Bad Thought

The closest thing our modern world has manifested to traditional religion is the study of economics.

The study of economics is something like an attempt to systematically engage with and describe a system too complex to be fully grasped or enumerated, too uncontrolled to be subjected to experiment, which is subject to the basic effects described by chaos theory, and a system (and this is important) which is modified in its behaviors by the economic theories themselves over time.

It is an attempt to theorize about and develop an understanding of something which is conceptually possible to rigorously understand, but which is beyond the scope of man’s capacity to fully grasp individually or collectively, and in which the theoretical separation of the observing theorizer is manifestly impossible to assume. Because it is impossible to use anything like a rigorous scientific approach in engaging with the subject, traditionally understood scientific knowledge about it is impossible for us humans.

Because a rigorous scientific approach isn’t possible in economics, economists engage with history and recorded statistics, using story and mathematics to build frameworks through which the economic system might be understood and described, and they check the accuracy of their frameworks against the past and against the present as it unfolds. Generally each framework that is developed describes some aspect of the subject of economics, under some conditions, more or less well, but is found to be incomplete or inadequate under other conditions.

Religion is something like what you would get if you expanded the scope of the object of economic study to include all human living, human social structures, human morality, and you tried to build frameworks which described the unfolding of that enormous subject. Of course, just as in economics and even more so, the subject of all of human being is beyond the possibility of scientific approach for the same reasons and for more, as much of it cannot even be described or evaluated numerically in any digestible way, but it does seem conceptually possible to rigorously understand, in theory, even if man cannot grasp it.

One aspect of religion that I think especially sets it apart from the study of economics is that the inseparability of the theorizer problem is even more deep and problematic, because as a framework of describing all being is developed, the theorizers live out the framework, and even the value systems described in the framework, and in so doing they manifest a largely novel manifestation of human living. As economic theories about how the human economic landscape works tend to shape the way that economic actors manifest their choices in the economy, so religious theories about what human life is and how it works tend to shape the way that human actors manifest their choices in their lives.

When I consider the meaning of this feedback loop of theory and action, it looks to me like that the study of economics and the study of religion have one very important similarity in the way in which they can interact with their project. They may not be able to subject their frameworks to rigorous experiment, but they are able to live out their frameworks and judge by the results how worthwhile the frameworks are. The tree judged by its fruits.

It looks to me like that this is what those who embrace religion are pointing at when they scoff at the notion that the scientific method could take the place of religion: they mean that the subject (all human living), while it seems to be conceptually rigorously understandable, is in scope in relation to the capacity of man beyond his grasp, and because the system is so complex and the observer cannot be separated and because the subject cannot be controlled, it is beyond the possibility of experiment.

It also looks to me that the study of economics is worthwhile and inescapable, and for similar reasons that the study of religion is worthwhile and inescapable, and that neither can possibly be pursued in a rigorous scientific way should be understood more as a limitation of science acted out through man than a critique the value of those studies for human life.