Deducing laws from premises deemed eternal and beyond question is a time-honoured method. For thousands of years, monks in medieval monasteries built a vast corpus of scholarship doing just that, using a method perfected by Thomas Aquinas known as scholasticism. However, this is not the method used by scientists, who tend to require assumptions to be tested empirically before a theory can be built out of them.

But, economists will maintain, this is precisely what they themselves do – what sets them apart from the monks is that they must still test their hypotheses against the evidence. Well, yes, but this statement is actually more problematic than many mainstream economists may realise. Physicists resolve their debates by looking at the data, upon which they by and large agree. The data used by economists, however, is much more disputed. When, for example, Robert Lucas insisted that Eugene Fama’s efficient-markets hypothesis – which maintains that since a free market collates all available information to traders, the prices it yields can never be wrong – held true despite “a flood of criticism”, he did so with as much conviction and supporting evidence as his fellow economist Robert Shiller had mustered in rejecting the hypothesis. When the Swedish central bank had to decide who would win the 2013 Nobel prize in economics, it was torn between Shiller’s claim that markets frequently got the price wrong and Fama’s insistence that markets always got the price right. Thus it opted to split the difference and gave both men the medal – a bit of Solomonic wisdom that would have elicited howls of laughter had it been a science prize.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/jul/11/how-economics-became-a-religion

Today, the influence of religious thinking on economic thinking is most readily visible in America’s public conversation about economics and the country’s debate over economic policy. Members of evangelical Protestant denominations in particular hold sharply different views on many questions of economic policy than Americans on average, including members of the country’s mainline Protestant denominations. These differences are even greater among evangelical denominations considered “traditionalist.” Similar differences appear in responses to surveys focusing not on economic policy but on underlying presumptions about how the economy works: whether individual economic success is mostly a matter of luck or hard work, or whether the poor are trapped in their poverty.

Such religiously grounded differences in people’s worldview also go a long way toward explaining the puzzle, much discussed in the empirical political science literature, of why so many Americans vote in ways apparently contrary to their economic self-interest. Why, for example, do so many low-income voters oppose taxes that they would never have to pay and benefit programs on which they rely? Why do so many people living in areas blighted by industrial waste and pollution oppose regulation or other policies to prevent such damage, or efforts to clean up what has occurred in the past? The strong correlation between people’s views on such matters and either their religious affiliations or their individual religious beliefs suggests that any effort to understand these observed patterns without taking account of the role of religious ideas in shaping people’s thinking on matters of economics is, at best, seriously incomplete.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-deep-religious-roots-of-american-economics/

As Romer told me: ‘You can’t overestimate the way that “theory beats fact” has infected economics.’

https://aeon.co/essays/economics-is-once-again-becoming-a-worldly-science