What people value about any ‘thing’ is its essence, for example, someone may purchase an item because it makes them more productive, or because it makes them more serene, or it makes them more beautiful. These qualities are what makes the ‘thing’ valuable and it is sought out by humans because these qualities are able to be perceived by humans. These qualities or virtues or attributes of God are foundational to value (in other words, that is why they are valuable) and therefore they are part of economic science unless, that is, there is an artifical separation between ethics and economics!
Means and ends are not necessarily perfectly distinct and the overlapping of means and ends in the real world of human action makes it possible to separate economics and ethics only artificially since there is the intertwining of means and ends almost at all times.
