Why God Likes Science & Capitalism

Suppose you're sent off to another universe in a super cosmos-travel machine and you land on the first planet you find with evolved life. The most intelligent species (which closely resemble humans) has evolved a belief in a god they call Z as their main religion, sustained over thousands of years, with hundreds of other religions that have come and gone over the centuries. You look at their recent history and find that for 199,800 of the previous 200,000 years their progression has been slow and steady with mostly subsistence level living, high infant morality, widespread poverty, where the pattern has been very slow steps up a very gentle slope. Then in their last 200 years they fused science and capitalism with industry, improved travel, population increase and more widespread communication, and suddenly those very slow steps up a very gentle slope became very fast steps up a very steep slope of progression. In fairly quick time they saw the diminution of subsistence level living, high infant morality and widespread poverty being replaced with better health, wealth and prosperity. On seeing this you might be inclined to think that their religious belief has at least in some part been inadequate to the task of lifting people into genuine progression.

With that in mind I'll give you some empirically verified evidence of how the world has gone for human beings on earth in the past 200,000 years. For the past 199,800 of those 200,000 years we had low global populations, and humans lived in meagre conditions, with lots of primitivism, low life expectancy and frequent infant mortality. People's earnings stayed around the subsistence levels (save for a tiny minority of aristocracy and ruling classes), and despite our being religious or worshipfully inclined for most of that time, our beliefs had no real impact on human beings at a scientific or economic level. Yes it is true that great works were produced by some great religious minds - but compared with everyone who ever lived they amount to a tiny minority. And while it is true to say that fabulous cathedrals and temples were built in reverence to God - it is equally true that around those great buildings most people were still barely subsisting - and nothing built or designed or written from worshipful inclinations changed that with any real significance.

The point being, Christian belief is based on supernatural and metaphysical truths, and truthful beliefs are extremely valuable to individuals and communities at a devotional and communal level, but it would be false to say that in the past few hundred thousand years religious belief had any significant impact on people's health, wealth and material standard of living, or on their economic and scientific development, when compared with the effect that science and capitalism had, because it didn't. The argument that some great scientific innovators and pioneers were religious won't help here, because it still fails to account for their relative scarcity, or for the thousands of years that preceded them where not much progress was being made.

So, despite the evolution of religious belief and moral ideas, for the past 199,800 of the aforementioned 200,000 years human progression moved at a snail's pace. Then a couple of hundred years ago something changed. People started to become more scientific, more empirically minded, richer, and populations began to increase more rapidly (it's still going on).  It was primarily science and capitalism that caused this sudden cheetah-like sprint of progression. This science and capitalist-based progression can be explained by a simple rule of thumb - people innovate, improve and provide answers to problems - and the more people, the more innovation, improvements and problems solved.  The more ideas and the more people to share those ideas with, the more humans prosper, and the quicker they do so.

Now let's be clear; science and capitalism haven't created a materialist utopia (far from it), nor a panacea against moral ills, and they are not without their negative spillover effects - but their prominence has seen an exponentiation effect that has brought more progression in the past 200 years than in the previous 198,800 years. In those 200 years, earnings, health, wealth, knowledge, scientific and technological capacity, and overall well-being has improved at an astronomical level not seen in any period of time that predated it.

Failure to recognise this puts one in a potentially knotty situation if one is a theist, because purely on the record of human health, wealth, standard of living, economic development, technological and industrial progress, it cannot be denied that the 200 years when science and capitalism have been most prominent have provided a much better record for humans than the thousands of years prior to that when religious belief was most prominent.

This does not, of course, mean that the progress science and capitalism have provided are the only kind of progression available to us - for it would be impertinent to measure human progression in terms of science and capitalism without mentioning the importance of Christianity in the areas of life into which science and capitalism make no real inroads. It stands to reason that the way Christianity enriches us is both locked into the material tenets of life, but also very much locked into metaphysical tenets too.

If things like science and capitalism show themselves to be good vehicles for human progression, or beneficial tools for lifting us out of poverty, curing diseases, feeding the impoverished, communicating globally, and generally enhancing our knowledge of the world, then they are not at odds with faith, and can work alongside Christianity so long as they enacted with a Christ-centred heart. And that's why if God is a God who values the kind of human progression with which we can lift people out of poverty, cure diseases, feed the impoverished, and generally enhance our knowledge of the world, then it seems to me that God must like science and capitalism at its best, as history has shown them to be the two best vehicles to achieve those things.