[Fertionbratte]

In the thread on the gold dinar and the Murabitun model for its implementation, our brother Abu Hajira suggested that we ought to have a scientific model, data, and scientific methods of analysing whether it would be successful or not. To pursue that in the section on the dinar would probably test contributors' patience to the limit so it occurred to me to start a new thread just for those who have an interest in this matter.

Scientific modelling is intrinsically a flawed process and. In the case of economics, it is a pseudo-scientific discipline based on entirely false premises.

Economics as a discipline grows out of the utilitarian branch of philosophy which is explicitly atheistical. This was perhaps an unanticipated consequence of the 'scientific' view of causality propounded by Newton et al, since once it was established (in their view) that the universe is completely explicable in terms of interactions between the entities within it, then people quickly concluded, as did Laplace when asked by Napoleon why his book Celestial Mechanics had no mention of the Creator, "Monsieur, I had no need of this hypothesis."

Even when science and economics nominally accept some form of theism, they are against revealed law in any form. In either case, Bentham's 1787 "Defence of Usury" http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/bentham/usury is entirely typical of the genre of philosophical works on economics in being a complete repudiation of even that tiny shred of shariah left to the Christians and Jews.

That is something specifically about economics, but the problem is wider and deeper than that. Science since Galileo, Descartes, and Newton is the attempt to build an alternative route to certainty. That attempt is based on the infatuation that people of the epoch had with Euclid. They admired Euclid's proving all his propositions, and thought that it would be possible to build a philosophy and science on the same basis. This proposed route to a kind of quasi-religious certainty was based on:
1. definition of terms,
2. axiomatic statements which are 'self-evident' and need no proof,
3. hypotheses which are tentative proposals which when given a
4. proof
then become
5. theorems.
This is completely a mathematical process and it totally restructured philosophy and its child science. The trouble was that whereas in mathematics we are dealing with very simple matters such as points, lines, areas, volumes, in any other discipline we are dealing with very many complex matters, which are hard to define, and whose axioms, i.e. the things which are self-evident, are not necessarily self-evident to all people involved, and moreover many implicit assumptions can dog careful thinking. It worked admirably well with Newton for the two-body problem such as the sun and a single planet, but it has not been made to work for the three-body problem, which is much more complex.

Usually the definitions of the terms and the axioms are so prejudiced in anything outside of the zone of mathematics as to be useless. Moreover, even in mathematics itself, the entire edifice was shown to be completely flawed, something which was a major crisis in the history of the subject (see: Morris Kline, Mathematics: the Loss of Certainty).

Famously, people like John von Neuman and the contemporary mathematician John Nash (subject of the Hollywood film "A Beautiful Mind", which unfortunately is not accurate biographically), two proponents of Game Theory and its application to economics, assumed that people are intrinsically selfish and uncooperative, but this is demonstrably not necessarily the case (see Adam Curtis's excellent documentary "The Trap" for some material about that), yet it had the terrible result of bringing about the selfish society comprised of selfish individuals that was postulated at the outset. It was self-fulfilling, as is much of science. One just has to remember that quantum mechanics grew out of, among other things, the astonishing discovery that if you set up the experiment to look at light (or electrons) as particles, they will behave as particles, but if you set up the experiment to treat them as wave-forms, they behave as waves.

Interestingly the entire rise of science parallels the rise of usury finance: Galileo designed a slide rule to work out compound interest for his patrons the Italian Medici banking family, and Newton was master of the Mint setting in 1717 for the first time ever the price of paper money vis-a-vis gold (wrongly thought of as setting the price of gold).

Keynes was an ardent Newtonian, and then of course we have von Neuman and Nash and the Chaos theorists. The relationship between science and usury finance is stronger than ever.



Abdassamad Clarke