Yet Another Inadequate Attempt to Deal With the Deepest Questions of Existence
I don’t know what else to do, except to constantly acknowledge the absurdity of a punk guy in his 30s spouting off Sunday blog posts on such weighty matters… Now on to business:
I think it’s safe to say that beyond the sheer implausibility of some of the Biblical accounts (feeding 5,000 people with some loaves and fish, bringing people back from the dead, parting a sea in order to escape Pharaoh’s army, etc.), perhaps the biggest problem atheists/agnostics have with Christianity is the seeming unfairness of God, in particular His depiction in the Old Testament. So I want to try to get you folks to see the analogies and considerations I’ve developed to help make sense of it, because of course when I read passages like those in the beginning of Jeremiah 15, it gives me the heebie jeebies too. It’s no joke to say I fear the Lord.
So here are some points to consider:
===> I’ve said it often before: The only reason it even occurred to me to try to understand, “How could the God of the Old Testament be infinitely good?” is that Jesus thinks He is (here and here). There is nothing irrational or “unscientific” about me deferring to someone (namely Jesus) who is clearly my better in this type of judgment.
My younger brother did graduate work in mathematics and the area he was going into (before he changed career course) he obviously knows far better than I do. So if he and I were attending a talk by a world-renowned mathematician lecturing on that area, and the famous guy said some things that I thought were violations of linear algebra, but my brother assured me the guy was right–I would assume I was wrong. Or at least, I would try really really hard to understand how something that seemed so obviously wrong to me, could be right. I wouldn’t merely take their word for it, but I would really go over my own reasoning since it would be so odd for them both to be so cosmically wrong. Well, same thing with goodness, Yahweh and Jesus.
===> At first this point is going to sound flippant and perhaps absurd, but if so it’s because atheists/agnostics have a hard time imaging the implications of the existence of the Christian God. Here goes: If such a Being exists, then whether you die from a heart attack, an earthquake, a Nazi gas chamber, or an angel of death…in all cases it is correct to say that God killed you. He is omnipotent; nothing happens that is inconsistent with His will. The reason you die a certain way, is that God designed it to happen that way.
So all of the stuff that seems monstrous in the Old Testament–with God ordering the Israelites to slaughter infants, for example–is not a reflection on God’s morality. Now you can still argue that it was a terrible example for Him to teach His people, and I think that’s quite a valid objection to raise. But my point is, whether those pagan infants died at the hands of Joshua’s sword, or from “natural causes” 100 years later after a lifetime of peace and prosperity, in both cases “God killed that person.” So it’s simply incorrect to recoil in horror at the first method and say, “Oh my gosh, your sick God kills innocent babies!!” To talk like that shows that you are not taking seriously the hypothesis that there is a Being who created the entire universe and designed the course of history from the beginning. (This reminds me of a funny bit Ricky Gervais had in a stand up special where he criticizes insurance companies for withholding payment after a freak storm. “I mean, if you believe in God, then everything is an act of God!”)
===> I think when we shudder at how God talked (through the prophets) to the ancient Israelites, we are forgetting just how savage the people in those days probably were. Think of it like this: In our own recent history, we can see quite clearly that there is a general trend for people to become more civilized with each succeeding generation. Now it’s true, there are countervailing trends of course. But I’m talking about stuff like treatment of minorities, or even civilians in times of war. As much as I am horrified by the stuff Bush and Obama have done, we don’t have the equivalent of the Japanese internment camps of World War II. It would take a heck of a lot more to get the American public to tolerate something like that nowadays. (Don’t get me wrong, they might, if nail bombs start going off in Walmarts across the country.) But c’mon, in general, you probably think you are “fairer” or whatever with your kids, than your parents were with you. But that’s not a knock against your parents, because they in turn were much fairer with you, than your grandparents were with them. The point is, every generation tries to correct the mistakes it perceives in the preceding one.
So now run the process in reverse. Can you possibly imagine what uncivilized savages people must have been, in the days when the Old Testament prophets were speaking out? Not that these examples will shock libertarian atheists, but just to give a sense of what I mean: When Moses was up on the mountain getting the Ten Commandments, the people who had just been rescued from Egypt with a series of miraculous plagues, and who had seen the Red Sea part before their very eyes decided to create a golden calf to worship. And then, part of the “backsliding” through the years would be having sex with pagan prostitutes at their religious temples. These aren’t minor slips; this is crazy stuff.
Now then, is it so surprising that God would talk to those people in a manner that sounds a bit harsh to us? Listen to your friends talk to their 2-year-old sometime. Then imagine if they talked that way to their 20-year-old children. What is perfectly acceptable when it comes to disciplining the former, would sound outrageously dictatorial for the latter.
So I think it’s a similar thing with the way God deals with people over the generations. Early on, He had to be a thundering authority figure, because that was the only way to get through to those people who were basically ignorant of the multitude of sins they were committing daily. But over time, we matured and were finally ready to understand the example of Jesus. And then those of us who have grown up in a culture imbued (however imperfectly) with His teachings have an even greater advantage. We all still sin, but it’s of a different type because now we know so much better that what we are doing is wrong.
To lend support to my claim that the God of the Old Testament was just as much of a “nice guy” as Jesus, when that’s what was needed to teach a person, look at the ending of the book of Jonah. To refresh your memory, after spending three days in the belly of a fish (or whale in some translations of Jesus’ recollection of the event), Jonah goes to Ninevah and tells the people God is going to blow up their city for its evil ways. The people repent, and God spares them. Jonah is mad and here’s what happens:
Jonah 4
1 But it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he became angry. 2 So he prayed to the LORD, and said, “Ah, LORD, was not this what I said when I was still in my country? Therefore I fled previously to Tarshish; for I know that You are a gracious and merciful God, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness, One who relents from doing harm. 3 Therefore now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live!”
4 Then the LORD said, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
5 So Jonah went out of the city and sat on the east side of the city. There he made himself a shelter and sat under it in the shade, till he might see what would become of the city. 6 And the LORD God prepared a plant[a] and made it come up over Jonah, that it might be shade for his head to deliver him from his misery. So Jonah was very grateful for the plant. 7 But as morning dawned the next day God prepared a worm, and it so damaged the plant that it withered. 8 And it happened, when the sun arose, that God prepared a vehement east wind; and the sun beat on Jonah’s head, so that he grew faint. Then he wished death for himself, and said, “It is better for me to die than to live.”
9 Then God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?”And he said, “It is right for me to be angry, even to death!”
10 But the LORD said, “You have had pity on the plant for which you have not labored, nor made it grow, which came up in a night and perished in a night. 11 And should I not pity Nineveh, that great city, in which are more than one hundred and twenty thousand persons who cannot discern between their right hand and their left—and much livestock?”
I love that last phrase–the Lord is asking, “You even want me to destroy that perfectly good livestock?!” So it’s clear, the God of the Old Testament is fully aware that killing infants is a serious thing. For whatever reason–and I confess I don’t have a great answer for the cynics–giving those orders to Israelite warriors was the right thing to do in that situation, whereas with Jonah, God is instructing him in ways that sound more pleasing to modern ears.
(And no, this isn’t situational ethics: Again, on standard libertarian principles, God owns everything in the universe, so He has the right to do whatever He wants to His property. If you don’t like that argument, then I’ll repeat the one from above: If you say God is a murderer for telling Joshua to kill people, then God is also a mass murderer for telling microbes to kill billions of other people throughout history.)
===> Last issue for tonight: People bristle at my insistence that Jesus is the way of salvation. Now when Jesus says “no one comes to the Father except through Me,” that could actually mean a whole lot of things. It could mean (a) you need to explicitly “accept Jesus” by name, or it could (b) almost be a tautology in the sense that if anybody is saved and gets to be with the Father in heaven, the only way he or she could have done it is through Jesus, since Jesus and the Father are one.
For now, I will just say that there is clear Biblical support for some people going to heaven who came before Jesus and thus couldn’t have accepted Him as their personal Lord and savior in quite the way that a modern evangelical would want, just to be on the safe side. Specifically, if anybody is in heaven, it is Moses and Elijah. When Jesus took some of His apostles up a mountain, He was transfigured before them and those two appeared, talking with Him.
Now it’s true, prophets in the Old Testament referred to the coming Messiah, and so in that sense you could say (for example) that King David (of Goliath fame) “accepted Jesus as his personal Lord and savior.” But this seems to open the door to what the critics of Christianity want, when they worry that “good, holy people” in some jungle might die without ever learning about Jesus, and then what happens to their souls? I’m not saying I know. I’m just pointing out that the Bible clearly indicates that some people before Jesus’ time “got into heaven.”
Mises >> Scott Sumner + Warren Mosler
“[I]nflation becomes the most important psychological resource of any economic policy whose consequences have to be concealed; and so in this sense it can be called an instrument of unpopular, i.e. of anti-democratic, policy, since by misleading public opinion it makes possible the continued existence of a system of government that would have no hope of the consent of the people if the circumstances were clearly laid before them. That is the political function of inflation. It explains why inflation has always been an important resource of policies of war and revolution and why we also find it in the service of socialism. When governments do not think it necessary to accommodate their expenditure to their revenue and arrogate to themselves the right of making up the deficit by issuing notes, their ideology is merely a disguised absolutism.” (Theory of Money and Credit, pp. 223-224)
“I’m a Scientist, Nothing Shocks Me.”
That may not be an exact quote, but that’s a line from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I was reminded of it when reading David Friedman’s recent blog post on evolutionary theory and new evidence that a low-salt diet might be bad for you. Friedman wrote:
There is a longstanding argument for reducing the amount of salt modern Americans consume, based on evidence that a high salt diet tends to produce high blood pressure. A recent European statistical study, however, reported just the opposite of what that argument suggests—evidence that lower salt intake was correlated with an increased risk of death from heart disease. Similarly, there is evidence that an increased consumption of omega 3 oils reduces the risk of heart attacks. But it has recently been reported that it also increases the risk of the more serious form of prostate cancer.
The logic of optimization provides an explanation for these results. The human body, like the race car, is a machine optimized for a purpose, although the optimization is by evolution rather than deliberate design. If it functioned better with less salt, the design would at some point of have been tweaked to consume less salt, excrete more salt more rapidly, or in some other way take advantage of that particular opportunity for improved design. If it functioned better with whatever metabolites fish oil produces, the very sophisticated chemical factory build into our metabolism would, presumably, have been modified over time to produce those metabolites without requiring that particular input. It is not surprising if changes produce improvements on some dimension of successful functioning for the human organism—but it is also not surprising if those changes, like changes in the design of a race car, produce at least equal worsening on other dimensions.
I do not want to overstate the point; there are at least two reasons why the design of my body might be suboptimal from my point of view… [Friedman then explains the two major caveats to his argument.–RPM]
But the implication of the argument I have offered is that we ought not to be surprised by results such as the two I just discussed. The fact that some change produces a gain in one measurable dimension that matters to us is very poor evidence that it produces an overall gain.
OK kids, I want you to control yourselves. Do NOT start talking to me about the Flying Spaghetti Monster, because I’m not challenging evolutionary theory per se in this post. All I am saying is that Friedman’s conclusion, well, surprised me. Yes, he’s right as far as he goes, but I could use evolutionary theory to argue that no matter what, we shouldn’t be surprised.
Friedman has just shown how evolution can explain why tweaking things can lead to problems even worse than the original thing.
But hey, I can use glasses to improve my eyesight, and as far as I can tell being able to see better doesn’t cause me to go deaf and get bitten by a rattlesnake. So that’s a blow against evolutionary theory, right? I mean, if it made sense for me to have better eyesight and this wouldn’t compromise something else, then why didn’t my ancestors weed out my shortsightedness?
Ah no, evolutionary theory would lead us to expect such a result! You see, there are constraints on the mechanism (which Friedman spelled out nicely in the part I omitted above for brevity). Actually, seeing the imperfections in living organisms is yet another feather in Darwin’s cap. Why would a benevolent God give His children birth defects, after all?
My point is simple: If we accept Friedman’s argument–and I honestly have no problem with it, as far as it goes–then we must realize that no matter what, we “shouldn’t be surprised” by such a result. If all the best medical evidence suggests that taking a multivitamin every day, or getting double bypass surgery at age 10 for that matter, confers far more benefits than damages, that by no means is a blow to evolutionary theory. In fact, most believers in evolution would find their theory vindicated yet again.
Thus my point: No matter what–in the context of the sorts of things Friedman is discussing–we “shouldn’t be surprised” at how modern organisms behave, in light of evolutionary theory. Note that I’m not claiming the full-scale evolutionary theory is non-falsifiable. I’m saying that it is, for the use to which Friedman is putting it in his blog post.
Krugman and I Are Self-Hating Economists
I was reading this Krugman blog post on the numerous benefits of more inflation, and it occurred to me: A lot of today’s Austrians predict that big price inflation is going to hit, and this troubles them because they think it would be a bad thing. On the other hand, a lot of today’s Keynesians predict that big price inflation is not going to hit, and this troubles them because they think it would be a good thing.
Maybe none of this has to do with ideology at all. Maybe really grouchy people go into economics.
Even Supercore Inflation Might Not Do the Trick
[UPDATE below.]
Uh oh. Days after saying that even “core CPI” (regular CPI with food and energy prices taken out) might be overstating the actual danger of inflation, such that maybe the Fed should just be looking at wage growth as the barometer of inflationary pressures, Krugman now blogs:
First, Bloomberg reports on signs that wages may be accelerating. It’s worth bearing in mind that we’re talking about modest stuff — if the employment cost index accelerates to 2 percent, that’s still just productivity growth, and hardly a sign of runaway inflation. Still, this isn’t what I expected to see, and I will be watching developments.
I do give him credit for admitting that. I should be clear that the reason I focus on “Krugman Kontradictions” is that I understand he has principles of a sort. I don’t think Krugman would consciously lie about something. No, he is clever enough, and economics is such a soft science, that he can frame things to make him right, regardless of what happens. (However, I think Krugman is aware that he’s playing a game, too. So don’t take my concessions too far here.)
More generally, a lot of people have been asking me, “Bob, can you explain why you were so wrong on your CPI predictions of the last few years?”
Well, I’m still working through the best way to think about these issues, so that’s why I haven’t given a full-blown post. I.e. I don’t want to point out the inadequacies of my prior way of thinking, until I’m comfortable that I have “learned the lesson.” (And sorry guys, I don’t think the lesson is that the MMT people are right.)
What I can say for now is that the specific mistake I made, was in thinking that other people would see the end-game as I perceived it. In other words, I am still quite confident that there is no way Bernanke’s actions “fixed” the economy, or that TARP was a good idea etc. To translate that into a falsifiable prediction (which I’ve made before but will here repeat): If the Fed’s balance sheet goes back to where it was pre-crisis (we can make it % of GDP to make it fair), and unemployment (as currently defined) goes under 6%, and we don’t have CPI (as currently defined) inflation higher than 5% over any 12-month period, there’s not some major event that could totally falsify the measures (like a war and Obama drafts everybody and imposes wage and price controls), and (just to cover myself) that situation lasts for at least a year without any hiccups in the economy (i.e. there’s not a stock market crash two months after the above conditions are met), then sure I don’t just need to tweak things a bit, I would have to question Austrian business cycle theory itself. (I realize those are strong conditions, but I don’t want to say something too flippant on a blog post.)
So because I don’t see the Fed’s huge interventions ending in anything but a combination of a bad economy and high price inflation, I thought others would come to that realization and start shorting the dollar. I thought that once we got over the year/year drop in CPI due to the sharp drop in late 2008, that people would realize inflation was the threat.
Well, that obviously has taken a lot longer than I thought. So that was my specific mistake: I thought other investors would start agreeing with my views by now, whereas I still think most of them are being incredibly optimistic.
So now it remains to be seen whether the explanation is (a) I was right, and they are wrong, and it’s just taking longer to manifest itself than I had originally thought, or (b) Krugman et al. are right, and my worldview itself is totally wrong.
UPDATE added a few hours after the original post:
It occurs to me that if Ron Paul became president and took my free advice (since I can’t accept taxpayer money, at least on net), it’s possible the above “anti-ABC” scenario would occur! So let me clarify that I am saying I find it inconceivable (given my current worldview) that we are going to sluggishly grow out of this malaise, and Bernanke will let the Fed’s balance sheet unwind naturally until we’re back to normal. That’s the kind of scenario I was trying to codify above.
In contrast, if next week Bernanke pegs the dollar back to gold, and Obama gets Congress to agree to abolish the IRS, cut federal spending by $1 trillion immediately, and start selling off all federal assets, then yeah maybe we could get of our current pickle without a crash and without high price inflation. But really what would be happening is that the great pro-growth measures would offset the disaster I think Bernanke et al. have baked into the cake, in our current trajectory. (Also, in practice I still think there would be a major recession, possibly even depression, in the scenario I just described–but it would last about 6 months.)
So to add another condition to the above, I am barring any incredibly radical pro-growth measures. I’m not going to be a jerk and say, “Oh, Boehner shaved $3 billion from Fiscal Year 2013 spending, so I’m off the hook.” I’m talking crazy Austrian heaven stuff.
Brad DeLong: If We Rule Out Any Alternatives, My Solution Is the Only One
I don’t understand why the debt ceiling issue is so mysterious. DeLong approvingly quotes Glenn Hubbard and then elaborates:
Glenn Hubbard in the Financial Times:
Forget the debt ceiling and focus on debt: On May 15, the US hit its “debt ceiling” of $14,300bn, covering publicly owned debt held by the Federal Reserve and government trust funds, and Washington is in a furor…. [T]he problem is not the debt ceiling per se. My wife and I don’t vote on whether we will pay our bills. Rather, we discuss whether our spending or income needs adjustment. So too must it be for our national “family”….
A good beginning. It should have been followed by a couple of paragraphs talking about how ludicrous it would be for a household to decide to spend in excess of its income and not to borrow. But Glenn then drops his opening paragraph theme and goes in a different direction…
So let me make sure DeLong, Hubbard, and everyone else recognize the non-ludicrous position a lot of us have been consistently taking on this: The Congress should not raise the debt ceiling, and it should slash spending.
Yes, there are odd rules governing the operation of Congress, but there’s nothing particularly crazy about having a separate vote on the overall debt, versus the individual spending items. In the same way, a husband and wife can decide, “We’re not spending more than $1000 on groceries this month,” and then separately decide whether to buy hamburgers when they’re on sale next Tuesday. There’s nothing ludicrous about such a procedure.
Sure, the rhetoric of many Republican politicians is inconsistent and tries to be all things to all people. But that doesn’t mean the “adult” thing to do is raise the debt ceiling, as DeLong and others suggest.
In other words, Tea Party-type voters and the politicians catering to them are demanding the simultaneously impossible (a) no debt ceiling increase, (b) no tax hikes, and (c) no cutting of old-age programs. But DeLong et al. assume the only way to resolve this contradiction involves denying all three. Why? I can consistently say yes to (a) and (b), and no to (c).
Last way of making my point. After quoting Hubbard favorably, I could just as easily have written:
“A good beginning. It should have been followed by a couple of paragraphs talking about how ludicrous it would be for a household to decide not to borrow, and to spend in excess of its income.”
In other words, given that Congress may decide not to raise the debt ceiling, then it has to slash spending (and/or sell of assets to raise revenue).
So framing the options before Congress doesn’t somehow make raising the debt ceiling pop out as the only logical thing to do. Yet DeLong, Krugman, and many others are writing as if the true austerians are defying the laws of arithmetic.
Government Ag Policies: Harvesting Absurdities
You can see my George Costanza impression in the beginning, and at the end I quote extensively from Catch 22. Oh, I also explain some economics in it, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Potpourri
* This Salon article on the apparent impotence of tax-rate cuts got me mad until the very end, when the author (Jared Bernstein) acknowledged all the possible confounding variables. In any event, it’s interesting how strong a case he can make that low marginal rates don’t lead to growth. (I co-authored a survey article for PRI where we found tons of academic papers showing that economic freedom is correlated with a strong economy, for what it’s worth.)
* This Lew Rockwell podcast with Chris Manion is really good. Topic: neocons.
* I realize Caplan doesn’t think much of the calculation argument (vs. incentive argument) against socialism, but not even a mention for poor Lu against the robotic Yglesias?!
* The anarchists are increasing their infiltration of social hierarchies. It’s all according to plan…
* I’m not sure how to process this case of the TSA saying it would ban all flights out of Texas if the “anti-groping bill” had passed. I think I can come up with extreme examples on both sides of the spectrum. (Assume for the moment that we don’t object to having federal and state governments.) I mean, suppose a TSA agent shoots somebody for looking at him funny. Can a Texas prosecutor charge him with murder? I leave the defense of the TSA as an exercise for the commenters.
* Oh yeah! A tribute to the Macho Man. Dig it?!
* Dick Clark the Younger is out with a pamphlet on resisting the State.
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