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Step Two: You're Crazy to Follow God's Rules

It is Irrational to Follow God's Rules Unless... Unless you believe in a God who can see into the hearts, and in the existence of eternal rewards and punishments. Consider these quotations from the Founding Fathers and other American historical sources: U.S. Supreme Court: " "No person who denies the being of a God, or a future state of rewards and punishments, shall hold any office in the civil department of this State. . . . Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good government, the preservation of liberty, and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education, shall forever be encouraged in this State." Church of the Holy Trinity v. U.S., 143 U.S. 457, 515-16 (1892) (quoting sections 5 and 14 of Article 7, of the constitution of Mississippi, 1832). Abigail Adams: "A patriot without religion in my estimation is as great a paradox as an honest Man without the fear of God. Is it possible that he whom no moral obligations bind, can have any real Good Will towards Men....The Scriptures tell us "righteousness exalteth a Nation." John Adams (Abigail's husband): "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." James Madison: "The belief in a God all powerful wise and good, is so essential to the moral order of the World and to the happiness of man, that arguments which enforce it cannot be drawn from too many sources nor adapted with too much solicitude to the different characters and capacities to be impressed with it." George Washington: Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, Religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of Patriotism who should labor to subvert these great Pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of Men and citizens. The mere Politician, equally with the pious man ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths, which are the instruments of investigation in Courts of Justice? And let us with caution indulge the supposition, that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that National morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principal. Thomas Jefferson: "God who gave us life gave us liberty. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed the only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever." Keys to Good Government shows what the Founders thought was essential to good government. Lost Truth:The video above and book below prove America is founded on the Bible. What each of these quotations has in common is an understanding that a BELIEF in the God of the Bible has some important connection to man's ability to OBEY God's moral rules. And as we saw before, our Founders and the philosophers who first articulated the ideas of freedom believed that freedom, prosperity, happiness, and peace could only be achieved by man if man's government followed God's moral rules. Both the connection between belief and obedience and the connection between God's rules and all those other good things can be proved with science, though nobody that we know of has yet undertaken this task. Let's see what science can show us about the connection between belief and obedience. How Man's Law Works, Calculating Expected Costs Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., the Supreme Court Justice of the early 20th Century once said "if you want to know what the law is ask a criminal." What Holmes meant was this. Rational men act in what they perceive as their best interest. They weigh the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action and choose that couse which they believe maximizes the net of benefits over costs. This calculation lies at the heart of all that we call the "science of Economics." Criminals know the penalties the law imposes for their actions. They also know how likely it is they will get caught. Richard A. Posner, the current Chief Judge of the 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, tells us that criminals calculate the expected cost of a planned criminal action by multiplying the magnitude of punishment (P) by the likelihood of being caught (c): E(Cost of Crime) = c * P If this expected cost is less than the expected benefit of the criminal activity - the ill-gotten gain - then it is rational to perpetrate the crime. In other words, there is a real benefit to crime that the criminal must forego if he chooses an alternative other than crime. The problem with man's law is that enforcement is always uncertain. To lower crime, we can either increase the penalties or increase the likelihood of being caught (like by putting more cops on the street), but we can never ensure that crime is always an ill bargain. How God's Law Works, Changing Hearts - but there's a Catch! God's law works in two ways to overcome the problem of uncertain enforcement. First, leaving aside the possibility of salvation, if there is a God and if He does recompense our actions in this life, then enforcement is certain. No action in violation of God's laws will go unpunished. But both TaNaKh (what the Jews call the Old Testament) and Bible teach that there is salvation, and a resurrection for those who have faith in God's promise of a Messiah. When Jesus came to earth as a man, He revealed God's plan, which while prophesied, had remained hidden. Jesus taught us that God's plan had essentially two steps: 1) Repent and 2) Believe. Repentance was the act of yielding our heart to God to acknowledge that His rules are right and that we have broken them and become sinners. 2) Belief means a faithful acceptance that Jesus' death and resurrection both paid the price for our sins and furnished a way for us to be restored to fellowship with an eternal God. The fellowship comes by way of Jesus' living presence in our "heart." As we continue to repent - to yield to God - this presence works ever more strongly to reshape what economists call our "utility function" - our true desires and preferences - so that they more closely match those of God. Thus, the second way God's ideas work is by actually changing our hearts so we no longer desire to sin. But we must first believe that that there is a God. Here's the Catch There are big gains that accrue to both the individual and society when people don't sin. In the case of theft, for example, we can get along with fewer cops, courts, and jails, not to mention fewer locks, anti-theft devices, etc. The resources that formerly were used to produce these items - which do not add wealth but merely prevent its redistribution by violence - can be put to work to produce items that do actually add to man's total wealth. But for these gains to be achieved, man must first believe. We can express the situation mathematically like this: s * 1 ? p * B where: s = the small gain from sin In the case of crime, this is the net benefit we discussed above. But it is also the "benefit," shall we call it "satisfaction," that comes from sins of the heart like lust, hate, or covetousness 1 = probability of the small gain p = probability of the big gain that accrues where people don't sin B = magnitude of the big gain We have purposely left the operator between these expressions as unknown to emphasize that society's problem in achieving the big gains is how to make their expected value of obedience (p*B) greater than the certain rewards of sin. Rearranging, our problem is how to achieve this situation: p > s/B Because it is obvious that if p>s/B holds, it will be rational to pursue the big gains rather than the small. Obedience to God's Law Comes Only with Belief Can you see how we can make p>s/B? Our founders could. If men do believe in the God of the Bible, then s is reduced by the magnitude of eternal punishment if you reject God and His free gift of salvation. It becomes negative infinity. Conversely, if you believe in God, B is increased by the reward of eternal life, it becomes positive infinity. In this situation, any value of p - even zero - will be greater than s/B. But this analysis suggests a more important result. Since one's estimate of p depends on whether one believes in God or not, p can really take on only two values, zero and one. For an individual who believes in God, p is one. For an individual who does not believe, p is zero. One will always be greater than s/B unless s is greater than B, which, by definition, is impossible. The gain from sin for one man cannot be greater than the benefits that accrue to everyone when there is no sin because one component of the benefit is the ill-gotten gain itself. In other words, if I don't steal $100 from you, you save the cost of prevention and enforcement AS WELL AS the $100 you would otherwise have lost. When we aggregate the costs and benefits of sin, there are no net benefits, because one man's gain from redistribution is another man's loss. Deciding not to sin always does entail a real sacrifice for any given individual, however, and because the true magnitudes of costs and benefits are not realized until after a person dies, there are issues of discounting that must be considered to evaluate the actual magnitudes of s and B. But because these magnitudes are ultimately infinite, we can ignore discounting, since it cannot possible change the relative magnitude of s and B. A problem arises if the person does not believe in God. In that case, p is zero. If p is zero, then the value of s/B can easily be miscalculated. The individual sees only the immediate certain "benefit" of sin, s. The larger gain, B, only partially accrues to the individual, and it is delayed in time. More importantly, if a given individual does not believe in God, he must consider that other individuals might also not believe in God and be willing to sin as well. This could further complicate the calculation of B, since when we expand our analysis to include other individuals, we have to recognize that the exact magnitude of B will depend on their actions as well. Here's the Real Magic: Playing the Sin Game in Society The individual incentives relating to sin and faith that we've looked at so far yield even more startling results when we examine them in the context of individuals deciding how to act within society, where the payoffs from any given strategy can be affected by the strategic decisions - the choice of actions - of other individuals. Consider you deciding whether or not to steal in relation to the possible actions of everyone else in society: You Don't Steal Steal Don't Steal 10 15 10 -5 Everyone Else Steal -5 0 15 0 For those of you familiar with it, the table presents the classic "Prisoner's Dilemma" game. Nobel laureate James Buchanan says all moral choices can be modeled with this game, and we agree. (Moral choices are essentially all involuntary transfers. Voluntary transfers can be modeled with an Edgeworth Box, though situational contexts dictate particular assumptions about the nature of utility functions in modeling voluntary transfers.) The actual magnitudes of the payoffs in the various compartments of the box are not important, only their relative magnitudes are important, and we will omit a technical discussion of actual magnitudes here. Just to be clear, what we've been calling s, the small reward of sin, is the payoff of 15 in the table. The big gain, B, is not shown, but it can only be achieved completely if both you and everybody else decide not to steal. If all of us decide not to steal, we can trade voluntarily with each other and turn our aggregate endowment of 20 (10 + 10) into an even larger amount. Voluntary trade makes everybody better off - otherwise why would you trade? - but getting in a position where we can all voluntarily trade requires everybody to choose the don't steal strategy. The important thing to see is that, when other people are just as likely as you are to steal, stealing becomes an imperative. You can only protect what you have if you are the first to steal. But because everybody faces the same incentive structure, everyone has to try to be the first to steal. This is the classic Hobbsian "war of all against all" and it leads to a zero payoff for everybody. The resources that one can save from theft are completely consumed by the cost of attempting to protect them, in the limit. The box shows why belief in God, which is the only condition that can prompt one to obey God's moral rules, is critical not only to an individual's eternal salvation but also to the temporal well being of society. In a society where there are many criminals, it makes sense to join them, but everybody ends up with nothing. Society did work out a practical solution to this problem that does not require faith. One man aggregates enough power that he can steal with impunity, while preventing most thefts by other individuals. We call this man a king. This is the essential truth the Founder's understood. It is why PERSONAL FAITH WILL NOT ENSURE FREEDOM. Only a faithful society can enjoy the prosperity, happiness, and peace that obeying the ideas that create freedom can bring.

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