Does spiritual economics introduced in a previous article solve the problems mentioned of capitalism?

First, the problem of limited resources. Capitalistic growth economics depends crucially on keeping consumer demands going. This is done often by creating artificial physical needs. An example is new annual fashions for women’s garments. It is very wasteful, very detrimental to finite resources.

In idealist economics, as people’s higher needs are met even partially, their physical needs reduce, reducing the demand for consumption reducing the wastage of limited material resources. The economy still expands, but in the higher planes where the resources are unlimited (there is no limit on love and satisfaction!).

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Secularism is the separation of church and state. In the past this has worked for democracy. State carries out the democratic ideal of bring meaning to everyone in society. The church gives us the ethical canopy under which everyone pursues meaning. Unfortunately, the evolution of scientific materialism puts a monkey wrench in this equilibrium.

In this country, the progressive democrats who are supposed to advance the pursuit of meaning, follow (correctly) the vehicle of creativity for that advancement. But science is supposed to be one of those creative activities that democrats utterly approve. When science advocates a Godless materialism and meaningless existentialism, the democrats get thoroughly confused. Many of these confused democrats seems to be anti-religion even anti-ethics. How then can religious people trust them to be even-handed about religions and religious ethics?

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Jesus lamented, The kingdom of God is everywhere, but people don’t see it. Well, the evidence is subtle; it is easy for ordinary people to miss it. But scientists are special people; they are experts in deciphering subtleties of evidence. Why have they been missing the signatures of the divine? The Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman expressed this myopia of the scientists of recent times when he offered this admonishment against unbridled imagination. Said he, “Scientific imagination is imagination within a straightjacket.” The straightjacket Feynman and others of the materialist ilk wear is the straightjacket of the belief system called scientific materialism. And the doctrine that binds the most is the exclusive reductionist doctrine of upward causation–everything is the movement of elementary particles and their interactions.

This entire paper is an exercise in how to take the straightjacket of materialism off our back. I argue that quantum physics is showing us the way by giving us back downward causation and its agent—Quantum consciousness (popularly called God) acting through the observer. In Newtonian physics, objects are determined things. But in quantum physics, objects are possibilities for consciousness to choose from. When an observer looks, the observer’s consciousness chooses among the quantum possibilities to collapse an actuality of experience. Quantum collapse is downward causation.

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Many people think that capitalism and market economics grew out of materialist philosophy that classical physics has given us. But this is myopic thinking of people who have missed the evolution of consciousness in the affairs of the manifest world.

First notice that during the period that capitalism developed in the hands of such luminaries as Adam Smith, it was Cartesian dualism under the modernist umbrella that was the influential metaphysic, not materialism. In modernism, mind and meaning are valued.

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