I'm not sure that "faith" is the proper example. Faith is a human response
to the Divine. The "free lunch" is salvation -- the Divine gift to humans.
Taking the Christian perspective, if one believes that Jesus died for our
sins, then salvation is indeed a free lunch. While good works can be a
natural response to one's acceptance of salvation, good works are not a
requirement (i.e. price) for salvation.
Antony Davies, Ph.D.
Research Fellow, Mercatus Center Capitol Hill Campus
Assistant Professor of Economics
Donahue Graduate School of Business
Duquesne University
Pittsburgh, PA 15282
http://www.business.duq.edu/faculty/davies
-----Original Message-----
From: Jose J. Vazquez [mailto:vazquezj@uiuc.edu]
Sent: Friday, August 26, 2005 12:18 PM
To: tch-econ@elon.edu
Subject: The costs of spiritual faith
I always introduce the principle of "No free lunch" in my intro classes by
challenging students to come up with resources they think are not scarce
(and hence violate the principle). Of course I always get the usual
suspects, air, water, space, etc, all of which are pretty straightforward to
explain their scarcity. Nevertheless, from time to time I usually get some
pretty interesting ones for which the explanations are not so clear cut.
One of the most interesting students' suggestions of unlimited resources is
spiritual faith (some students usually say God's love too). I usually use
the following three main arguments to try to convince students that
spiritual faith does not violate the principle:
1. Faith might not be considered a resource per se, but a payment of
some sort and in this sense it doesn't apply. This explanation is usually
not very well received.
2. There is an effort (perhaps time) associated with having faith, or
enjoying the benefits of spiritual faith. This argument usually creates
heated debates as some students always argue that having faith requires no
real effort and the benefits are unlimited.
3. If spiritual faith were in fact free, then everybody would be a
believer and had spiritual faith. Obviously this is our beloved "cash on
the table principle", usually our last resort. But as it turns out this is
usually the most persuasive argument.
Nevertheless, I still would like to hear what other explanations might be
out there. I think I still can do a better job at conceptualizing the real
cost of having spiritual faith. As well as some of the other interesting
ones I get from time to time, among them "God's love", and "unconditional
love from another person".
Cheers
Jose
Jose J. Vazquez-Cognet, PhD
Department of Economics
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL 61820
(217) 265-0682
(217) 333-7664
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Aug 26 2005 - 11:55:54 CDT