On Fridays I write about the quirky and fun side of economics and finance and nothing is more fun than economists using their tools on problems they were not originally designed for and that these tools better not be used for in the first place. In this respect, my prize for the best (ab)use of economics goes to Francisco Parro from the Universidad Adolfo Ibanez in Chile. His paper has the following abstract (and against my usual habit I quote this one in full because it is so good):
“This paper develops an economic model to study the philosophical problem of evil. God's creation of the world is modelled as a problem of optimal incentives. A principal (God) must choose a world so that the populating agents behave according to his benevolent objective. In a world, the physical environment resembles a contract that determines the rewards and punishments for different choices. The agents' behavioural rule determines how they respond to these incentives. I characterise a contract and a behavioural rule that solve the principal's problem, and evil is evidenced. Specifically, evil endogenously aligns the agents' actions with the principal's objective. Other insights on the origin, cause, and role of evil are also derived from the model. The result of this analysis is a theodicy arisen from an economic model. As a byproduct, this paper shows how an economic model can be used to study philosophical or theological questions.”
In essence, what his model finds after a series of mathematical gyrations is that:
God wants humans to do what he wants them to do. Thus, he invents the concepts of good and evil.
Humans do whatever they want, but whenever they do something that is not in the interest of God he punishes them for their evildoings.
This directly implies that in order for good and evil to exist, there needs to be an original sin. Without an original sin, humans would never know what evil is.
God allows evil, but human action and human choice are what cause it. God is just an observer of human action and uses reinforcement learning to guide humans on a path to good behaviour.
Every human can reach paradise in the sense of not doing any evil anymore. It just depends on how fast they learn if and when they will get to that state of enlightenment.
If people behave rationally, all evil will be eradicated in the end because they will tend to avoid evil and do good instead.
God doesn’t care about past sins. The path to paradise can be short or long, depending on how fast a human learns to avoid evil. But there is no penalty to doing a lot of evil in your life as long as the human finally turns a corner and avoids evildoing.
So there you have it. Religion as described by an economic model. Make of it what you will.
"We are gathered today in worship, so please stand while we sing Psalm 91. We will then analyse His supply and demand curves on page 112 in the Book of Common Prayer"
This is really fun and interesting! Actually, these musings occur in other nerd circles such as the philosophy of man, or machine learning, or physics (as in multiverses).
If we suspend disbelief and our anthropomorphic tendencies for the moment, consider that our "world" is really the brain's interpretation of our senses. It is very hard for us (agents) to prove/disprove which parts of our world are not a simulation. After all, having a PINN (Physics-informed Neural Network) is now available. A very powerful computing environment can do many simulations or epochs or experimental cycles where there are just a few base rules of interaction, but intelligent agents (e.g. humans) are allowed some degree of freedom ("choice"), and the ultimate good is just an objective function (minimalization of a cost function or optimization of something). "Evil" is just an agent's foray into increased deviation from the objective. "Holiness" is an iterative learning or gradient descent of sorts as assisted by reinforced learning/experience and fine-tuning of learning coefficients.
It does not even matter if we exist in flat land or 2D (ala Plato's cave) or 3D (as we perceive this world) or any N-dimensions. It might even provide relief to those that ask questions like "why does God allow babies to suffer?" type of thing. Well, there is not much to it, but part of an experimental process. Maybe the higher-order scientist is simply searching for suitable candidates for the base model for Human 2.0 (aka resurrection or reincarnation, etc.) for the next phases of his experiments.