Chapter 51: Design vs. Darwinism
Updated: 1/13/20
Christian Economics: Teacher's Edition
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28).From these conceptions gradually grew a body of social theory that showed how, in the relations among men complex and orderly and, in a very definite sense, purposive institutions might grow up which owed little to design, which were not invented but arose from the separate actions of many men who did not know what they were doing. This demonstration that something greater than man’s individual mind may grow from men’s fumbling efforts represented in some ways an even greater challenge to all design theories than even the later theory of biological evolution. For the first time it was shown that an evident order which was not the product of a designing human intelligence need not therefore be ascribed to the design of a higher, supernatural intelligence, but that there was a third possibility—the emergence of order as the result of adaptive evolution. — F. A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (1960), Ch. 4:3.
Here we see two rival views of causation. Paul affirmed the existence of a cosmic order. There is providence undergirding the creation. All things work together. In what way does the structure of creation work as a unit? To achieve a purpose: to guarantee good things for all those who are called according to God’s purpose. There is an overarching coherence in the creation. Creation is good for those called according to God’s purpose. This goodness is built into the creation. Creation is structured in terms of this. History has meaning in terms of this.
In self-conscious opposition to this view is Hayek’s view of the origin of social order. All social order arose from the decisions of individuals who had no intention of creating a social order. There was no central plan in heaven or on earth. There is no heaven. There is no God. There is no design. These decision-makers had no design in mind. Nevertheless, there is a social order that looks as coherent as we imagine that a personally designed order would look. This appearance of a design is an illusion. There was no designer. There was no conscious design. There was no collective purpose.
The great intellectual battle in the modern world is the battle over cosmic purpose vs. Darwinism. All other intellectual conflicts are minor compared to this one. The denial of all purpose prior to the evolution of mankind is the heart, mind, and soul of Darwinism. Darwinism is the reigning religion of the intellectuals in the modern world. Darwinism was a direct assault against the intellectual heritage of classical philosophy, as well as Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and the intellectual tradition of the West, which grew out of a combination of classical philosophy and Christianity.
Darwinism teaches explicitly that, prior to the unplanned advent of man, all matter evolved in terms of impersonal forces. Life spontaneously evolved out of lifeless matter as a result of impersonal forces. The essence of Darwinism is cosmic impersonalism. Man brought purpose into the world. There is no God. There is no cosmic purpose. There is only man, either collective or anarchic, to provide meaning, direction, and progress, as defined by man, either collective or anarchic. Man is the only god there is, according to Darwinism.
In contrast to this philosophy of cosmic impersonalism is cosmic personalism, which rests on the doctrine of God’s purposeful creation of the universe out of nothing. This must be the foundation of all thought, the Bible teaches: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). Christian thought begins here. Christian economics begins here. To start Christian thought, including economics, with any other presupposition is a conceptual error.
Hayek made it clear that Darwin got his idea of cosmic purposelessness from the social theories of two late-eighteenth-century Scottish rationalists: Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith. I began this chapter with Hayek’s statement on social evolution. Here is the next paragraph.
Since the emphasis we shall have to place on the role that selection plays in this process of social evolution today is likely to create the impression that we are borrowing the idea from biology, it is worth stressing that it was, in fact, the other way around: there can be little doubt that it was from the theories of social evolution that Darwin and his contemporaries derived the suggestion for their theories.
This is why the intellectual battle between Christian economics and humanistic economics begins with the closely related doctrines of God’s creation of the universe out of nothing and His absolute providence over creation ever since. I cover the issue of creation in this chapter.
The concept of individual purpose is central to economic theory. That is because the doctrine of God’s purpose is central to all social theory. Man is made in God’s image. Men have purposes because God has purposes. There is God’s general purpose, which was the foundation of God’s week of creation. That purpose was the dominion covenant: God’s delegation of authority to mankind to rule over the creation in God’s name and on God’s behalf (Genesis 1:26–28). Man’s authority is legal (in God’s name) and economic (on God’s behalf). It is based on trusteeship. The fundamental economic principle is this: God’s absolute ownership of all creation, including man. This is the inescapable economic implication of God’s creation of all things out of nothing. Private ownership is an extension of God’s delegated ownership. Private ownership is based on trusteeship. This includes life itself. Thus, Christian economics rests on a self-conscious repudiation of this principle of humanistic free market economics: the individual’s absolute self-ownership. There is trusteeship under God, not autonomous self-ownership.
Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations built an economic philosophy on the principle of autonomous self-interest. He never mentioned God in the book. It is an inherently atheistic book. All economics built in terms of Wealth of Nations is implicitly atheistic. This is why modern economics is the most atheistic of the social sciences. The economics profession has never taken seriously Smith’s other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a Deistic defense of morals as the basis of social order. There is nothing in The Wealth of Nations that in any way depends on The Theory of Moral Sentiments. That is why the latter has been ignored.
It was Smith and the other Scottish rationalists who developed theories of social order that did not rest on the assumption of creation and providence as the source of social order. Social order evolved impersonally, they argued. There was no cosmic purpose, no cosmic direction in the development of social institutions that are orderly.
The British politician and political theorist Edmund Burke was a contemporary of Smith. He respected Smith’s ideas in The Wealth of Nations. Burke developed a social philosophy that was equally evolutionary. He rejected all grand theories of social change. He believed in custom as the only reliable source of social order. He believed that institutions compete for men’s allegiance. Institutions develop in terms of successful competition. Burke was famously hostile to the French Revolution. His book, Reflections of the Revolution in France (1790), became the premier diatribe against it. He saw the revolution as a monstrous product of men’s rationalist schemes. There was an inherent pragmatism in Burke’s social thought. He did not view the social order as directed by a providential God. He did not believe in permanent laws. He was, in this sense, a believer in situational ethics. He was a social evolutionist.
Thus, both the Scottish libertarian tradition of the free market and the European conservative tradition of anti-revolutionary social change grew out of late-eighteenth-century concepts of social evolution. This evolutionary outlook has been one of the two major foundations of Western social thought ever since. The other is social revolution: the French Revolution and its legacy. This tradition has been equally atheistic, i.e., anti-providential. It substitutes central economic planning and armed violence for market-based economic development and social custom as legitimate sources of social change.
There is an inescapable pragmatism in Darwinism. It has faith in time-based, time-ruled wisdom. Pragmatism is the basis of ethics in Darwinism. Ethics can evolve. Hayek put it this way in a 1964 essay, “The Theory of Complex Phenomena.”
. . . the basic conclusion that the whole of our civilization and all human values are the result of a long process of evolution in the course of which values, as the aims of human activity appeared, continue to change, seems inescapable in the light of our present knowledge. We are probably also entitled to conclude that our present values exist only as the elements of a particular cultural tradition and are significant only for some more or less long phase of evolution—whether this phase includes some of our pre-human ancestors or is confined to certain periods of human civilization. We have no more ground to ascribe to them eternal existence than to the human race itself.
Humanistic free market economics rests on some version of this outlook. It builds its case for both personal liberty and economic growth in terms of an inherent pragmatism and situation ethics. It denies that the creator God and God’s laws have anything relevant to say to economists. Such a God is irrelevant to economic theory, they assure us. They are wrong. Dead wrong. I have discussed this in considerable detail in Appendix B of my book, Sovereignty and Dominion (2012). I wrote it for the original edition, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis (1982). (http://bit.ly/gngenv2)
The very concept of purpose is problematical in modern science. The idea of purpose presupposes a realm that is independent of scientific cause and effect. Men need a theory of causation in order to attain their purposes, yet they also want to believe they are free men, i.e., outside this system of rigorous causality. This has been the irreconcilable philosophical dualism of modern man’s thought after Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century. The scientific ideal of predictable and therefore controllable impersonal nature is at odds with the ideal of personalism and liberty. This is the nature/freedom dualism. If nature is under absolute law, and if men are exclusively the products of nature, then what is the source of men’s freedom? If you view yourself as exclusively an evolutionary product of impersonal nature, and therefore not of God, then to the extent that you can control nature, to that extent someone may be able to control you. You gain power over nature, but someone else using nature can gain power over you. Soon, robots may be able to do this. Do robots have purposes of their own? Will human programmers someday provide these purposes? What will happen when robots and computer algorithms begin programming each other? These are not hypothetical questions. They are being debated in the highest scientific circles.
1. Design
God is sovereign. He has purposes. His original purpose is seen in the foundations of the creation. “The Lord by wisdom founded the earth; by understanding he established the heavens” (Proverbs 3:19). Biblical economics begins with the creation, but before the creation there was cosmic purpose. Men, who are made in God’s image, are told to imitate God in this regard. “Blessed is the one who finds wisdom, and the one who gets understanding” (Proverbs 3:13). It is only because God has purposes that men can have purposes. God’s purpose in creating the world is the model for men’s purposes in serving creatively and subordinately as trustees of God. There is no autonomy for man. The creation is under man only because man is under God.
What was God’s purpose? He provided a mission statement.
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Genesis 1:26–28).
This did not reveal a plan. That would come later (Genesis 2). This was merely a statement of God’s original purpose. The plan would soon reflect this original purpose.
2. Darwinism
The Darwinist denies all cosmic purpose prior to man. There was no purpose. There was no plan. There were physical laws governing non-living matter. Out of the interactions between impersonal laws and impersonal matter came life, somehow. Out of life came man. This process was the product of a combination of an ultimate impersonal randomness and unbreakable impersonal physical laws. Somehow, total randomness and unbreakable law interact. We are never told how. We are assured only that they do. This impersonal process provides coherence to matter. It supposedly explains change. But there was nothing directing this change.
Then came man. It was just one of those things, just one of those crazy things. With man came purpose.
Austrian School economists begin their analysis with purpose, which undergirds human action. These economists are by far the most self-conscious economists in beginning with individual purpose. For Austrian economic theory, purpose is strictly individual. Individuals are responsible for the outcomes of their actions through market forces. Outcomes are inherently unpredictable because they are the results of undetermined human choice. This is why Ludwig von Mises rejected the legitimacy of mathematics in economic theory. He saw mathematical economics as an illegitimate invasion of scientism: the logic of physics, which denies purpose in the name of attaining scientifically predictable social causality. In this sense, he was at war with his brother, Richard von Mises, who was a mathematician and a defender of the idea of mathematical tools in social theory.
A huge philosophical problem facing free market economists is to explain the origin of collective purpose. If all purpose is individual, and all responsibility is personal, what is the meaning of collective purpose? What is it? How can it be discovered? How do decision-makers know how these collective purposes arise out of individual purposes? How can collective purposes be evaluated? How can they be measured? If economic value is subjective, how can decision-makers discover collective purpose?
Is ownership individual? If so, there is no meaning for collective ownership. How can property be valued accurately by central economic planners? Value must be assessed in terms of purpose. But what is social purpose in a world of individual purposes? Is there social value? Is there social justice? If so, how are they discovered?
The Darwinist has no doctrine of the Trinity, which is both individual and corporate. He has no concept of the creation as reflecting God (Romans 1:18–23). He is on his own. If he is a methodological individualist, as Austrian School economists claim to be, then there is no way for him to explain collective purpose. Most of them openly deny such a concept. I cover this in Chapter 5 of Sovereignty and Dominion, my economic commentary on Genesis. (http://bit.ly/gngen2)
People use individual plans to allocate scarce resources in order to achieve their purposes. Without plans, men could not achieve their purposes. Plans are extensions of purposes. Plans are personal because purposes are personal.
1. Design
God holds men responsible for their plans. This is the message of Jesus’ parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14–30). The owner gives money to his stewards. Then he leaves. When he returns, he demands an accounting. The results guide him in entrusting additional resources to them. The owner had a plan. The trustees also had plans. This was a system of individual planning, but there would be a final accounting. Men’s personal futures were at stake.
There was a hierarchy. There was an owner. He transferred ownership to the stewards, but they were not autonomous. They were part of a hierarchy. This hierarchy was a legal hierarchy. It was also an economic hierarchy. The owner never surrendered ownership permanently. He delegated it. The stewards were his legal agents. They could buy and sell in his name. They were also his economic agents.
There was an unstated rule: “turn a profit.” This rule governed all of the stewards’ plans. It was simple to understand. They knew what they had to do. They had to return more wealth to the owner at the end of his journey.
The owner imposed sanctions. The stewards’ individual rewards matched their individual productivity. There was a system of monetary accounting. The owner knew who had served him well by the rate of return and also by the original size of the allocated funds.
Finally, there were rewards in the form of more service and more opportunities for profit. The arrangement could be repeated on a profitable basis.
There was an overarching plan. The owner delegated control. He invested in his stewards. There were also individual plans: the stewards’ plans. They were part of a whole: the owner’s capital. This extended over time. The arrangement could be renewed. But the owner did not renew the contact with the steward who buried his coin.
There was coherence. There was structure. There was also responsibility. All of this was personal.
2. Darwinism
The god of Darwinism is man. It is not clear whether this is collective man or individual autonomous men. There is division within the camp: individualists vs. central planners.
Whose plan is authoritative? The state’s plan or the individuals’ plans? Darwinism offers no way to resolve this. For Hayek and Mises, there is no central plan. They both rejected the rationality of central planning. This was the debate over socialist economic calculation, which lasted from Mises’ 1920 essay, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” until the literal suicide of the Soviet Union on December 25, 1991. Then, overnight, the debate ended. The socialists disappeared.
There has been a rival tradition. The main founder was Lester Frank Ward, a self-taught American scholar in the late nineteenth century. His 1883 book, Dynamic Sociology, was an attack on two competing ideas: (1) Christianity, with its doctrine of a cosmic design, and (2) individualistic social Darwinism, which taught progress through individualistic competition, which had been Adam Smith’s pre-Darwinist social evolutionary theory of national wealth. He argued that modern science now knows the laws of social evolution. Scientists can plan collectively through the state. I explored this theme in Appendix A of Sovereignty and Dominion: “From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty.”
The appeal of central planning is related to the concept of social purpose. Most people want to believe in design. They want to believe that there is something above the market’s auction process that will enforce justice. But free market Darwinism denies that such categories exist in a competitive market. In contrast, social Darwinists who believe that top-down economic design is legitimate can appeal to voters on the basis of the ability of bureaucrats to design just systems of law and resource planning. They invoke morality. They get followers.
What is the source of economic law? God or the purposeless, evolving cosmos? The Bible affirms the reliability of economic laws because they are aspects of God’s creation. The archetype was God’s prohibition against eating from His tree: property rights.
Economists say that the source of economic law is the purposeless, evolving cosmos, when they say anything at all. But they prefer not to say. They do not believe that there is any such thing as authoritative moral laws that apply to economic theory. Most of them believe that causation is statistical.
If there is no connection linking moral standards, moral behavior, and economic success, most people will not trust the social philosophy in question. They will not commit to faith in any system of public morality that denies the connection between righteousness and success. They believe, as Ben Franklin taught, that honesty is the best policy. To deny this connection is to commit suicide for your cause.
1. Design
The Bible makes it clear that God’s creation is structured in terms of moral law. This includes all social sciences, so called. Moral philosophy is the basis of all social order, the Bible teaches. Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 present this view of historical sanctions. But the basis of God’s law is the revelation of God. God’s laws are part of a coherent, self-reinforcing covenant (Deuteronomy 8:17–18).
Psalm 119 is the longest chapter in the Bible. It is devoted to a defense of God’s law. The Proverbs are pithy summaries of the relation between God's law and success. Some of these are economic laws.
The Bible is clear about private property. The private property order is the foundation of economic success for individuals and societies.
All of this is by design. It is built into the creation. It reflects God. This is denied by virtually all modern social theory, but especially economics. Economics was the original atheistic science. The laws of economics are regarded by economists as autonomous.
2. Darwinism
Hayek’s views are typical. He was a consistent Darwinist. He denied that economic law is grounded in anything permanent. “. . . the individual, in participating in the social processes, must be ready and willing to adjust himself to changes and to submit to conventions which are not the result of intelligent design, whose justification in the particular instance may not be recognizable, and which to him will often appear unintelligible and irrational.”
He argued that Charles Darwin came to his views of biological evolution by way of Scottish social theory. Hayek defended Scottish social theory. But he did not defend “social Darwinism.”
It is unfortunate that at a later date the social sciences, instead of building on their beginnings in their own field, reimported some of these ideas from biology and with them brought in such conceptions as “natural selection,” “struggle for existence,” and “survival of the fittest,” which are not appropriate in their field; for in social evolution, the decisive factor is not the selection of the physical and inheritable properties of the individuals but the selection by imitation of successful institutions and habits. Though this operates also through the success of individuals and groups, what emerges is not an inheritable attribute of individuals, but ideas and skills—in short, the whole cultural inheritance which is passed on by learning and imitation (Constitution of Liberty, Ch. 14:3).
The message is clear: there is no God backing up these evolutionary developments. There is merely imitation, either conscious or unconscious. Men copy what works. This is pragmatism, not ethics. This is why few people have ever adopted Hayek’s philosophy, and those who have adopted it have generally been academics who have been taught to believe in the world of Darwinism. People seek ethical justifications that support their conclusions. I am such a person.
How are men to decide what is worth their time, and what is not? How do they decide what to sacrifice for? They must evaluate value. But how? How can they grasp what is worthwhile, and what is not? Every economic philosophy faces this question. It is the question of rendering judgment.
1. Design
God imputes economic value. He does so corporately. He also does so individually. This is one implication of the doctrine of the Trinity.
Men are made in God’s image: corporately (mankind) and individually (men). It is therefore possible for people to assess value for groups.
There is a common standard. Men know the difference between good and bad, wise and foolish. Evil-doers may suppress this knowledge, but they know (Romans 1:18–22). This is why God holds them responsible.
God can make judgments about interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility. He can therefore make judgments about collective value. We know this because of the parable of the widow and the rich donors.
And he sat down opposite the treasury and watched the people putting money into the offering box. Many rich people put in large sums. And a poor widow came and put in two small copper coins, which make a penny. And he called his disciples to him and said to them, “Truly, I say to you, this poor widow has put in more than all those who are contributing to the offering box. For they all contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in everything she had, all she had to live on” (Mark 12:41–44).
Because God can do this, we can do this. A consistent defender of methodological individualism would insist that this is not possible, methologically speaking. But decision-makers do it anyway. So do most economists, who delight in offering policy suggestions in the name of economic science.
2. Darwinism
The Darwinist denies that there is any fixed value, economic or otherwise. Man is not made in God’s image, since there is no God. So, the economist has a problem. How can he explain how it is that men can impute value? A man can decide what he likes right now, but there is no way to prove continuity with what he deemed valuable a year ago or a moment ago. (This was the argument of an economist, G. L. S. Shackle.) Here is the problem with methodological individualism. Imputation of value is strictly individual. It is strictly autonomous. It is strictly subjective. There is no way, according to methodological individualists, to compare subjective utility, one person vs. another. If we begin with individualism, it is therefore scientifically impossible to provide useful advice regarding state economic policy. We cannot scientifically balance subjective values among groups. Why not? Because there is no common measure of subjective value. This idea destroys the concept of objective economic advice. An individual’s ability to establish value is limited to the moment. There is therefore no way to deal scientifically with changing tastes. When values change, imputation changes. As I have written with regard to all numerical accounting, “there’s no accounting for taste.” Tastes keep changing.
This is the issue of economic succession. Who will inherit? What will be done with this inheritance? Is the inheritance more than individual inheritance? What happens to the wealth of nations over time? Are there laws of inheritance?
1. Design
People care about the success of their children and grandchildren. This is surely part of their purposes in life. This goes back to Paul’s teaching: “And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).
The Bible is clear about what God wants for His people: inheritance. “But the meek shall inherit the land and delight themselves in abundant peace” (Psalm 37:11). “The righteous shall inherit the land and dwell upon it forever” (Psalm 37:29). We should regard this as a mission statement.
The question is this: Is the system of economic causation established to attain this? Yes. It is part of the covenant. “Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ You shall remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you power to get wealth, that he may confirm his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is this day” (Deuteronomy 8:17–18).
This is a matter of God’s design of the social order. This is the affirmation of God in the texts. The covenant is supposed to be confirmed over time. Nations that obey God’s economic laws will prosper. This is the providential basis of the wealth of nations down through the generations. “You shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Deuteronomy 5:9–10). If this is no longer true in the New Testament era, then it is impossible to develop an explicitly biblical social theory. There is no other theory of social causation in the Bible.
2. Darwinism
There is no design in nature, we are told. There is also no design in the social order. There is no designer. All biological development prior to man was the product of natural selection.
Today, men do make decisions. They do plan. But central plans by the state cannot be attained, Hayek and the Austrians say. Knowledge is decentralized. No state planning committee has sufficient knowledge to plan for the nation. So, free market social orders prosper.
How long will this condition be true? It is not built into the creation. Nothing is built into the creation. Hayek spoke of “tools,” a seemingly neutral word that seems devoid of ethical content. The future is all about tools, not ethics. It has nothing to do with cosmic design. There is nothing transcendent to back up the following scenario.
These “tools” which man has evolved and which constitute such an important part of his adaptation to his environment include much more than material implements. They consist in a large measure of forms of conduct which he habitually follows without knowing why; they consist of what we call “traditions” and “institutions,” which he uses because they are available to him as a product of cumulative growth without ever having been designed by anyone mind. Man is generally ignorant not only of why he uses implements of one shape rather than of another but also of how much is dependent on his actions taking one form rather than another. . . . Every change in conditions will make necessary some change in the use of resources, in the direction and kind of human activities, in habits and practices. And each change in the actions of those affected in the first instance will require further adjustments that will gradually extend throughout the whole of society. Thus every change in a sense creates a “problem” for society, even though no single individual perceives it as such; and it is gradually “solved” by the establishment of a new overall adjustment. . . . Who will prove to possess the right combination of aptitudes and opportunities to find the better way is just as little predictable as by what manner or process different kinds of knowledge and skill will combine to bring about a solution of the problem (Constitution of Liberty, Ch. 2:3).
He wanted men to have faith in this evolving system of tools, ethics, and institutional arrangements. He wanted men to place their trust in this impersonal system of evolution. But almost no one in his lifetime did. Almost no one does today.
The supreme philosophical issue of the modern world is design vs. Darwinism. The problem that the Darwinian defenders of the free market have is this: how to persuade men that they can trust their lives and the future of their heirs in a system that is evolving. The average person wants to have faith in a world of ethical cause and effect, a world backed up by a God who cares about ethics, and who has structured the world to make this true: “honesty is the best policy.” Hayek and atheist economists want men to mentally transfer their faith in God, God’s design, and God’s providence to an unplanned auction process that somehow assures both wealth and justice, despite the absence of any definition of justice, and despite any way of showing how it will somehow prevail.
Understandably, the economists get few takers for their offer to the masses to substitute Darwinian evolution for the God of creation. In this respect, the masses have greater wisdom than the economists.
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