God and Economics

This post discusses one of Ludwig von Mises’s key insights which formed the basis for the differentiating factor of the Austrian school of economics.  It’s an interesting article, and I couldn’t help but notice many parallels between Mises’s arguments and those of theists.

I found it particularly interesting that Karl Popper was referenced.  I’ve found his “Black Swan” criticism of certainty within deductive empiricism to be a helpful illustration of how “random hypothesis” procedures can’t be transferred to explorations about morality, logic and other universal concepts.  One can never reach a useful theory through only trial and error; one must begin with some reasonable a priori principles.  This line of reasoning can be employed to show the weaknesses of naturalistic explanations of uniquely human traits; nature has only trial and error mechanisms, and thus the complexity and harmony of human intelligence, aesthetic appreciation and morality aren’t explained by it.

The recent subprime loan crisis in the U.S. provides an interesting economic anecdote for this principal.  Some of the brightest mathematical minds of our day were employed by investment banks to model behaviors of borrowers, and their models showed that a strong return with an acceptable amount of risk could be reached via certain “packaged” combinations of high quality and low quality loans.  These models were pimp-slapped by reality when defaults on loans reached levels far outside of the historical norms used as a given, and the economic carnage is expected to reach into trillions of dollars.

Here’s hoping we can find a way to limit the intellectual carnage caused by similar ill-advised confidence in empiricism in theistic/atheistic discussions.

Disappointed with the Poison

I’m so disappointed at how ad hominem discussions between theists and atheists often become. Maybe it’s a result of the so-called “New Atheism”, or perhaps it’s due to the sense of theism slipping out of a place of cultural influence, but so many conversations I see and participate in become deluged by thoughtless attacks, dehumanization of the opposition, etc. Theists are just as guilty of this as atheists.

I certainly hope that culture starts turning away from this sort of poisonous discourse; whether atheism or theism is true, we’ll never live to find out if we keep swallowing these bitter pills.

Magnetic Atheism

I’ve wondered lately at the fact that those who make a decision to declare themselves atheists often remain with that label indefinitely, yet there are many former theists. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that most societies are theism-oriented, thus theism is seen as a sort of default. Accordingly, people will call themsleves theists though they have never really thought about or “owned” their beliefs. Meanwhile, atheists in such societies necessarily must go against the grain to embrace their beliefs, and it makes sense that this sort of hard-won worldview would be very “sticky”.

I must remember that no matter how hard-won my beliefs, if I find falsity in them, I must fight past the strong pull and discard them.