But what causes problems? It is always something different but at the moment people see the global economic crisis as the main source of their troubles. Modern man has become used to looking for a scientific remedy to his problems. If your head hurts, take a pill. If you don't want children, take a pill. But where does one even begin with a global economic crisis? Take a pill of economics! This is exactly where troubles start, with the science of economics and with the social sciences in general.

In his study titled What Social Science Does - and Doesn't - Know (City Journal, Summer 2010) Jim Manzi repeatedly points out that according to four Nobel Prize winning economists (James Buchanan, Edward Prescott, Vernon Smith, and Gary Becker) the American economic stimulus package was a mistake. While according to two other Nobel Prize winning economists (Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz) the government made the right decision. Who are we to believe? It is impossible to decide rationally, since the social sciences cannot come anywhere near the relative accuracy achieved by the natural sciences. Thus, they cannot prognosticate. According to Manzi, the social sciences are incapable of turning into a real science since a prerequisite for that is the ability to formulate rules based on prognoses. He believes this is the case because the social sciences lack controlled experiments. Although the proper statistical-mathematical methods have been sought for 150 years, it is still not possible to "reliably predict human behaviour".

Not everyone agrees. This year a book came out in Hungarian by Albert-László Barabási titled Villanások - A jövő kiszámítható [Flashes. The future is Calculable]. According to the author, who is a physicist living in America, the social sciences will become a real science if they radically enlarge their database, as they would then be able to prognosticate human behaviour based on hitherto unseen numbers of incidences. "People do not differ too much from grains of pollen floating in water," writes the physicist, that is, just as the movement of other physical bodies is calculable, human movement and behaviour can also be predicted in advance. Barabási's vision of a "brave, new world" is certain to provoke a great deal of controversy. Beyond his regarding people as being the same as other physical bodies, his methodology is flawed since he does not make a distinction between movement and action. For example, he tries to track the changes in people's locations by observing the movement of their mobile telephones. The political consequences of this are unforeseeable, which he is perfectly aware of himself. Can the human condition really be altered by scientific tools? Is it a realistic aim to be able to predict human behaviour? Is it even a desirable aim?

So is it redemption or prognostics?  A proud European culture has set scientific prediction as an objective and has left the Christian ideal of redemption alone as the "opium" of backward, unenlightened people. We in Europe have tried to treat the occasional desperation of the human condition by increasing knowledge. Even at the very beginnings of Christianity the Gnostics sought to reduce the anxiety that stemmed from the uncertain consequences of redemption by increasing knowledge. Faith and rationality are the two concepts that determine the European destiny. According to the liberal ideal of progress the human condition can be advanced and man can be redeemed with the help of science, while according to the conservative approach the human condition is unredeemable, and indeed changing human nature - whether it be through genetic or political tools - is not desirable since it would have terrible consequences: for example freedom and even the illusion of it would be lost forever.