Economics of Hell (Part I)

You've no doubt seen the Thermodynamics of Hell that circulated around the internet a few years back, but have you ever wondered, "What would an metaphysical economic model look like?" Me neither, but I decided to work out the answer anyway. You just never know where this stuff will come in useful.

First we need some basic assumptions:
1. God and Satan exist
After all, it's kind of pointless to work out the economics of something that doesn't exist. Also economic models with only one party are boring so we need both God and Satan.
2. Souls exist
The only buying and selling we hear about with regards to religion are souls. So we must assume that the good exists.
3. The Judeo-Christian tradition is essentially correct.
We never hear about Zeus or Odin buying souls, we need some beings that will be active in the soul market. Also, it would be a real pain to create a model for a polytheistic religion.

Now the stage is set, on to the model. The supply and demand model from microeconomics seems to be a logical starting point. We'll use Souls as the good and worldly valuables as the price (we're looking at this from the side of God/Satan, the buyers in the market for souls). Now, God by definition needs nothing so his demand curve is simply a straight line at Q=0 (the blue line in figure 1). As greed is one of the seven deadly sins, we must assume that Satan has a non-zero demand where Q approaches infinity when p approaches zero (the red line in figure 1).

An obvious conclusion can be reached just from the demand curves: God will never purchase a soul. Since souls (as well as all other things) have a marginal utility of zero for God he has no incentive to accept them or to give up anything to acquire one. We must therefore assume that God only accepts souls out of politeness (he is defined as being good, so that should include good manners) as the other explanation for accepting a object with zero utility are motivations such as greed or spite.

Some may use this to rationalize the decline in miracles (The ancient Hebrews had all the water in Egypt turn to blood...we get someone cured of a disease which doctors were already treating him for). However, this also implies that God has never had any reason to perform miracles. There are two possible explanations for this discrepancy:
1. Supernatural occurrences are the work of Satan.
Note that Jesus advocates no punishment and complete acceptance of sinners and many of the miracles worked by the God of the Old Testament were unnecessarily destructive and often appear to be brought about for petty reasons.
2. Supernatural occurrences are fakes.
Note that people are quite gullible (as the number of psychics in the world can attest), and while James Randi is old, he's not THAT old.

Also we must also consider that one of the assumptions from which we based our model is incorrect, which...
...oh...
...well...
So until next week, I'll be reading up on Bertrand Russell and the Greco-Roman religious traditions.