Economics - Science - Religion
You work to earn a living.
This is necessary; every living being has to do so, from the wildebeest (which I present here as an example for a dumb but social animal) down to the amoeba in its guts; even plants lift their own weight and burst rocks. And, tools or no tools, (pre-) human hunting and gathering is work as well.
By delivering goods and services, however primitive - and that would include (re-) creating yourself - you must destroy resources which, physically, are worth more than the end product; or the system would come to a standstill.
You cannot create them.
Beyond that, in human society, all money you earn is debt - someone owes you something for it, or it would be worthless.
All the money in the world, of all time, from the verbal IOUs of the stone age to modern digital currency - even if symbolized (‘backed up’) by inflation-proof material possessions - is the result of creating a (monetary) debt which is offset 1:1 by (monetary) assets or wealth on the other side.
In every currency, for each unit of wealth there is a unit of debt of the same worth.
This is not in dispute.
Even if this wealth, thus created by splitting a non-entity of zero into assets and credit just by saying so - in return for work or otherwise - is accumulated by only a few, while the so co- created debt is passed along to many, it does not change the principle: Any money you receive is offset by a debt in like sum, and both add up to zero. Which is why, by the way, canceling (or, in truth, even repaying) that debt destroys the assets, one on one; enter interest payments and fees. On the other hand, destroying some else’s assets makes yours more valuable.
That is how human economics work.
But this is not really the important part, for other living beings, such as the wildebeests and their intestinal amoebae, or even bees and other social animals (as well as plants and fungi) do fine without money; which, seen evolutionary, is a rather recent and human invention - and with this we are wandering away from economics, and into the realm of science. How do you live?
In order to live, and therefore to work, or to work in order to live - either which way, every sign of life, every breath and heartbeat or gut movement with its digestive chemistry is indeed work, seen scientifically - you have to destroy resources, usually carbohydrates and free oxygen.
This makes humans (and every other living being down to the single-cell amoeba) an entity working on the principles of thermodynamics (and in fact plants as well, as it is the sunlight that splits the water and lashes the hydrogen to carbon) - they are no different in this from a diesel (or in fact any other) engine, or animal; they can therefore be replaced by one (a computer counts as a machine as well) for specific tasks.
It does not matter if a human pulls the plow, or an animal or a tractor, if a human calculates, or a computer:
All of them must adhere to the second law of thermodynamics, which states that whatever you (or your replacements) do, you cannot sustain yourself by your own effort, let alone return a profit.
No machine can create its own fuel to run on indefinitely (or, indeed, at a gain), no human or beast (and no plant) can produce its own food. The balance of work is always negative, because there is always a loss; always and everywhere. There is no profit, except in monetary terms - and that is somewhat imaginary, as it expresses the value humans attribute to a product; see above.
The source (and sink)
You can and may have to work to gain access to those resources; but to do so and live, you must destroy these at a (far!) greater rate than you could ever hope to (re-) create them:
If you are forced to create your own resources by treading a generator-fitted bicycle lighting a potato patch in a closed, dark cellar to solely live and breathe off, you will die within a couple of days, as soon as you have used up your reserves - even if it has taken twenty years, and even more resources, to create these reserves and conditions for you to be able to even try in the first place.
As a thermodynamic being, you cannot create the external source and sink you need to keep entropy low enough for you to be able to 'live' by increasing it through work.
But - and this is where we wander on from science into the realms of religion - for you to be able to destroy something that you cannot create by virtue of the second law of thermodynamics, it must have been created by something - or, if you will, someone - else.
According to the universal laws of thermodynamics, there is no perpetuum mobile, no ever-running machine, and certainly not one that is able to put out a surplus of work or energy.
But to be able to exist, even to come into existence as a biological being confined and confronted by the laws of thermodynamics and dependent on external resources and input, you depend on *exactly that* to exist for every second of your life - in fact, the old Christian prayer to 'give us this day our daily bread' shows an old understanding of the fact that, not only is the possibility to exist a gift, but it has to be a continuous one as well.
And that continuous gift is not confined to a steady, endless stream of surplus work or energy, to the benefit of every living being on any planet in the universe.
It also encompasses, even beyond the continuous existence of the surroundings which allow this to happen - as in space - the continuous coming into existence, maintenance, and development of these surroundings, as in time; that what we call Creation.
That continuous gift, then, parlays back into what we humans call economics - which is, as religion and science are, a figment of our mind, see above; wildebeests, amoebae, trees and diesel engines all get along fine without all three - as it pertains to the access, the use and destruction of these given resources; and this includes ourselves as part and product of this creation - as creatures, not as creators of anything (except a debt towards each other).
And that is what it has to do with everyone.
What remains to be studied is the question
if there is an external source (and internal? sink) to the universe, which some may envision as God (or Gods), which then feeds itself down the line, at frighteningly low efficiency, all the while accumulating entropy and loss - until the universe has lost all its primarily allocated resources and original momentum, and dies the dreaded "heat death" or death of equilibrium, taking with it all flukes and freaks of nature (also known as ‘living beings’), and their prerequisitions, that have incidentally emerged along the way; thus, in a way, correcting the mistake of “local ‘lesser equilibrium’ than should have been”.
or if, on the contrary, there are myriads of self-induced and self-augmenting internal sources (and a big sink) within the universe, created by gravity or the mutual attraction of matter, which inevitable and eternal property of matter will continue to develop the universe’s content and potential, and might so be called ‘God's physical tool of Creation’: The simple force that orders, separates and complicates, creates potential, refutes chaos and destroys entropy, thus making all an expression of His divine will (if you will) - until perhaps finally all is gobbled up in a black hole, the diametrical opposite of equilibrium.
I go with the latter, and propose an inversion of the formula for entropy to accommodate it.
For either entropy is increasing overall, then evolution from primitive to complex seems to go against it - and the mechanics of evolution are just the method, not the aim - and the question is not why life is impossible in most of the universe, but how it is possible at all:
Either God, or dead matter and energy, brought forth living matter from dead matter; and, by the way, dead matter itself.
There is hardly a third option.
Either you are the end, or the start of something.
Lengthy Epilogue:
On the matter of religion and logic
You cannot escape the religious aspect, as religion, science and economics are bound to the human mind, and both science and economics (which are not regarded as a true science, as they cannot predict with any accuracy, up to now) over time become dogmatic and with that, religious, i. e. they begin to purport unquestionable truths - along with all the trappings that go with it, such as orthodoxy and the burning of heretics - which is another sign that these three perspectives of reality are, as stated, rooted in the human mind.
For one, it is assumed (although of course we have no way of knowing), that ants, wildebeests and their intestinal amoebae, though being very social beings, neither have a concept of religion (and what if they did…), nor do even our closest of kin, the chimpanzees and other primates; for another, humans are already instilling and discussing God and morals with their electronic self-ersatz (and perhaps their future master) they call AI or artificial intelligence (and, if true, failing); which, of course, proves that humans think this is a part of their own natural intelligence.
And, indeed, though we do not know what the Neanderthal may have thought about these things, the fact that humans (as Homo Sapiens) became successful WITH a propensity for religion, shows that this evolved for a reason; and though it may have been simply a trade-off from the evolution of intelligence, apart from it seeming to be a darwinistic gain of fitness (i. e. in understanding the world), it obviously wasn't an obstacle or disadvantage in darwinistic terms.
Humans are bound to value their actions and decisions based on something - and Artificial Intelligence, too, would probably be at loss for action and decision without some moral or philosophical fundament. Pure logic leads nowhere; in fact, it seems to be always self- contradictory in the end (and with that, self- destructive). Religion tells you where to start from - and where to end.
So, as much as you may want to try, you cannot escape religion. In fact, the more you try, the more it creeps into some other realm, such as economics and science; a dedicated religious belief can immunize you, to a certain degree, against a new (un-) scientific or (anti-) social religion, by blocking the receptors. Religion is about what you should do and not do; a religious person, for better or worse, is less inclined to listen to science or economics for guidance on things moral.
In the end, religion is about believing in the big picture, in fundamental, certain truths; and here it meets science. And, of course, deep down in its foundations, science also relies on absolute, "undeniable" or "unquestionable" truths, like 1+1=2, always and everywhere. The problem begins when the resulting structures higher up are deemed to be so. In that case, science instantly becomes dogmatic (as do economics), and then must be seen as / in terms of a religion; dogma is a result, not a method.
In essence, one could say that religion concerns itself with the absolute or unconditional, as in absolute truth and unconditional expectations, and science does the opposite, being an observation of the conditional and relative, of what happens relative to what under which conditions.
In contrast (and independent of its content, which is often distilled over the ages and millennia), religion is about (or rather: unconditionally accepts or sets as given) the first and final word, the alpha and omega, on any given subject.
That, what is.
You - or the wildebeest intestinal amoebae - do not even have to be aware of even the question of its existence.
As seen from the perspective of logic
You cannot be aware of something you cannot be aware of.
Scientific, 'rational' thinking, as stated above, is conditional and relative; it depends on assumptions, which set limits (as all definitions do).
This dependency ‘limits’ the scope of your arguments; if you assert otherwise, you are trying to fool yourself and others - especially if you are not sufficiently (self-) aware of their conditionality.
By this limitation, paradoxically, 'rational grounds' almost forcibly incline you towards some, even any, kind of belief system.
There are always at least two sides to an argument, but only one truth.
For that reason, scientific statements ought to be relative, religious ones absolute; or, turned the other way around, relative statements are scientific ones by nature, absolute ones inherently religious.Your 'rational grounds' could be, in truth, just a rationalization.
And as all rational arguments rest on assumptions, stated or not, these, if wrong (and their final correctness cannot be proven in principle - why is 1+1=2?), will instantly throw the argument.In religious context, funnily enough, this does not matter.
You may not know the truth, but it is there - if only to seek.
You cannot get rid of it.
Which is why, or so it was said, "whenever scientists climb a hill, they will find theologians there, lounging at the top".
And since all rational argument is defined by prerequisitions,
those who cannot state their assumptions cannot state their case.
But as you cannot know what you do not know - these "unknown unknowns" (Rumsfeld) cannot be resolved, and have to be taken into account as well.
To sum it up
In making a statement
You are assuming your model is right and will predict correctly, no matter what the conditions and input data
- but you have no way of knowing if this is so.
Either the model has not been tested under the set of new, specific circumstances, or we are talking about historical hindsight occurrences (and even then, historians disagree).
Are the criteria you chose really relevant? And how do you know?You are assuming your input data is correct
- but you have no way of knowing if this is so.
What you put in is what sensors (perhaps your own) measure; you cannot know if these are or were measuring correctly, or indeed if these measurements are being processed correctly on the next level.
Ask any expert about witness reliability or hearsay evidence.You are assuming that the circumstances have not changed
- but you have no way of knowing if this is so.
All swans all people have ever seen are white, say all the people you ask that have ever seen swans.
But then, Australia is discovered, and lo! these people have seen only black swans - and perhaps there are green ones where no-one has looked, or red ones where they have been purposefully engineered.
Just one of these assumptions has to be wrong, and the output is potentially lethal.
A zebra eyeing some shadow under a tree:
Is that a lion over there, or a spot of shade? Can I trust my eyes and my recognition? Will I be eaten, or collapse of thirst?
The lion, if there, hoping:
One or the other, or all of the above.
So the problem with scientific statements is that they always rely on your assumptions being correct, but these, for one, can never be proven in total; for another, they can never even be completely stated,
for practical reasons: The statement of ALL assumptions and prerequisitions would be repetitious, fill pages, and lead to them being forgotten halfway through; so all those that humans routinely take for granted are left out, which make up the mass bulk; and only those assumptions that are controversial are stated in the beginning of an argument - maybe one or two: "Given that... then...".
This gives away the fact that the others are taken for granted.in principle: You cannot even know if you know all of them - especially not the “unknown unknowns” (see above). The explosion of knowledge led to more people knowing more, but that means they used to know less, and not even know they did.
This leads to the vast bulk of, moreover, deep-seated, ground-laying, fundamental assumptions to be taken and believed in as unquestioned, and in good faith; but matters of faith and belief are religious matters, even if they seem to be scientific, or have a scientific subject - which again leads to vast cohorts of "true believers" in one theory, or another, never go beyond questioning anything even slightly below the surface of the argument at hand; doing that would question their "unquestionable" world view, and with it their reason for existence; and this causes them to be as rigid and unwavering in that point as any religious zealot, given to hard-line, absolute statements that are non-negotiable: Opponents are treated as heretics (which they are), witches burnt, and unbelievers driven out of town - depending on the local and temporal majority.
Though all humans are forced to take (sometimes different) sets of assumptions for granted, which can never be proven in totality or in principle, we do not even know if we see the same property, for instance color, while we are looking at the same object in the same room: a 'color-blind' person will still stop at a red light, provided this is always in the same arrangement. But is it? We just (and must) assume that we see the same; prove this we can not - in principle.
Since you cannot know in principle that the assumptions you (unconsciously) are basing your decision upon are complete and correct, you have to have faith in that the belief system which you have chosen poses the correct frame of reference for the decision to be made.
Rationality, by its own relativity, can only exist within the limits of a belief system which is defined as absolute, consciously or not; to ignore this is at your own peril.