Within the bounds of my esteemed field, I find myself drawn to the foundations upon which it is built. I am developing plenty of thoughts and impressions about the real meat and potatoes of economics (If there are some who wish to hear about this, I shall begin building more regularly on my academic blog, http://subliminallyunemployed.blogspot.com), but I still want to know about where the methodology of economics comes from, and the philosophy behind it.
A friend of mine, a professor in the biological sciences, has said that naturalism is the all-pervasive beginning place for his field. Economics is founded in this plus the additional pillar of pragmatism. We assume every decision-making person knows what is best for himself, or at least knows better than we can. De gustibus non est disputandum (I'll let Annie translate this for you all). But as a Christian, can I ascribe to these philosophies? Must I divorce myself from a Christian philosophy in order to practice my vocation? Is there an way of doing economics that uniquely coincides with what Christians believe regarding the nature of the world and human beings?
I shall in short order prepare comments on comic books, gravy, and freshmen. However, before I venture to these lands, I would like to hear about how your various vocations tend to either conflict with Christ or support him. Many will do both (in which case you can mention either or both), but I believe there is no vocation that does neither, so don't throw that card in.
HOW I FEEL WHEN I’M TWO WEEKS OUT FROM QUALS
9 years ago
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Ciao Norman!
'But respecting taste, there is no argument'
These here eyetalyun keyboards are nifty - they have separate keys for accented vowels. But it means that they had to displace a number of other keys, which makes typing, if not difficult, at least mildly sub-optimal.
I am considering the Academy as a vocation (or at least as a place to sleep when I run out of money), and it seems that in studying literature, especially of the medieval sort - which is to say, religious literature - one is expected to read things 'objectively', which here takes on the meaning 'having decided that christianity is false'. Thus, discussions of Dante centre on the Marxist perpective, the feminist, et cetera; having denied the bedrock of the work, modern academia must construct a substitute of paper.
This makes a discussion of the true metathemes in old stuff more difficult, aside from being poor exegetical technique. I don't know, however, if it's really a showstopper or just an annoyance.
But I wonder why economics must be proscriptive as you say ('people know what is best for them') and not merely descriptive ('people, in fact, act as though they know what is best for them, and behave accordingly, whether we like it or not')? Any Christian would agree with that - it's straight out of Judges.
'pre-scriptive', not 'pro-'
I agree, Joel. Let me give an example: in economics, we describe a market in which buyers and sellers interact, yielding a market quantity exchanged for some good. If the government steps in and says that sellers may only legally produce up to a zero quantity (say, of prostitution), we observe that this disrupts the market and can demonstrate that this leaves buyers and sellers worse off, in terms of happiness from these goods. This implies that, generally speaking, people are better off if the government lets them have their prostitutes. But are people actually better off if they have legal access to prostution? They think they are. De gustibus non est disputandum.
But surely not all economists are entirely pragmatic? Would they be in favour of genocide, or burning witches, or for that matter building bridges out of 'em, merely because it could be demonstrated that people want such things? In other words, I'm assuming that the economic luminaries of the world, whatever they may say, all have some point at which they are quite prepared to dispute the desires of the hoi polloi, and the only question is how long it takes to reach that point... in which case you're in more or less the same boat as all the rest of us in dealing with people who operate from a different moral standard; the only difference being that your people have charts and graphs to make their arguments sound clever.
I think meteorology supports Christianity quite well. There's no conflict that I'm aware of. I think Chaos Theory (part of meteorology) has very interesting and amazing implications with regard to God's sovereignty.
I also don't necessarily see a conflict between Christianity and naturalism. I'm not sure whether the Bible actually teaches supernaturalism.
And I agree with most scientists that the supernatural does not belong in science, at least in most fields.
If something can be studied scienfically, I don't see how it could qualify as supernatural.
Matt -
Come sempre, it's all about the definitions. Presumably, your sort of naturalism differs from what I shall call the traditional definition (the philosophical stepchild of rigourous materialism) in the sense that you admit the existence of the supernatural, or at any rate something that is not governed by what we call the laws of nature. I at least hold this to be the sine qua non of basic theism, and thus inseperable from any belief in Scripture. How does it seem to you?
Joel - No, I think I believe in the traditional definition of naturalism and yet am a Christian theist and believe the Bible to be true (and interpret it literally in most cases). If God is governed by natural processes (perhaps because 'natural processes' is part of his nature), I don't see a conflict with regular old naturalism that denies supernaturalism.
So would you say that God is at all distinct from the created order? I mean, I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense to put it the other way - not that God is subject to the law of nature, but that nature is subject to the law of God, to which he himself submits... which is more or less to say that he does as he likes and everything else follows suit, and he happens to be pretty consistent (which permits us to derive principles and laws and such). Is this close to what you're saying?
Joel - Yes, I think that's basically what I'm saying.
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