The Invisible Hand of God

Empiricism is the doctrine that holds that all knowledge is based on sensory information, with the aim of clarifying mental confusions, such as superstitions. Perhaps its most stringent representative was David Hume, who ruthlessly turned its principles even on himself at times. For example, 'the wind' is only a generalization of sensory phenomena such as the feeling of a chill pressure on exposed skin, resistance to walking, a hat being flung from one's head, etc., and not some independently existing entity or spirit. Another Empiricist, though less innovative than Hume, was his buddy Adam Smith. The significance of this fact is that it means that Smith's perhaps most famous single idea, 'the invisible hand of the market', was intended by him to generalize a set of observable economic phenomena, and was not an invocation of some self-subsistent entity. But, alleged acolytes of Smith, who also ignore the fact that his book on Morality asserts that Sympathy is the basis of Goodness, continue to defy Empiricist principles. First, they cherry-pick evidence that tends to bear out that market forces, when left alone, do indeed produce fair results. But, more damagingly, the 'invisible hand' gets divinized, so that Capitalism is taken to express the will of God himself. No doubt, the alliance of the Religious and the Economic right-wing is based in such an appropriation of Smith's thinking. If so, then any credibility problems besetting that political sector are of its own making.