Can science predict all human behavior?

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with the point.

According to a recent article in The Economist, the Digital Revolution is poised to, quote,

up in the practice of macroeconomics.

With so much of our life lived online, it's now possible to know nearly everything about an average person's consumer behavior,

from the amount of produce they buy to what they're watching on Netflix. Now the technical term for this is econometrics.

In the extreme, it treats people like predictable robots.

With enough data, the theory goes, we can reliably predict consumer behavior in any given scenario.

That's one thing to predict purchases.

But people should never be reduced to mere statistics.

Maybe that's why the economist warns that the biggest danger with this approach

is Ubrus, like in Mao's China reducing people to numbers dehumanizes them. The Christian

worldview, however, is bigger. People are not programmable cogs in a global marketing machine. We're

not units of the state. We're more than our material appetites. We're capable of glorious heights

and catastrophic failures, made in God's image and in need of redemption.

I'm John Stone Street.