Scarcity And Religion

Scarcity and Religion James A. Montanye

Abstract: This essay develops an economics philosophy of religion and morality that is grounded upon material scarcity. The essay redefines “first cause uncaused,” explains the partial shift from scriptural to secular religion, and documents religion’s material relevance in everyday life. Keywords: religion, theodicy, theology, secularism, first cause, ultimate concern, natural selection, altruism, trust, scarcity, efficiency, markets, factions Introduction Among G.W. Leibniz’s late writings is an essay entitled “Principles of Nature and Grace.” In it, the polymath mathematician, philosopher, and theologian set forth the principle the “nothing happens without a sufficient reason.” The principle states that reasons underlie all facts and truths, and so provide discoverable and unique answers to all legitimate questions. Leibniz first question pursuant to this principle was, “Why is there something rather than nothing.” He concluded (following Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, and others) that the “final reason of things is called God” (Leibniz [1714] 1908, 303). Leibniz’s argument echoes a passage from Plato’s eponymous Timaeus dialog, in which Plato’s alterego mused that “everything that comes to be must of necessity come to be by the agency of some cause, for it is impossible for anything to come to be without a cause” (Plato 1997, 1234). Plato ascribed that cause to a “craftsman” called demiurge; Aristotle called it the “first mover.” That cause today is called the entrepreneur, to wit: “The various complementary factors of production cannot come together spontaneously. They need to be combined by the purposive efforts of men aiming at certain ends and motivated by the urge to improve their state of satisfaction” (Mises [1949] 2008, 249). Returning to Leibniz, it follows from the supreme perfection of God, that in creating the universe he has chosen the best possible plan, in which there is the greatest variety together with the greatest order; the best arranged ground, place, time; the most results produced in the most simple ways; the most of power, knowledge, happiness and goodness in the creatures that the universe could permit. For since all the possibles [sic] in the understanding of God laid claim to existence in proportion to their perfections, the result of all these claims must be the most perfect actual world that is possible. And without this it would not be possible to give a reason why things have turned out so rather than otherwise. (Leibniz [1714] 1908, 304).

The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus foreshadowed Leibniz’s theodicy by asserting that all things are fair in God’s view. Mankind alone subjectively characterizes conditions as being just and unjust. Leibniz’s theodicy, which Voltaire famously ridiculed in the comic novel Candide (1759), bore upon the biblical account of creation and the Second Century’s theological doctrine of ex nihilo, which addressed God’s creation of the cosmos out of nothing. Cosmological discoveries prompted Pope Pius XII to declare in 1951 that science “has confirmed the contingency of the universe and also the well-founded deduction as to the epoch of when the world came forth from the hands of the Creator. Hence, creation took place. We say: ‘Therefore there is a Creator. Therefore, God exists!’” (qtd. in Krauss 2012, 4). God thus became creation’s “first cause uncaused,” a label that precludes inquiry into the first cause of God itself. Modern science is less congenial to theological accounts of creation. Cosmology now imagines how the universe could have arisen spontaneously; science, unlike theology, does not address creation’s collateral why question (Aristotle’s “final cause”). If, for example, nothingness is intrinsically unstable, then the existence of something is less remarkable than Leibniz’s imagined state of nothingness. The physicist Steven Hawking argued that science now explains “the fine-tuning of physical law without the need for a benevolent creator who made the universe for our benefit” (Hawking and Mlodinow 2010, 165). God becomes superfluous or irrelevant if not dead by this light. Of course, “could” does not prove that creation actually occurred in any of the ways theorized. The creation puzzle remains underdetermined, leaving scientists, theologians, and philosophers free to argue about the proper meaning of “first cause.” Science nevertheless continues pushing God’s significance further into the gap opened by the theologian Ludwig Feuerbach, who decreed that “god is the idea which supplies the lack of theory. The idea of God is the explanation of the inexplicable— which explains nothing because it is supposed to explain everything without distinction. […] Darkness is the mother of religion” (Feuerbach [1843] 1989, 193). The idea of God as creation’s “first cause uncaused” becomes one of many possible hypotheses addressing creation’s first cause unknown. The stock phrase therefore demands revision. Leibniz’s question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?,” overshadows a more germane question for religious and moral inquiry. That question asks why something exists in such scarce supply that all life either must act efficiently in order to maximize the value derived from it, or else follow into extinction 99.9 percent of all previously evolved life forms. Leibniz’s theodicy, which was influenced by his mathematical sense of maxima and minima, addressed this question implicitly. Creation, by Leibniz’s lights, produced the best of all possible worlds by allocating scarce resources among an indefinitely large number of alternative ends. Even if creation occurred ex nihilo, it nevertheless was constrained by natural laws and limits that even God was obliged to honor. As if anticipating Albert Einstein’s later question, “Did God have a choice?,” Leibniz’s answer was, “Not entirely.” God is not maximally great by this light, instead resembling the diminutive gods of Greek mythology that stood in front of the law rather than behind it. The nature and extent of God’s divine shortcomings remain open to theological debate. Material Scarcity as the Essential First Cause Uncaused

Life on earth represents evolved adaptations to the relative scarcity of those resources necessary for survival and reproductive success. Scarcity therefore is Mankind’s ultimate existential concern. The task of overcoming scarcity determines aspects of human behavior ranging from altruism, cooperation, reciprocity, and the exchange of economic goods, to religion, morality, and the rise of religious and secular institutions. Moral evil and sin are ambiguous and subjective concepts in the absence of a perfect God, reducing theodicy to ultimate concerns about material scarcity and random misfortune. Religion and morality are contingent upon these concerns, as Leibniz sensed; Kant’s reasoned concept of freedom notwithstanding. In sum, material scarcity is the first cause uncaused that underlies Mankind’s appearance and continuing struggle for existence. Nature’s raw bounty, while seemingly endless, is merely a “potential plenty” that otherwise amounts to penury (Strauss 1953, 238). Natural scarcity is transformed into relative plenty through Mankind’s ingenuity, effort, sacrifice, inherent behavioral propensities, rationality, acquired abilities, and entrepreneurial spirit. These adaptations are addressed routinely within economics and biology, yet rarely are considered directly within theology, moral philosophy, and the social sciences generally. Whereas moral philosophers characterize human reason as being “concerned with nothing but itself, nor can it have any other occupation” (Kant [1782] 1922, 680), the distinguished economist Ludwig von Mises argued instead that “the primary task of reason is to cope consciously with the limitations imposed on man by nature” (Mises [1949] 2008, 237). The economist Lionel Robbins canonically defined economics as “the science which studies [rational] human behavior as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses” (Robbins [1935] 1962, 16). The biologist Richard Dawkins illuminates scarcity’s influence on Darwinian evolution by characterizing “[n]atural selection [as] a miserly economist […] It’s economics everywhere you look: unconscious calculations, ‘as if’ deliberately weighing up the costs and benefits” (Dawkins 2015, 53; 55). The biologist Richard Alexander, finds “no evidence for even a core of morality. Rather it appears that our judgments about it are always cost-benefit decisions (including conscious and subconscious acts as a result of conscience) made in relation to our own personal history of lessons of the structure of our society” (Alexander 1987, 118). A few philosophers, David Gauthier, Max Hocutt, and Richard Joyce among them, derive conclusions that parallel Alexander’s. The reluctance of theology and social science to address scarcity as Mankind’s ultimate concern stems partly from Leibniz’s “sufficient reason” claim that reasons provide unique answers to all legitimate questions. That claim embodies two philosophical errors, as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin explained. First, subjective questions of value, which are ineluctable consequences of scarcity, admit many “true” answers. Second, optimal answers to complex sets of value questions are unlikely to be entirely knowable, harmonious, and compatible (Berlin 1991, 201–202). Value questions necessarily require that competing, subjective truths be balanced, either cooperatively through voluntary exchange, or else coercively by means of social compulsion. Pragmatic tradeoffs of both sorts flow from experience rather than logic. Tradeoffs regrettably are anathema to theologians and social thinkers who cleave to Leibniz’s “sufficient reason” argument.

Christian scripture asserts that God rewards individuals who pray in private (Matthew 6:6), and yet public worship is the rule rather than the exception. This condition richly suggests that there is more to religion than spiritual communion with a personal god. Public religion and the moral sense that flows from it are rational behavioral responses to scarcity. Religion flows naturally from Mankind’s inherent eusocial (highly social) propensity for cooperation, reciprocity, trust, and exchange (see Wilson 2012). Religious language and rituals idealize mutually beneficial exchange, with God epitomizing (à la Anselm) exchange perfection. Human consciousness houses a “ruthless and devastatingly focused calculating machine” that the noted zoologist (and occasional writer on economics) Matt Ridley terms the “social-exchange organ,” one of many specialized modules that make up the human brain: “We don’t know for sure where the social-exchange organ is, or how it works, but we can tell that it is there as surely as we can tell anything about our brains” (Ridley 1997, 131). Among other things, this organ causes humans to invent social exchange in even the most inappropriate situations. It dominates our relationship with the supernatural, for example. We frequently and universally anthropomorphize the natural world as a system of social exchanges. ‘The gods are angry because of what we have done’ we say to justify a setback in the Trojan war, a plague of locusts in ancient Egypt, a drought in the Namib desert or a piece of bad luck in modern suburbia. […] If we please the gods—with sacrifices, food offerings, or prayer—we expect to be rewarded with military victory, good harvests or a ticket to heaven. Our steadfast refusal to believe in good or bad luck, but to attribute it to some punishment for a broken promise or reward for a good deed, whether we are religious or not, is idiosyncratic to say the least. (Ridley 1997, 131) Social exchange would generate no practical benefit in a world of superabundance. A specialized organ therefore represents an evolved adaptation to scarcity. Mankind’s rational and entrepreneurial attempts to mitigate scarcity not only create the varieties of religious experience, but also define the varieties of religious purpose (Montanye 2017). Religious experience follows purpose as reliably as form follows function elsewhere in life. Public religion represents attempts by individuals and groups to mitigate scarcity’s effects through collective action. The theologian Paul Tillich observed that “everything secular can enter the realm of the holy and that the holy can be secularized. On one hand, this means that secular things, events, and realms can become matters of ultimate concern, become divine powers; and, on the other hand, this means that divine powers can be reduced to secular objects, lose their religious character. Both types of movement can be observed throughout the entire history of religion and culture, which indicates that there is an essential unity of the holy and the secular, in spite of their existential separation” (Tillich [1951] 1973, I:221). Lest “secular religion” be mistaken for solecism, consider that “[i]n the twentieth century it showed greater energy, won more converts, and had more impact on the Western world than the traditional institutional forms of Christianity” (Nelson 2010, 349). Both theistic and secular religion represent rational attempts to enhance Mankind’s survival and reproductive success, and to promote psychic flourishing, by

actively deriving value from scarcity. This effort entails: (i) facilitating altruism, reciprocity, cooperation, trust, and exchange; (ii) moderating parasitism of reciprocity— individuals’ claims against the material success of others (Ridley 1997, 124); (iii) perfecting Mankind by compensating for perceived imperfections of evolution and reason; (iv) reducing costly uncertainties regarding the intentions and likely conduct of other individuals; (v) constraining the imposition of costly burdens upon others; and (vi) fine-tuning human behavior to suit changing conditions of scarcity (Montanye 2012, 30). Overcoming Material Scarcity Scarcity influences the breadth of human existence. Theistic and secular religion responds to these effects within four aspects of life: (i) the private sphere; (ii) the public sphere; (iii) the realm of market exchange; and (iv) the factional realm of rent- and entitlement-seeking (parasitisms of reciprocity). The Private Sphere Theistic and secular religion in the private sphere mitigate scarcity by facilitating interpersonal trust, cooperation, and altruistic (non-market) behavior among individuals living within biological families and other close-knit groups. Religion’s focus can be any common interest, ranging from metaphysical beliefs to material concerns. The theologian Helmut Richard Niebuhr implicitly invoked scarcity and competition when distinguishing the private sphere from “the gangrenous corruption of a social life in which every promise, contract, treaty, and ‘word of honor’ is given and accepted in deception and distrust. […] The massive law books and the great machinery of justice give evidence of the vast extent of fraud, deceit and disloyalty among men” (Niebuhr 1989, 1; 81). Private, non-market relationships require interpersonal trust, which religion generates at low cost. The sociologist Robert Putnam—who studies the ebb and flow of social capital, which he defines as “connections among individuals: social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them”—concludes that “[f]aith communities in which people worship together are arguably the single most important repository of social capital in America. […] nearly half of all associational memberships in America are church related, half of all personal philanthropy is religious in character, and half of all volunteering occurs in a religious context” (Putnam 2000, 19; 66). Furthermore, “communities of faith are more important than faith itself,” and “religious Americans are more trusting and (perhaps) more trustworthy” than other individuals (Putnam and Campbell 2010, 66; 443). Theistic religion did not disappear concurrently with the rise of secularism—as philosophers and sociologists of religion long assumed had happened—because of the efficiency with which religion mitigates scarcity within the private sphere. The Public Sphere Theistic religion within the public sphere once bound anonymous individuals and small groups into larger social aggregations at the level of communities, cities, and nations. The public sphere arises along the margin where formal, large-scale relationships

become more efficient responses to scarcity than non-market altruism. The ebb and flow between theistic and secular institutions is most evident within the public sphere. The public sphere mitigates scarcity by formalizing pragmatic ideas, rules, rituals, and tradeoffs that foster commercial exchange and secular politics. This sphere harmonizes competing values by shaping Mankind’s natural propensities for cooperation, reciprocity, and trust into statutory laws, property rights, and contracts. Applying the Nobel economist Douglass North’s description of “institutions,” the public sphere comprises “the rules of the game in society or, more formally, […] the humanly devised constraints that shape human interactions. In consequence, they structure incentives in human exchange, whether political, social, or economic. Institutional change shapes the way societies evolve through time and hence is key to understanding historical change” (North 1990, 3). Institutional change explains the historical shift from theological to secular social organization. The word “religion” is a cognate of the Latin verb ligo, ligare, whose figurative meaning is “to unite.” The historian Charles Freeman notes, with reference to ancient Roman civilization, that “[r]eligious practice was closely tied to the pubic order of the state and with the psychological well-being that comes from the following of ancient rituals. Religious devotion was indistinguishable from one’s loyalties to the state, one’s city, and one’s family” (Freeman 2003, 8). Later, yet still prior to the emergence of modern nation-states, the Roman Catholic Church served as the unifying (and monopolizing) central presence in Western Europe. For centuries, after attaining secular power commensurate with its spiritual aspirations, the medieval Christian Church functioned as a quasi-government, providing public goods, as well as private goods, by mainly establishing guidelines and standards for individual behavior— from kings to peasants. The Church dominated medieval society. As the most important organization and institutional force in the Middle Ages, the Church could not help but be a key economic player. (Ekelund and others 1996, v) The beliefs, objects, and rituals that ground public religion matter little. What matters instead, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes noted, is merely “the declaration of our opinion of whom we do worship. [… “divine” and “civil” worship] are words of the same action in degree” (Hobbes [1642] 1949, 192). Pluralism, which entails multiple “truths” about subjective value, necessitates secular public religion. Secular organization enables heterogeneous societies to extract value more efficiently and evenly from prevailing patterns of scarcity. As pluralistic societies became secularly self-defining, covenants that once were symbolized theologically by the rainbow, cross, and crescent became symbolized instead by flags, slogans, re-imagined enemies, and all-to-human deities (Montanye 2006). Theistic religion eventually became partitioned behind a “high wall of separation” between church and secular state. Secular religion’s ideal cooperating partners are public officials and bureaucrats who act as if desiring to emulate, if not to be, gods. “[T]he terms ‘society’ and ‘state’ as they are used by the contemporary advocates of socialism, planning, and social control of all the activities of individuals signify a deity. The priests of this new creed ascribe to

their idol all those attributes which the theologians ascribe to God—omnipotence, omniscience, infinite goodness, and so on” (Mises [1949] 2008, 151). Secular godheads act as if they are unconstrained by scarcity, using ambiguity and worse to conceal the social cost of their creations. This is not what the Catholic Catechism intends by professing that “the goal of a virtuous life is to become like God” (Vatican 1995, art. 1803). Historians question whether deified civil power constitutes a “substitute religion” or a “substitute for religion” (Burleigh 2007, 197). Either way, the debate correctly characterizes theistic and secular religions as being substitutable pubic institutions whose ebb and flow reflect relative social costs, benefits, and the structure of economic payoffs. The Market Realm The market realm is an interface between the private sphere of altruistic interpersonal relationships, and the competitive public sphere of impersonal laws, contracts, and institutions. Markets create value from scarcity by bringing anonymous individuals into exchange relationships that spontaneously balance private needs and wants against scarce supply. Markets form where the private and public spheres alone operate inefficiently. The philosopher Adam Seligman notes that “in the current [market] situation we are more dependent on trust (and less on familiarity) to supplement those interstitial points where system confidence is not sufficient” (Seligman 1997, 160). Secular institutional rules establish the trust and trustworthyness that enable markets to function efficiently. Aspects of theistic religion occasionally supplement these rules. In order to inspire trust, ancient traders on the Greek island of Delos during the second and first centuries BCE organized their professional lives along religious lines and swore oaths to patron deities. Religious temples, shrines, statues, and alters “functioned as important pieces of commercial hardware that facilitated the completion of commercial activities” (Rauh 1993, 126). Secular gilds and trade associations serve a similar function, as do costly and hard-won reputations for fair dealing. The economist Robert Nelson notes that “[s]ociety will always require the services of some kind of priestly class, economic or otherwise, in order to assist in fending off the widespread rent seeking [factions coopting state power to capture windfall economic gains] and other multiple forms of opportunism that always threaten the bonds of social obligation. [… It has] fallen to a new priesthood in the economics profession to provide a normative foundation for the market, now necessarily taking a secular religious form” (Nelson 2001, 13; 10; 296). The Factional Realm The factional realm comprises privately beneficial but socially wasteful responses to scarcity. Putting Kierkegaard’s existential philosophy in perspective, it is the factional realm, rather than the public sphere and market realm, that is the essence of untruth. The economist Adam Smith characterized faction as representing “the clamorous importunity of partial interests,” for which secular politics is modern Hobbesian warfare’s preferred weapon. Factional gains, which occur perforce at the expense of other individuals, often

precipitate social discord. By contrast, private altruism, conscientious secular institutions, and the market process mitigate scarcity by fostering outcomes that are both privately and socially beneficial. Factions prevent these adaptations to scarcity from performing up to their potential. The deleterious effects of religious faction greatly concerned Hobbes, who characterized faction as existing like “a city within a city […] an enemy within the walls” (Hobbes [1642] 1949, 149–150). Similar concerns were expressed by the philosophers David Hume (see [1742] 1876, 58) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (see [1762] 1954, 164). The views of Hobbes, Hume, and Rousseau culminated in James Madison’s discussion of faction in The Federalist No. 10. Madison defined “faction” as being “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. […] a religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy” (Hamilton, Madison, and Jay [1788] 1961, 78; 84). Madison recognized that religion cloaked factional responses to scarcity especially well, but (following the philosopher John Locke) believed that small and widely dispersed congregations posed little threat to the new American democracy at that juncture. Religious sects do not degenerate perforce into faction. Rational social safeguards nevertheless are prudent. Madison’s approach, which remains valid, was to view religious rights as property rights (Montanye 2011). Madison drew from Locke, and foreshadowed John Stuart Mill, when writing that property “embraces every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right; and which leaves to every one else the like advantage. [… It includes] a man’s land, or merchandize [sic], or money [… as well as] his opinions and the free communication of them. He has a property of peculiar value in his religious opinions, and in the profession and practice dictated by them” (Madison [1792] 1906, 6:101). Religious rights are inviolable by this light so long as their exercise is not detrimental to public prosperity and order. Article 10 of the French National Assembly’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen (1791) takes a similar approach. Regrettably, theological religious rights, unlike their secular counterparts, rarely are treated as property rights nowadays (see Mueller 2009, 271–315). Summary and Conclusion Religion, and the moral sense flowing from it, are expressions of Mankind’s ultimate concern for survival and reproductive success, and for psychic flourishing. The first cause of this ultimate concern is the scarcity of material resources. In a world of superabundance, religion and morality would generate no benefits, and so would not arise. In the real world, by contrast, religion and morality emerge as efficient means for mitigating scarcity’s constraining effects. Highly productive secular religion largely has replaced less efficient theistic religion as the basis for social organization. Theistic religion’s productive contribution nowadays principally entails generating the trust that undergirds altruistic (non-market) behavior within the private sphere of human existence. Social control over nonproductive religious factions not only prevents wasteful conflicts over scarce resources, but also ensures that Mankind’s productive adaptations to scarcity function efficiently.

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