Our economist, who art in heaven

It was only three months ago that the economics profession was questioning the very basis of its science in the wake of the global financial crisis.

"The science of macroeconomics is in deep trouble,'' was the verdict of The Financial Times. Economist magazine devoted a series of features in July to "what went wrong'' with the profession. Celebrity economist Paul Krugman argues the science's predictions have proved "spectacularly useless at best and positively harmful at worst''.

In just two years, economics has moved from an academic field that could solve insoluble problems to a derisive vocation incapable of tying its own shoelaces.

Financial and macro-economists, it is charged, helped cause the crisis. They still didn't see it coming and are hopelessly divided on a solution to ensure it never happens again.

It is time, according to the great and the good, for a radical rethink of financial and macroeconomics.

So, what have three months of navel-gazing and soul searching yielded? If two recent papers are anything to go by, economists have turned to the enemy of science, religion, for inspiration and solace. Ye gods.

Philip Graves, from Colorado University's economics department, published A Scientific Rationale for Belief in God, a paper that succeeds in being neither rational nor scientific.

Graves is a great believer in futurist Ray Kurzwell's theory that artificial intelligence will eventually develop consciousness. In time, an entity, whether human or mechanical, will acquire the sum of all human knowledge, thus attaining the requisite godly status of omniscience.

Since knowledge is power, Graves posits, this being will become all-knowing and all-powerful. Hilariously, he concedes in the footnotes that ''since it is possible that many different entities might come to approach All-Knowing at somewhat different rates, a temporary condition of multiple gods might exist''.

The third element of Christian divinity, of course, is all-loving. Graves presumes that such an intelligent being will be, by its very nature, all-loving  a decidedly optimistic view, but then economists have always been lousy at exploring  human nature and behaviour.

Even if you accept that an entity will evolve that possesses qualities approaching what some today believe to be god-like, how does this future deity explain today's religious beliefs?

This is where Graves gets really weird, taking a page or two out of the book by LRon Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology.

Such a powerful, knowledgeable being, Graves suggests, would understand all about "soft worm holes'' and the "fourth dimension'' (no, not the album by Finnish power metal band, Stratovarius) and travel back in time and establish their divinity at mankind's inception.

Much more credible and interesting is How Evolution Created God: The search for the origins of religion, by James Dow, emeritus professor at Oakland University.

For Dow, religion or religious belief is a story about the biological evolution of the human brain and the evolution of what he calls cultural cognition.

One theory holds that religion is a collection of "cognitive styles'' that have evolved for other purposes. In other words, religion is a spandrel, an off-shoot or side-effect from a way of thinking that was necessary or helpful in mankind's evolution.

A more sympathetic hypothesis sees religion as a system of strengthening social ties. This is problematic, as Dow notes: "Understanding the natural selection of human behavioural complexes is very difficult when they are not directed toward an obvious survival or reproductive goal. The thrust of religion, to worship unseen beings whose existence is unverifiable, seems to have no obvious benefit.''

Dow seeks to build on the evolutionary theory that a genetically determined signal can cause selfish genes to produce altruistic behaviour. Religiosity, he argues, could be a signal to others that a person can be trusted, creating a fitness advantage to the signaller.

He developed a mathematical model to test whether "religious communicators evoke greater trust causing others to desire an association with them''.  Dow insists his work is purely exploratory and certainly not the final word on the origin of religion. However, "the mathematical simulation of the evolution of signalling patterns holds promise in the understanding of the evolution of religion'', he says.

The simulation does suggest that natural social selection could explain the evolutionary purpose of religion is to overcome a genetic tendency to selfish behaviour that can harm the species' survival prospects.

But, Dow warns, "more complex forms of social selection need to be hypothesised and tested'' before any definitive judgment can be made. It is still, he notes, a "mysterious selection process''. Rather like religion, then.

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 Nick Smith is a senior financial writer.