God as Slaveowner; Conversations with Murphy

by Stephan Kinsella on October 26, 2025

From various posts and exchanges with Bob Murphy etc.

Natural theology saw the characteristic mark of deity in freedom from the limitations of the human mind and the human will. Deity is omniscient and almighty. But in elaborating these ideas the philosophers failed to see that a concept of deity that implies an acting God, that is, a God behaving in the way man behaves in acting, is self-contradictory. Man acts because he is dissatisfied with the state of affairs as it prevails in the absence of his intervention. Man acts because he lacks the power to render conditions fully satisfactory and must resort to appropriate means in order to render them less unsatisfactory. But for an almighty supreme being there cannot be any dissatisfaction with the prevailing state of affairs. The Almighty does not act, because there is no state of affairs that he cannot render fully satisfactory without any action, i.e., without resorting to any means. For Him there is no such thing as a distinction between ends and means. It is anthropomorphism to ascribe action to God. Starting from the limitations of his human nature, man’s discursive reasoning can never circumscribe and define the essence of omnipotence.

From: Human Action and Universe Creation:

As for whether you what to quote or cite me, well I don’t think at this point you have time to really engage with my comments. But I would think it appropriate to drop a footnote somewhere in this paper, saying that I do address some of these issues explicitly in: Stephan Kinsella, “Defending Argumentation Ethics,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), pp. 158–63, esp. the section “God as Slaveowner” (pp. 160-63).

As for your following section, again you might want to drop a note saying that though you don’t have space to deal with this, Kinsella explicitly responds to the argument in that next section, in Stephan Kinsella, “Defending Argumentation Ethics,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), the section “Arguing With Your Slave” (pp. 158–60).

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Regarding a section about Murphy’s argument about God owning us as slaves or something (see Stephan Kinsella, “Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan,” in Legal Foundations of a Free Society (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), in the sections “Arguing With Your Slave” and “God as Slaveowner”), I wrote: …

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Twitter discussions with Bob Murphy:

See Bob Murphy Show, <a href=”https://www.bobmurphyshow.com/episodes/ep-88-ludwig-von-mises-versus-god/”>Ep. 88 Ludwig von Mises versus God</a> and Murphy, “Reconciling God With Libertarian Theory,” in Elvira Nica & Gheorghe H. Popescu, eds., <em>A Passion for Justice: Essays in Honor of Walter Block</em> (New York: Addleton Academic Publishers, forthcoming 2025 or 2026?) (my comments below).
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<p dir=”ltr” lang=”en”>As an an-cap libertarian, it’s a bit awkward that the Bible says I am a slave to King Jesus.</p>
I’m not being ironic, I actually think Biblical Christianity is the correct framework by which to understand the partial truths in secular libertarianism and conservatism.

— Robert P. Murphy (@BobMurphyEcon) <a href=”https://twitter.com/BobMurphyEcon/status/1979629582144946568?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>October 18, 2025</a></blockquote>
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<p dir=”ltr” lang=”en”>It’s kind of interesting how a principled libertarian Christian should view God. Just as Christians (confusingly, IMO) reject Mises’s views about praxeology–the idea that humans act, which is always driven by felt uneasiness, meaning they are imperfect, not omniscient, not…</p>
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) <a href=”https://twitter.com/NSKinsella/status/1979918760145231910?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>October 19, 2025</a></blockquote>
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<p dir=”ltr” lang=”en”>I don’t know that I have read your response. So maybe I have forgotten. I’m simplifying what I recall having heard many times from theists about this argument, not sure if it’s exactly yours or not. This is twitter after all.
The question is not whether God is human, because…</p>
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) <a href=”https://twitter.com/NSKinsella/status/1980031736558805030?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>October 19, 2025</a></blockquote>
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<p dir=”ltr” lang=”en”>again, if you had read my comment — you’ll see that god owning us is somewhat of a murky concept since ownership is simply a normative support for power or possession but God has perfect power and thus no need of rights or norms to protect him, to persuade others to do what he…</p>
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) <a href=”https://twitter.com/NSKinsella/status/1979953089122603478?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>October 19, 2025</a></blockquote>
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<p dir=”ltr” lang=”en”>Okay I just re-read your 2023 draft contribution to the Block festschrift. I see stuff in there about God and ownership and homesteading, but nothing in there about the argument that Mises’s praxeology is incompatible with the idea of God nor with my criticism and brief summary…</p>
— Stephan Kinsella (@NSKinsella) <a href=”https://twitter.com/NSKinsella/status/1980378970442141788?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw”>October 20, 2025</a></blockquote>
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Robert P. Murphy, “Reconciling God With Libertarian Theory,” in Elvira Nica & Gheorghe H. Popescu, eds., <em>A Passion for Justice: Essays in Honor of Walter Block</em> (New York: Addleton Academic Publishers, forthcoming 2025 or 2026?).

In response to a draft of this piece, I gave Bob some comments. In my email:
<blockquote>Clever and well done. Not sure what the first part, about free will, has to do with god’s owning us… I embedded some comments w/ track changes. I refer to my critique of libertarian creationism so attach the latest draft of the pdf in case you what to glance at it.</blockquote>
Bob:
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… your response is exactly what I needed; I want to be careful and not simply state as if it’s obvious that the creator of the universe owns it.
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<div>I still think that’s weird though, the move you are making, about creating bodies versus controlling them. In the future when cars are all self-driving, if I come up with a way to hack into my neighbor’s car and instruct it to drive me around, you still think that’s stealing right?</div>
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<div>Kinsella:</div>
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<div dir=”auto”>yes. Direct control over cars is not the basis of ownership. As for bodies of someone can control my body it’s trickier.</div></blockquote>
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<blockquote>As for creation-humans never create things. They only rearrange matter. They transform. This is what production is. Even rand agrees. So does Mises and Rothbard. See
<div><a href=”https://c4sif.org/2010/09/locke-on-ip-mises-rothbard-and-rand-on-creation-production-and-rearranging/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener” data-saferedirecturl=”https://www.google.com/url?q=https://c4sif.org/2010/09/locke-on-ip-mises-rothbard-and-rand-on-creation-production-and-rearranging/&source=gmail&ust=1761084247637000&usg=AOvVaw2xWmN9xC_k4y1ahXb5NurY”>https://c4sif.org/2010/09/<wbr />locke-on-ip-mises-rothbard-<wbr />and-rand-on-creation-<wbr />production-and-rearranging/</a></div>
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<div><span style=”color: #333333;”>I am not suggesting you, respond to me; just suggesting you might want to have some footnotes alluding to the fact that there is some external discussion of some of these matters, whether or not you have time to respond to it</span></div>
<div>…</div>
<div>Incidentally, this is clever and nicely written and argued. But I think there are some fallacies in some of your arguments, for example, your comic strip argument is clever but … really makes no sense. In that strip there are no characters who feel and think things. And if they say “what if God…” then that is just God writing those words for them. So the analogy is hard to maintiain. I also think there are problems w/ your free will arguments and the attempt to square it with God’s omnipotence/omniscience etc. But a B+ for effort!</div></blockquote>
<div>And more:</div>
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<div id=”avWBGd-4541″ class=”WhmR8e” data-hash=”0″>Kinsella:</div>
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<div class=”WhmR8e” data-hash=”0″>I also think there are different arguments that could be made. For self-ownership. We just don’t need to make them yet since we have no god-proof . e.g. you could say that everyone owns his body b/c he homesteads it, but the basis of homesteading is initial direct control. We just don’t have to respond to these situations yet.</div>
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<div>Eg. I have told people this, re arguing why spam should be trespass:</div>
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<div>”I assume you would agree that if someone knocks on my door after I told them they are not welcome on my property, that’s trespass. Even if it’s not, if someone else does it. Right? I have a door open to the street, but I have communicated to a given person that I revoke his permission to use my door.</div>
<div>I assume also you would agree that in some cases calling someone’s house can be some offense–for example a stalker who keeps calling some woman over and over, making her fear.</div>
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<div>So suppose I have a phone connected to the phone system, like having a door and sidewalk connected to the street. If I sign up to a well-known DO NOT SPAM registry, and some spammer picks up his phone and dials my number anyway, isn’t he using my phone without my permission? He’s causing it to ring, is he not? The phone would not ring if he didn’t dial the number. It’s like he’s using a remote control device.</div>
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<div>To take another example, suppose I and my neighbor have identical remote control helicopters. To avoid interfering with each other I switch mine to channel 7 and he uses channel 13 on his. One day he intentionally switches his remote to channel 7 and starts piloting my helicopter around my living room, wreaking havoc. Would you not say he is using my helicopter without my permission?”</div>
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<div>[Bob]: it seems that Block and you don’t understand how e-mails and computers work. The spammer isn’t causing anything to happen to your computer to which you do not consent.</div>
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<div>You don’t seem to understand how nuanced and complicated these words “cause” and “consent” are. I understand the factual situation but yes, I do think that the spammer is “causing” things to happen and no, I don’t think you “consent” to it.</div>
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<div>Let’s take some other examples. suppose someone keeps calling your phone. Some telemarketer. You alert them “don’t call me anymore”. I’d say that if they keep caling you, they are using your phone without your consent–they are making it ring. The fact that you are joined to a network where this is *possible* does NOT mean you “consent to it”.</div>
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<div>How about this. You have a remote control helicopter drone <wbr />sitting on your kitchen table. Your neighbor can see it from across the street. He plays around with his “Ardoino” device and figures out the remote control signal codes, and so he remotely turns on your helicopter and flies it around your kitchen, smashing dishes and chasing your dogs and kids around. Now by your logic, the neighbor isn’t trespassing–why, you had the audacity to have a remote control that “invited” his control by having “such-and-such” a nature. He didn’t “cause” it to fly around–you “consented” to his control of your helicopter.</div>
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<div>Bob:</div>
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<div>I am not seeing how the spammer / helicopter stuff is hurting me.</div></blockquote>
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<div>Kinsella:</div>
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<div>It’s about direct control. If I can control your helicopter in your dining room it’s still using your resource without your consent. maybe something like that could be modified for human bodies, if/when other people or a “god” could control it. I think the whole concept of human action and “conflict” and “use of means” would change in such a world.</div></blockquote>
<div>Bob:</div>
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<blockquote>OK. Maybe this is all obvious to you, but I noticed when I was writing up my stuff about that Hoppe passage, it seems we are conflating two different uses of the possessive. In your framework, I think it would make sense to say, “OJ Simpson started out owning his body, but after the trial with competent libertarian judges, he was found guilty of murder and now the parents of his ex-wife own OJ’s body.”
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<div>So notice in that formulation, I’m still calling it “OJ’s body” even though I’m saying somebody else owns it. I think what Hoppe showed is why it’s so natural for us to refer to that particular limb as “Hoppe’s arm” and not “Schulze’s arm.” But that doesn’t prove libertarian self-ownership, since Ted Bundy’s arm is still Ted Bundy’s arm in that sense.</div>
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<div>Or put it this way: I could do a Black Mirror episode where you and Hoppe run a prison, and the android guards mistakenly take your commands to inject cyanide into the prisoner’s body on death row and put it into your body, because the robot actually took your article seriously and thinks you own the prisoner and hence “Stephan’s body” is now ambiguous.</div></blockquote>
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<div>Kinsella:</div>
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<blockquote>not sure the point exactly, and we could talk about it sometime, but i despite arguments by lexicography. and I agree w/ Lefevre. See <a href=”https://c4sif.org/2012/12/lefevre-on-intellectual-property-and-the-ownership-of-intangibles/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener” data-saferedirecturl=”https://www.google.com/url?q=https://c4sif.org/2012/12/lefevre-on-intellectual-property-and-the-ownership-of-intangibles/&source=gmail&ust=1761084247681000&usg=AOvVaw3fgyrtWeoHUHsTYATNZFGj”>LeFevre on Intellectual Property and the “Ownership of Intangibles”</a>:</blockquote>
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<p style=”padding-left: 40px;”>LeFevre also highlights the confusion that often comes from the linguistic use of possessives:</p>
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<p style=”padding-left: 80px;”>It is quite common for one or both spouses in a marriage contract to presume that their opposite number is actually a possession of theirs. Our language gives credence to this supposition for it is usual to hear a man refer to his partner as “my wife.” She is not his in a property sense.</p>

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Bob:
<blockquote>My point is that Hoppe’s musings (translated from German, that stuff) to me establish why we call it Hoppe’s arm, not that he owns his body in a libertarian sense.</blockquote>
Kinsella:
<blockquote>Yes, I get your objection, more or less, I think. …</blockquote>
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Here are my in-line comments to his draft chapter, quoting some of Bob’s text as necessary for context:
<blockquote>Simply put, if the Genesis accounts are correct, then God created spacetime itself. He didn’t use other inputs, but <em>de novo </em>created every last quark in the cosmos. As such, according to standard libertarianism (e.g. Rothbard ____, p. 34), God is clearly the rightful owner of the material universe</blockquote>
Kinsella: I am curious to see what you argue here: are you arguing the standard libertarian view is that people who <em>create</em> some thing <em>own it</em> because they <em>created it</em>? This is the view I disagree with and do not thing it is part of libertarianism; it is an error of Lockean “creationism”. It also leads to intellectual property b/c if you create a pattern or invention or poem, you “own” it since you created it. In my book I discuss this e.g. ch. 14, Part III.B, and ch. 15, Part IV.C. I mean in a sense, parents “create” their baby; do they “own” it?? No, because the childhas direct control over its body so is as self owner, despite someone else having crated it. See my chapter 4, How We Come To Own Ourselves. But as I told you I believe in previous comments, God, unlike a child’s parents, can also directly control any human’s body [presumably]. Thus, the argument for self-ownership and against slavery [other-ownership] breaks down if we posit a God-creator. But <em>not</em> because he’s the creator; but instead, because of his power to control human bodies directly.
<blockquote>and can set whatever rules He wants for His tenants. God is no more a dictator or tyrant than the manager in a factory who tells employees they have to pass a drug test to remain on the company premises. As I put it when I spoke to the Libertarian Christian Institute: “Atheist libertarians love the idea of homesteading, except for God” (Murphy 2017).</blockquote>
Kinsella: Homesteading has nothing to do with creation! Homesteading means finding and using an already-existing and previously-unowned resource. In your example God didn’t do this; he created the universe. I guess you could argue that once it’s created, and it’s unowned, God can swoop down and start “using” it or embordering it—mixing his labor with it—to try to “own” it, but that was not your premise. Your premise seemed to be that if you create something you own it, and that this is part of libertarianism. It’s not. As I discuss in the sections cited above, see e.g. p. 417, and note 51. See also the section “Creation of Wealth versus Creation of Property” in this paper: “<a href=”https://thelibertarianalliance.com/2011/01/18/stephan-kinsella-on-intellectual-property/”>Intellectual Freedom and Learning Versus Patent and Copyright</a>,” <em><a href=”http://www.libertarian.co.uk/”>Economic Notes</a></em> No. 113 (Libertarian Alliance, Jan. 18, 2011), also published as “<a href=”http://www.libertarianstandard.com/articles/stephan-kinsella/intellectual-freedom-and-learning-versus-patent-and-copyright/”>Intellectual Freedom and Learning Versus Patent and Copyright</a>,” <em>The Libertarian Standard</em>, Jan. 19, 2011.

In other words, if I reject God’s ownership of the universe based on his claim that he created it, it does not mean I object to his owning it by <em>homesteading</em>.]

As for whether you what to quote or cite me, well I don’t think at this point you have time to really engage with my comments. But I would think it appropriate to drop a footnote somewhere in this paper, saying that I do address some of these issues explicitly in: Stephan Kinsella, “Defending Argumentation Ethics,” in <a href=”https://www.stephankinsella.com/lffs/”><em>Legal Foundations of a Free Society</em></a> (Houston, Texas: <a href=”http://www.papinianpress.com/”>Papinian Press</a>, 2023), pp. 158–63, esp. the section “God as Slaveowner” (pp. 160-63).

As for your following section, again you might want to drop a note saying that though you don’t have space to deal with this, Kinsella explicitly responds to the argument in that next section, in Stephan Kinsella, “Defending Argumentation Ethics,” in <a href=”https://www.stephankinsella.com/lffs/”><em>Legal Foundations of a Free Society</em></a> (Houston, Texas: <a href=”http://www.papinianpress.com/”>Papinian Press</a>, 2023), the section “Arguing With Your Slave” (pp. 158–60).

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Regarding a section about Murphy’s argument about God owning us as slaves or something (see Stephan Kinsella, “<a href=”https://stephankinsella.com/publications/defending-argumentation-ethics/”>Defending Argumentation Ethics: Reply to Murphy & Callahan</a>,” in <a href=”https://stephankinsella.com/lffs/”><em>Legal Foundations of a Free Society</em></a> (Houston, Texas: Papinian Press, 2023), in the sections “Arguing With Your Slave” and “God as Slaveowner”), I wrote:

Kinsella: In the end: as I think I said before: I don’t know if I would disagree with you that God owns us—because he has even more direct control over our bodies than we do. But … so what? Libertarianism is a political philosophy about what inter-human laws are just—it’s about how we can treat each other. The existence of God only reinforces this, since if he is the owner of us, or of the whole universe, and if he is “good” and thus somewhat of a libertarian, we can presume he also agrees that as between us humans we ought to treat each other according to libertarian rules; so his existence doesn’t oppose libertarianism. Also, in what you quoted from Walter above,… it’s not clear to me he would disagree that God owns us.. .he just thinks it’s irrelevant (?). Isn’t this basically what Walter means when he writes: “[T]his ploy of utilizing the Deity for the purpose of criticizing argumentation ethics is itself illegitimate. It is well known that <strong>libertarianism is a theory that concerns the relationship between man and man, not between man and God</strong>. When recourse is made to the latter, all bets are off.
<blockquote>But what if, say, intelligent aliens created the earth out of diffuse matter that was circling the sun billions of years ago? They would have homesteaded that material</blockquote>
This may be correct, unlike your God-created-the-universe example above, since in that case God created things <em>ex nihilo</em>; here, the Aliens took already-existing, unowned resources and transformed them in some useful way so as to homestead them. But then, if they are long gone, I would argue they have abandoned it. I believe I already sent you some points about abandonment e.g. of trash, in a previous correspondence. I could look it up if you need it but I imagine time is short for you and this morning it is for me to..
<blockquote>and would therefore be the rightful owners of planet Earth.</blockquote>
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<blockquote>To them, the idea that intelligent beings would one day walk around Earth, thinking they had arisen purely by random mutation and natural selection, might seem preposterous—as silly as teenagers finding a bicycle parked in the woods and claiming they thought it was a weird rock formation and that’s why they took it home.</blockquote>
So are you saying they created the earth as as sort of zoo…? I would still argue that the humans who exist are self-owners (see above) since each one has a better claim to his body than the aliens, just as a child is a self-owner even though the parents created him