{"id":391,"date":"2009-02-04T19:01:44","date_gmt":"2009-02-04T19:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=391"},"modified":"2026-02-02T16:49:04","modified_gmt":"2026-02-02T16:49:04","slug":"ed-witten-meet-gerard-debreu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/02\/ed-witten-meet-gerard-debreu\/","title":{"rendered":"Ed Witten, meet Gerard Debreu"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Oliver Kamm has a post<\/a> arguing that theology is not an academic\u00a0discipline, since (he asserts) it does not aim to discover anything new.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I am not qualified to assess\u00a0this claim about theology (and, to be honest, nor do I think is he).\u00a0 But I am intrigued that so many of the lord high panjandrums of contemporary western society, including \u00a0the normally-reasonable Mr Kamm, treat theology with such disdain, but\u00a0present no such criticisms of mathematical physics or neoclassical mathematical economics.<\/p>\n

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What are the epistemological differences\u00a0between theology and (say) string theory? \u00a0Most religious believers will claim to have had personal, direct contact with the divine, and these personal experiences provide evidence for their beliefs and\/or practices.\u00a0 Such evidence is personal and subjective; only rarely, if ever, is more than one person involved in these experiences, and these experiences and contacts are almost never able to be independently and objectively verified, or repeated, or deconstructed, or analyzed with experimental methods. But for all its many failings,\u00a0this evidence\u00a0is significantly greater, deeper and more compelling than anything yet presented for that part of mathematical physics known as string theory.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/p>\n

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No objective, experimental or other,\u00a0evidence yet exists that the universe is comprised of invisible entities, known as strings, vibrating in additional dimensions to our own three of space and one of time.\u00a0 Indeed, it may be the case that no such objective evidence COULD even exist, since these entities are supposed to inhabit additional space-time dimensions inaccessible to us.\u00a0\u00a0 To my knowledge, no string theorist has yet claimed to have personal direct experience of these objects of their study.\u00a0 Thus all of theology – even that part which claims the world is run by large extra-terrestrial lizards <\/a>\u00a0– has\u00a0firmer epistemological grounding than\u00a0any part of string theory, or its younger siblings, such as M-theory, which posits a universe comprised of large, multi-dimensional objects called branes.<\/p>\n

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And what of the epistemological differences, if any,\u00a0between theology and mainstream mathematical \u00a0economics?\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Despite what a reasonable observer might think, mathematical economics is not concerned at all with economy or society, or the economic transactions which so dominate most of our lives.\u00a0 Rather, mathematical economics studies abstract\u00a0mathematical objects, called (in that enmystifying manner which western academics have made their own) “economies”.\u00a0 These economies do not exist anywhere, not even in an ideal form, they bear no relationships whatever\u00a0to anything a contemporary westerner would call to mind when the word “economy” is read or spoken aloud, and\u00a0the study of their mathematical \u00a0properties has no relevance to any question any politically-engaged person might wish answered about the allocation of resources or the sources and distribution of wealth.\u00a0\u00a0 How could\u00a0 it, when the entities of study are such abstracted objects, in some cases significantly simpler, in other cases more complex, than the real-world markets and economies which surround us?<\/p>\n

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Which of the two, then – theology or mathematical economics – deals with matters of importance in people’s lives?\u00a0 Which of the two aims to talk about their direct, personal experiences?\u00a0 Which addresses questions people have in their everyday lives, or even about those questions which societies only raise every generation or so?\u00a0 Which, despite its failings and flaws, deserves our respect for its relevance and attempt at finding meaning, and which deserves disdain for wasting so\u00a0many of our society’s scarce resources on self-indulgent, technique-besotted,\u00a0\u00a0status-ridden, exclusivist,\u00a0navel-gazing? <\/p>\n

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As is probably clear by now, if I ruled the world, the string theorists and the mathematical economists would all receive compulsory re-education as theologians.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, given what I have just written above, they should all prosper in their new careers.<\/p>\n

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Oliver Kamm has a post arguing that theology is not an academic\u00a0discipline, since (he asserts) it does not aim to discover anything new.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I am not qualified to assess\u00a0this claim about theology (and, to be honest, nor do I think is he).\u00a0 But I am intrigued that so many of the lord high panjandrums of contemporary […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,64,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics","category-religion","p1","y2009","m02","d04","h19"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14122,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions\/14122"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}