This paper is the first to offer an economic model of God and humanity as optimizing agents in
the context of concrete belief archetypes (religious ‘contracts’) in Judeo-Christian theology. Data
support the model’s unique predictions, despite their otherwise counterintuitive, unlikely nature.
For example, the model requires that in one belief archetype, ‘good works’ not increase with
strength of faith, as one might otherwise expect, and that what appears may be God’s dominant
contract precisely balances divine penalties for reneging on promises with incentives to seek
divine ‘gifts’—an equivalence supported in the data