Now the serpent was more shrewd than any other beast of the field which the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Has God really said, ‘You must not eat from any tree of the garden’?” (Genesis 3:1)
You have read more pages on epistemology in this book than you are likely ever to read again in any academic study, unless you decide to study philosophy. What I have done here is simply not done, and has never been done, in the history of economic thought. I am unaware of another book in any academic discipline, other than philosophy, that begins with such a detailed presentation of the underlying presuppositions of the field. Silence prevails.
There is a reason for this silence. Academia has been humanistic ever since the days of classical Greek philosophy. It has rested on an unstated presupposition: the autonomous mind of man has both the authority and the ability to interpret the world correctly apart from any appeal to the supernatural. This is the meaning of autonomy. Humanists have long waged an intellectual war against supernaturalism in general and biblical religion in particular. This has been going on ever since the serpent asked Satan’s rhetorical question: “Has God really said?” The correct answer is this: God has clearly said.
Part 1 is a survey of epistemology: “What can man know, and how can he know it?” This topic is unfamiliar to most university students. It is unfamiliar to most university professors. It has never been a popular topic. My objective for Part 1 was to help prepare you for a lifelong intellectual battle. Humanists dismiss Christianity as wrong—theologically, morally, and epistemologically. They dismiss the Bible as a book of myths. Modern institutional education is based on this premise: the Bible is not an intellectually binding source of intellectual authority. Part 1 is a short survey of the problems facing humanists in explaining the intellectual system that they use to dismiss Christianity. I want you to understand that the self-confidence of humanists is not based on a coherent explanation of how men can reason apart from (1) relying on the God of the Bible to provide coherence (providence), and (2) relying on the Bible to provide guidelines for ethics and a correct understanding of historical causation, which is ethics-based. Humanism is grounded mainly on the dualist philosophy of Immanuel Kant: trapped in between his irrational noumenal realm of powerless freedom and his scientific phenomenal realm of unbreakable mechanical causation, each of which is created by the mind of autonomous man.
Kant offered no scientific or logical way to explain how the mind of man gains access to the external world’s laws of causation. It does, obviously, but Kant could not explain why or how. He did not believe that these laws exist independently of the mind of man. Michela Massimi, an expert on Kant, wrote “Kant and the Laws of Nature” for Oxford Bibliographies in 2016. His view is representative of most experts in Kant’s thought. “When it comes to theoretical philosophy (and in particular, to Kant’s philosophy of nature, which is our topic), the main question is how it is possible for us to come to know nature as ordered and lawful. Where does the lawfulness of nature come from? In the Critique of Pure Reason and in the Prolegomena, Kant held the view that our faculty of understanding is the primary source of nature’s lawfulness because the a priori categories of the understanding ‘prescribe laws to nature’—that is, they play the role of constitutive a priori principles for our experience of nature.”
Yes, you read that correctly. Strip out the academic jargon —“constitutive a priori principles”—and the paragraph really is as nutty as it sounds. Massimi is arguing that Kant believed that man’s mind (whose, exactly?) imputes coherence to nature. Man’s mental categories are the only source of nature’s coherence as far as we can ever know. Let me boil this down in three words: man is God. Man’s subjective imputation of coherence to nature is definitive and binding on nature. Whether the universe is inherently coherent or not, a question that Kant dismissed as unanswerable, man’s subjective imputation provides order to the universe. Kant’s lengthy and highly detailed arguments for this bizarre conclusion do not bother Kantian philosophers. They would bother anyone with a trace of common sense, assuming that people with common sense would bother to read Kant’s two unreadable major books: Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and Critique of Practical Reason (1788), which is as impractical a book as you will ever not read. I assure you, economists have more common sense than to read these books. They have their profession’s unreadable journal articles to read (which few do) and write (which even fewer do).
The modern intellectual world unknowingly relies on Kant’s epistemology, yet almost no scholars other than trained philosophers have ever read Kant. They are naive and uninformed about the major epistemological questions Kant raised but failed to answer. They do not understand that the epistemological foundation they stand on is sand. This is not where you stand. “Therefore, everyone who hears my words and obeys them will be like a wise man who built his house upon a rock. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat upon that house, but it did not fall down, for it was built on the rock. But everyone who hears my words and does not obey them will be like a foolish man who built his house upon the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew and struck that house, and it fell, and its destruction was complete” (Matthew 7:24–27).
This is why Christian scholars should not enter the world of scholarship with a paralyzing sense of inferiority to humanists. On the contrary; they should be confident. I want you to believe two things with respect to economic theory. First, you should be confident in the Bible. Second, you should be confident that humanists have not offered a logically consistent intellectual foundation to explain economic causation or any other kind of causation.
Full-time scholars believe in the autonomy of man, the autonomy of philosophy, and the autonomy of specific academic disciplines. Yet they also want financial support from the public: dependence, not autonomy. They are well aware that most of what they say and do is not marketable in the great auction that is the free market. There are few bids for their services. So, they are forced to ask for donations. They learned in the late eighteenth century in what is now Germany that there is far more money available through state compulsion than from voluntary donations. What they have demanded ever since is autonomy from interference by the public (“academic freedom”), but also compulsory economic support from the public (“investment in our future”). They want the benefits of economic dependence without the liability of intellectual subordination. This outlook goes back to Adam in the garden. The serpent implicitly promised this: the benefit of being God, knowing good and evil, but without the liability of judicial subordination to God. In an old English phrase, this irreconcilable pair of goals are described as having your cake and eating it, too.
Academia today is funded massively by the state. This money is extracted from taxpayers by means of the threat of violence. Most taxpayers do not share the view of the humanists that there is no God who speaks authoritatively in history. Professors are using the state to steal from taxpayers. They justify this theft in the name of the myth of intellectual neutrality, which is another way of asserting the autonomy of man. The Bible makes it clear that there is no autonomy. There is also no neutrality. It is deceptive to argue for either position. It is also highly self-interested.
Economics is the academic discipline whose members are most aware of the effects of self-interested behavior. The entire discipline has rested on the principle of personal self-interest ever since the days of Adam Smith. In no other academic discipline have the practitioners been more adamant in asserting the ethical neutrality of their field. This goes back to the mercantilists a century before Smith. Academics insist that there is no theft involved in compelling taxpayers to fund them. Here is their logic: advances in ethically neutral economic theory benefit everyone. To say that they are ethically blind to their intellectual justification of their self-interest is an understatement. In short, they respond predictably, just as economic theory says people do.
I have structured Part 1 in terms of the biblical social covenant’s five points: sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and time. Economic theory is a subset of this structure.
1. Point one: Sovereignty
Point one of the biblical covenant is the sovereignty of God. He is transcendent. Sovereignty in philosophy is always the foundation of all thought. It is the starting point of philosophy. This is the central presupposition in human thought. Humanists have their equivalent of this presupposition. It is never stated openly by academic humanists when they write their books. They presume the sovereignty of man. I break with this tradition of convenient silence. The source of truth is God, the Bible teaches. I have made this clear at the outset. I have argued that presuppositions are the foundations of all logical systems. The systems rest on them, yet these presuppositions are not based on logic. They are based on faith.
I introduced you to the writings of Cornelius Van Til on this point. He argued that the Creator-creature distinction must be the starting point of all Christian philosophy. I then surveyed the issue of cosmic origins and its relation to sovereignty in economic theory. Economists are Darwinists. Nevertheless, with the exception of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, economists have avoided the topic of cosmology. I made it clear why I reject the humanists’ doctrine of neutral scholarship. It rests on non-neutral presuppositions.
Humanists use a two-step argument to get to their fundamental principle: the sovereignty of man. First, they begin with the autonomy of the cosmos, which is impersonal and without purpose. Through the interaction of impersonal and purposeless random change and impersonal physical, chemical, and biological laws, man evolved. Second, man has purposes. This makes man personal. Man is now in charge of nature. He answers to no higher authority. Point two of the biblical covenant, hierarchical authority, becomes point one in the humanists’ covenantal structure: sovereignty. I discussed this subtle argument in Appendix A of my economic commentary on Genesis: “From Cosmic Purposelessness to Humanistic Sovereignty.”
The doctrine of creation is the most fundamental presupposition of Christianity. Why? Because the doctrine of the creation of the cosmos by God out of nothing is the foundation of the doctrine of God’s sovereignty. Similarly, the denial of this assertion is the most fundamental presupposition of humanism. In A Humanist Manifesto (1933), issued by the American Humanist Association, we are presented with 15 assertions. Here are the first two.
FIRST: Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created.
SECOND: Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process.
These points one and two parallel points one and two of the biblical covenant: sovereignty and authority. This doctrine of origins is a self-conscious substitution of a new concept of sovereignty—impersonal non-creation—for Christianity’s concept of sovereignty: personal creation. It substitutes cosmic impersonalism for cosmic personalism. This declaration of non-origins serves as the foundation of the sovereignty of the god of our era: mankind. Man serves as god by default. He possesses unchallenged authority. He is autonomous. Why? In the humanist outlook, he has purposes. Nature does not. This substitution of man’s authority for God’s began with the serpent’s temptation: “Has God really said?” Man is not really under God. Man can exercise authority autonomously.
This self-conscious substitution of a new god for the God of Christianity is never publicly announced in the treatises and textbooks of humanists. But this substitution is fundamental to the assertion of intellectual neutrality. We have heard it before. Moses warned Israel in God’s name: “But you may say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand acquired all this wealth.’ But you will call to mind the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the power to get wealth; that he may establish his covenant that he swore to your fathers, as it is today” (Deuteronomy 8:17–18). Modern economics declares that autonomous man is the source of wealth. Man has used nature, which belonged to no one prior to man, to build civilization. There was no owner before man. Therefore, there was no sovereignty before man. Autonomous man is now at the top of the three resource chains: the power chain, the knowledge chain, and the time chain.
2. Points Two Through Five
Point two of the biblical covenant is authority/hierarchy. Chapter 2 is devoted to a discussion of the covenant’s five points. Here, I argue that economic theory is not autonomous. Christian economic theory rests on a concept of a hierarchical order in which law is superior to economics. I argue that trusteeship, which is a legal concept, is superior to stewardship, which is economic. I present what I regard as the covenantal structure of economics in four sets of five laws each. In contrast, humanistic economists do not begin with God’s covenant, which involves moral and judicial laws. They begin with the doctrine of economic scarcity. This starting point is an implicit announcement of the autonomy of economic science. Christian economics denies such autonomy.
Point three of the biblical covenant is ethics. Chapter 3 is an assertion of the value-laden nature of economics. This in an inescapable implication of the covenantal structure of economics. Man cannot escape God’s economic laws, which are at bottom ethical. Economic causation is at bottom ethical (Leviticus 26; Deuteronomy 28). Humanistic economists have sometimes been forthright in their declaration of the value-free nature of economic theory. All of them assume it. This is a declaration of scientific autonomy. It is basic to all modern science. This declaration goes back to the Greeks.
Point four of the biblical covenant is sanctions. This is a matter of exercising judgment. Judgment is the application of law to historical circumstances: casuistry. Chapter 4 deals with epistemology: “What can man know, and how can he know it?” Epistemology undergirds the question of methodology in every academic discipline. Few scholars outside of philosophy ever consider epistemology. In every discipline, only a handful bother with methodology, which is a narrow application of epistemology. I argue, following Van Til, that modern epistemology goes back to Kant. The dualisms that plagued Kant—nature/freedom, personality/science—are ignored by his disciples, who are generally unaware of these issues. Kant could not tell us how the cause-and-effect realm of nature left man free to choose. Man is said to be both outside of nature’s impersonal causation (gaining freedom) and also in charge of nature (gaining power). Economists do not concern themselves with the Kantian epistemological foundations of their discipline. They remain mute.
Point five of the biblical covenant is time. This is the issue of succession over time. In economics, this is the issue of inheritance. I discuss the issue of long-term economic growth in relation to the issue of time. Most economists favor economic growth. This raises the issue of the limits to growth. This in turn raises the issue of time. Human population cannot compound for long on earth. The compounding process has now raised serious questions regarding resource limitations, especially living space. The steady compounding of digital technology has raised the issue of the falling cost of information: its effects on jobs. All of these growth-related issues point back to cosmic origins. The seemingly endless time frame associated with the humanists’ doctrine of the Big Bang is not available if the Bible’s account of time is correct. Compound economic growth points to the fulfilling of the dominion covenant and therefore the end of time. The humanistic economist does not consider biblical chronology: a looming final judgment. He assumes the existence of eons of time: the cosmic evolutionary time frame. But what becomes of the doctrine of compound economic growth in such a time frame? Either growth must end, or else time must end. I argue for the latter. Economists remain silent on this issue, except for a handful of economists who advocate zero growth.
My main point in Part 1 is this: humanists have not been forthright in specifying their intellectual starting points, which are based on unproven and unprovable presuppositions. These presuppositions are not based on the rigorous logic that humanists insist is binding on scientists.
This is surely the case in economic science. I have used economists as illustrations of a universal trait among humanistic academics. They hide their presuppositions from their readers. I think most of them hide their presuppositions from themselves. They are not trained to think in terms of presuppositions. They presume what they need to prove, as self-proclaimed scientists, by means of their supposedly neutral logic. If they were more forthright about specifying their ultimately religious presuppositions, which are not shared by most citizens, they would reveal themselves as special pleaders for humanism. This would threaten their acceptance. This would in turn threaten their funding. They have zero self-interest in doing this. So, they remain mute. They do not discuss sovereignty, authority, law, sanctions, and time. They implicitly assume the humanist worldview’s presuppositions regarding these issues, but they do not mention them, let alone defend them.
It is intellectually mandatory that Christian scholars in every academic discipline begin their treatises with a detailed discussion of these five principles as they apply to their respective disciplines. Christian scholars should become self-conscious about their disciplines’ foundational principles. They should identify and then challenge the humanists’ versions of these five principles in their fields.
Having discussed the five foundations of economic theory, both humanistic and Christian, I am ready to discuss the five major categories of economic theory. I cover these in Part 2.
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The full manuscript is here: https://www.garynorth.com/public/department196.cfm
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