, meaning the nation of Israel. He had spoken openly. God then added: “I declare what is right.” This reveals the ethical aspect of God’s decrees, as well as His revelation regarding His decrees. He does not speak secretly. This is the work of imputation: declaring publicly that which conforms to God’s standards. These standards are inherently ethical: right vs. wrong.
The implication of this for economic reasoning, and all other social science, is this: there is no such thing as value-free analysis. But it goes way beyond this. All attempts to formulate a hypothesis of ethical neutrality for social analysis is an affront to God. It is saying this: “Neutrality is possible.” This means, above all, neutrality toward God. This is another way of saying that the creation was originally autonomous: no God-provided design. Yet this passage in Isaiah makes it clear that God’s design was the very foundation of the creation. It preceded the creation. The creation was inherently covenantal from the beginning. It looked forward to mankind’s dominion over the earth, even including calendars: signs and seasons (Genesis 1:14). Therefore, the covenant cannot be divorced from ethics: point three of the biblical covenant.
Here, I present some of the implications of the creation week as a covenantal process.
First and foremost for any consideration of the auction process of the free market, there was coherence to the design. All of the pieces fit together. The creation week was both systematic and sequential. At the end of each day except day two, God declared His work as good. These were acts of imputation: evaluating the outcome of His labor in terms of His design. Day by day, God fitted the pieces together into a systematic, coherent system. The week’s final day of creation was day six: the creation of man, and the announcement of the dominion covenant. This established a hierarchy: God > man> creation. I will explore the differences between humanism and creationism in Chapter 50, “Design vs. Darwinism.” At this point, I will say only this: Christian social theory must begin with an assertion of the underlying coherence of men’s institutions. This is based on the biblical story of the creation week as purposeful, systematic, and coherent. Ultimately, the creation was covenantal. It had to do with ethics. This is why God declared to Isaiah that He speaks the truth regarding what is right.
Covenant-breakers do not have this view of creation. They do not believe that there was purpose underlying the creation. Yet they insist that with man came purposeful behavior, systematic planning, and institutional coherence. That which a personal God did not provide to the universe, mankind does provide for his social arrangements. Yet they cannot avoid the analogy of man as God. The biblical account of creation asserts purpose, systematic planning, and coherence. It is difficult for Darwinian covenant-breakers to think in any other framework.
Economists assert that people are purposeful. Yet the defenders of the market invoke something analogous to the purposeless, evolving cosmos when discussing free market outcomes. No one planned them. No one designed them. They deny any element of planning with respect the creation. This leads to a major problem in persuasion. Most people find it difficult to imagine that there is any purpose, system, or coherence in an undesigned institution. This is why defenders of the free market find it almost impossible to persuade people regarding the efficacy of the evolutionary model for identifying how a totally free, undesigned, and unplanned market process is the source of the obvious benefits of the modern economy. Men think that coherence is the outcome of design. They cannot shake this pre-Darwin. pre-Adam Smith outlook.
Here is the key argument offered by Progressives and pro-government planning social Darwinists ever since Lester Frank Ward’s book, Dynamic Sociology, was published in 1883. They say that science has now replaced purposeless, impersonal evolution as the source of progress, not simply in the natural sciences, but also in the social sciences, especially economics. They have moved from the model of purposeless, impersonal evolution to the model of scientifically designed and directed evolution. They have replaced the biblical God of creation with a new divinity: scientific man.
Defenders of the free market as an unplanned process face most people’s instinctive response: skepticism. The skeptics cling to an image of an omniscient, omnipotent God who speaks a sovereign word, and the universe responds as ordered. They want scientific planners to speak nearly omniscient, nearly omnipotent words, and the social world will then very nearly respond as ordered. In response to those social deviants who resist, authorized agents of the state will apply scientific negative sanctions. Next time, there will be less resistance. Next time, there will be greater coherence.
What is the source of order in mankind’s institutions? Darwinists do not agree. A tiny handful invoke the model of the cosmos before man appeared: undesigned, unplanned evolutionary change. The other wing of the church of Darwin reply that the model of unplanned evolution fits the free market most of the time, but a designing political order must intervene to bring moral order into operation whenever the autonomous market does not produce fair outcomes for the weak, the poor, and the poorly educated. They insist that well-educated, well-paid state scientific planners must revoke and replace specific market outcomes. They place greater faith in scientific planning than they do in undesigned market processes.
Christians must deny the Darwinists’ premise: the existence of impersonal evolution, whether cosmic or social. They must begin with this moral and legal premise: the personal responsibility of each individual for the outcomes of his decisions. The process of market competition is not impersonal. It was designed by God. God remains sovereign.
Then what is mankind’s source of the moral and legal standards that God will use to assess the performance of everyone in history? Answer: God’s revelation in nature and also in the Bible. Men deliberately distort His revelation in nature (Romans 1:18–20; 2:14–15). So, the Bible is necessary to restore covenantal accuracy, i.e., accurate imputation. So is illumination by the Holy Spirit. "When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come" (John 16:13).
Here is the fundamental point with respect to design. The humanly unplanned outcomes of the market’s auction process are legitimate whenever men have obeyed the economic laws of God. These laws are the outcome of God’s mandated authorization of the private ownership of property (Exodus 20:13). God is the economic planner. He provides coherence. He has an integrated plan for the ages. This includes every area of life. Nothing is left to chance. He has mandated institutional arrangements that establish the free market. The market has evolved out of these laws whenever men have obeyed them. The market order has been unplanned by human beings. But it is planned. The market is the outcome of human action, not human design. But the absence of human design does not disprove the existence of an economic plan that is purposeful, systematic, and coherent. This is why people can safely trust the free market in most instances. They can more safely trust the free market than regulation by state bureaucrats.
A buyer is part of God’s plan for the ages. He is not autonomous.
Thus says the Lord, the Holy One of Israel, and the one who formed him: “Ask me of things to come; will you command me concerning my children and the work of my hands? I made the earth and created man on it; it was my hands that stretched out the heavens, and I commanded all their host” (Isaiah 45:11–12).
As someone made in God’s image, the buyer has purposes, just as God did in the creation week. He acts as a creature, but he is in a position to design a plan of action that he hopes will enable him to achieve some of these purposes. He possesses money. This gives him wide latitude. Money is the most marketable commodity. He has many sellers bidding against each other to sell to him. The more money he has, the more of his goals he will be able to attain if he plans wisely and executes these plans efficiently. As an owner, he has a God-given right to bid. “Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me?” (Matthew 20:5a). He may choose to bid for goods that he will consume. He may choose to purchase investments for future income. He may choose to give money away. The point is this: he has the ability to bid because he owns money. If he gained this money legally, no one should complain that he owns it. That is the distribution of income that God has planned. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17). “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust” (Matthew 6:45b). More ominously:
Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.” To the contrary, “if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink; for by so doing you will heap burning coals on his head” (Romans 12:19–20).
People buy and sell. They make allocation decisions (point two). The outcomes will vary. There will be winners and losers as a result of these decisions (point four). These outcomes are legitimate (point three). They are not random. If they were voluntary and not based on false weights and measures, those who would have preferred another outcome should not complain. They should not call on the state to redistribute this income. Bureaucrats employed by the state are not in a position to determine who should have received how much net subjective income from any exchange. The state must not play God. Bureaucrats must not substitute their judgment of what is fair for God’s judgment. The buyer should be free from guilt regarding the legitimacy of his wealth. He should not be made a target in a political campaign of guilt manipulation.
A man may pursue suicidal goals. This man did.
And he told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, ‘What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?’ And he said, ‘I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, “Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.”’ But God said to him, ‘Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God” (Luke 12:16–21).
It is not for the state to play God and announce a judgment against him. That is God’s authority. God is the sovereign legal agent of final imputation: a declaration of “guilty” or “not guilty.”
People design plans. They cannot speak their plans into existence. They are not God. They must therefore use means. The market is the primary institutional means of enabling individuals to pursue their plans. This was not true throughout most of history. The family was. But with the compounding extension of the division of labor through capital investment since about 1800, the market has become the central economic institution.
The moral validity (point three) of market outcomes (point four) is assured by God’s design (point one) of the market. It is an extension of a series of biblical requirements: the principle of private property, the right of contract, the rule of law, future-orientation, capital investment, and accounting techniques. The morality of the market is derived from the morality of God’s Bible-revealed law.
The seller is judicially comparable to an auctioneer. Like the buyer, he has designed a plan to let him fulfill his goals. He is acting purposefully, just as God did in the creation week. He is acting systematically, just as God did. He has decided to offer things for sale. Most sellers want money in exchange. That is because money is the most marketable commodity.
He decides on a rule governing exchanges: high bid wins. This is also what the buyer wants: high bids in the form of more goods per currency unit. Both the buyer and the seller are seeking to make an exchange at the highest available bid, given time constraints, geographical constraints, and marketing costs.
The Bible recognizes that buyers and sellers want better offers. But they are content with the offers they accepted. “'Bad, bad,' says the buyer, but when he goes away, then he boasts” (Proverbs 20:16). This is normal business in societies with a limited division of labor, where face-to-face bargaining is common. In a highly developed market order, there is no bargaining. It is this: take it or leave it. Time is too precious to waste on bargaining.
There is no coercion involved in the sale. This honors the principle of allowing people to use their property as they see fit. If they choose to exchange it, there is nothing immoral about this. So, the morality of the auction process is preserved.
We know from Read’s essay that there is a coherence of the production process that makes a pencil possible. He used the example of the pencil in order to clarify this coherence. But because he did not discuss the market as an auction, he did not focus on the central issue of production and distribution: pricing. He did not mention the auction’s principle of exchange: high bid wins. Without an understanding of this principle, the production process remains a mystery. The pencil remains a miracle.
A miracle is comparable to God’s speaking the universe into existence. It is outside the limits of repeatable operations. A miracle is designed to achieve some end. It requires special intervention by God into the auction’s process of supply and demand. The pencil is the product of individual designs, but not a single design. No one knows how to design a pencil, Read wrote. He was correct. Nevertheless, manufacturers produce pencils by the billions. How can this be? A pencil has been designed by someone. The process has not been designed by anyone on earth. Here are three facts. First, we can buy all the pencils we want at a local store. Second, someone produced them and delivered them. Third, there is coherence between someone’s plan to sell pencils and our ability to buy them easily. How do these three facts fit together? By means of three words: high bid wins.
There is nothing immoral about a process that is mysterious in its details, but not overall, once we understand the auction’s principle of high bid wins. There is nothing immoral about the principle of high bid wins. If the state were to enforce comprehensively a law against using the principle of high bid wins to govern exchanges, there would be no pencils. There would be few products. There would be poverty. I ask: How could something as simple as a pencil exist if there were no auction process? It could not exist. So, why should the auction process be criticized as immoral and therefore in need of coercive intervention by government bureaucrats?
Men are not divine. They cannot speak their creations into existence. To go from their designs to final products, they need the division of labor. They need the cooperation of other people.
Men are made in God’s image. They therefore have the intellectual power to design things, just as God did in the creation week and still does. But men do not have the intellectual power to design the process of production that enables them to build the things that they design. This was the brilliant insight of Read’s essay. Men can design simple products, but they cannot design the complex products that produce the simple products. Nevertheless, these complex products do come into existence. They keep getting improved by minor revisions.
There is an overall design. God is the author. He created a moral universe that from the beginning was based on a combination of fixed laws of nature and social institutions based on moral cause and effect. He announced a few easily understood laws that, whenever most people obey them, they are enabled to produce complex products. The original divine design, which is at bottom moral, governs the development of the auction process. No human being could have designed it. Not many people even begin to understand it. But it works anyway.
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