Neoclassical economists implicitly set up an extended analogy between their field and physics. Physicists deal with objective, mindless processes that can be modelled with precision because they’re not subject to anyone’s will, memory, imagination, irrationality, and so on. Thus, the physicist’s mathematical abstractions uncover the seeming timelessness or necessity of these operations. And because the physical relations are objective, they need no divine supervision. Hence, the Scientific Revolution forced European intellectual elites into deism and then into methodological atheism. In their professional capacities, scientists leave out theological explanations of how God might govern physical systems because such religious language turns out to be superfluous and empirically empty.

Now, when economics is compared to physics in that extended way, all the pieces are in place for an aspiration towards laissez-faire practices. Just as God is irrelevant to the workings of physical systems, which evidently take care of themselves, as per the scientist’s mathematical models, so too efficient (i.e. capitalistic) economies work by themselves, with no need for governmental management.

And notice what happens when the analogy is loosened. If economic systems are rather beset by sociological and psychological factors that are subjective rather than objective, such that there are no simple laws at work in real-world social affairs, the orthodox economist’s preference for mathematical abstractions is questionable, as is the very scientific status of economics as a discipline.