Digressions&Impressions

The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Byzantium, and the PSR

One interesting feature of recent debates about God’s existence is the use of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to deride the rationality of theistic belief (a colorful spin on Russell’s teapot case). What I’m interested in is why anyone was ever impressed with it.

Lately I’ve been studying the history of the Byzantine Empire: its military history, its religion and theology, its philosophy, art, and architecture. It’s amazing to me that there’s an entire empire, lasting one thousand years, that is wholly absent from popular Western culture. When was the last time you saw the Byzantine Empire mentioned in a movie, a television show, or a recent novel? And so what happened? Why did one thousand years of Greek Christian history go down the memory hole?

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For many neoplatonic thinkers (Christian or no), the existence of some sort of deity is philosophically obvious. God/master deity often served as the explanatory ground of almost everything: concepts, knowledge, morality, human purpose, the soul, freedom, and the basis of political order. This isn’t a coincidence. They believed they had arguments beginning from their philosophical commitments and extending to the existence of some kind of chief deity. Some kind of God served a central explanatory role in these philosophical and theological systems.

For neoplatonists, the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) would have seemed a ridiculous analogy with the divine. The power of the FSM is to generate the intuition that God’s existence is random, unnecessary, and absurd. And just as no one should believe in FSM, no one should believe in God. But, again, the finest minds for over a thousand years, and really fifteen hundred years, would have been utterly unmoved because God’s existence was in no way random. In fact, God’s existence was the least random thing imaginable.

The truth is that a single, original deity isn’t going to seem random on any view that prioritizes the conceptual and the mental as ontologically fundamental. Deity just doesn’t look weird on such views. And, importantly, these views aren’t insane, since it is hard to see how the conceptual and the mental as we know them could even in principle originate in the material world. So there must be some mental point of origin or explanation, and that suggests at least one deity, and perhaps only one master deity. I take no stand here on whether those systems must lead to some kind of theism, just that it is entirely reasonable for these philosophical systems to yield arguments for some kind of theism.

So when did FSM start seeming like an interesting analogy? Not the 19th century, since idealism was dominant in many places, and idealists frequently affirmed the existence of either an immanent deity or a transcendent one.

No, it is the dominance of physicalism that gives the FSM its rhetorical power. But this suggests that all the FSM can do is convince people with tacit physicalist commitments that God’s existence is as random and unexplained as the FSM. For again, for centuries upon centuries, almost no reflective person with philosophical training would have been impressed. Instead, the only people who are impressed are those who have absorbed physicalist assumptions. And, while physicalism is influential, it is not only reasonably contestable, but it is probably in some trouble in the philosophy of mind and metaethics. It’s just hard to jam mental and moral properties into the physical world.

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So that’s why I think the FSM impresses some people. It impresses express or tacit physicalists, but other reasonable philosophical systems won’t see a single God as an arbitrary and laughably random postulate. And the philosophical systems that do see God in this way are subject to various difficulties. Now, the Christian God may indeed seem random as a specification of the master deity, but even Christians admit that we only know about God’s Trinitarian structure through revelation. So if you want to impugn the Christian God with the FSM, you have to already think you have a good argument against the idea that the master deity can and has revealed itself as having a Trinitarian form. And that requires a bit more than ridicule, if the existence of a master deity is already on the table.--Kevin Vallier "Why Was Anyone Ever Impressed by the Flying Spaghetti Monster?"

Let me start by saying that I love Kevin Vallier's attempt to think seriously about the historically conditioned conceptual pre-conditions of shifts in the apparent plausibility of a thought experiment, argument, or intuition. (He is also right to note the oddness of the near invisibility of Byzantine culture.) Contemporary philosophers tend to dislike doing this because it smacks of relativism (of the historicist kind) and it creates a pathway toward systemic methodological doubt about the evidential status of a lot of our techniques. 

As an aside, Vallier does not emphasize that for much of its natural history the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM) was intended and understood  as satire (this is exceptionally clear in the Wikipedia article describing its history). It's pretty clear that even if satire is a human universal (I don't know), the content of satire is (ahh) necessarily historically conditioned. But FSM has found its way into philosophical discussion (see for example here).

Now, Vallier suggests that it's the twentieth century rise of physicalism that helps explain the tacit cultural/rhetorical power of FSM. Because it is the embrace of physicalism that allows one to see God’s existence "as random and unexplained as the FSM." But Vallier does not explain why this is so. By this I do not mean that Vallier needs to offer a mechanism that takes us from the philosophy presupposed in the zeitgeist to the cognitive effectiveness of ridicule; although it would be swell. But rather what the conceptual connection is between physicalism and the purported randomness and explanatory vacuity of of God. It can't be because of the commitment to law-governedness in physicalism because God is in no worse position (conceptually) than various (let's say, other) arbitrary initial conditions. It can't be because God can't be explained within physicalism because physicalists can't explain the origin and nature of laws and constants.  And it can't be because God is inconsistent with physicalism. This list is not meant to be exhaustive.

Vallier himself suggests that one some interpretations physicalists leave no room for mental and moral properties at all. But as Vallier hints that version of pysicalism generates much mystery about many of our social practices and the nature of experience. So, the case is by no means straightforward. (I am no property dualist, for the record.)

Rather, the rise of physicalism happens to coincide with the demise of the principle of sufficient reason (PSR; see here). That the PSR was taken to have lost its salience in the twentieth century is taken for granted in, and perhaps best expressed by, Lovejoy's The Great Chain of Being. I think it's the lack of cultural purchase of the PSR that accounts for the historical shift Vallier is trying to put his finger on. For the PSR has no tolerance for (i) arbitrary events; (ii) no tolerance for un-caused events/entities (that is a natural way to interpret the idea that “Nothing comes from nothing”); and (iii) no tolerance for unexplained events/entities (etc.). 

The connection between the rise of phsyicalism and the demise of the PSR is culturally conditioned, but not intrinsic. For, at the start of the twentieth century, for various reasons, and I hasten to add not all of them good reasons, scientific developments (the Big Bang, quantum mechanics, etc.) were interpreted as suggesting that science entails that the cosmos has arbitrary elements ineliminably woven into it (and so incompatible with the PSR).

Ine may think there is now a deeper mystery. If the demise of the PSR created a physicalism wonderfully at ease with randomness, then implying God is really random can't really figure into an argument against the existence of God.

The mystery dissolves if we remember the FSM is not an argument against the existence of God (understood as a designing mind). Rather, it is a demand for "equal time" for other wonderful ideas.

Piketty's Taxation --> Transparency Argument

The benefit of the global progressive tax on capital is that it will help to stop tax havens and make wealth inequalities a matter of public record:

3E. Lack of Transparency: r > g entails high levels of wealth inequality that are easy to hide under present legal conditions. This makes the true distribution of wealth inaccessible to the voting public, preventing them from making rational collective decisions.

3P. Increasing Transparency: A global progressive tax on capital will stop tax havens and other institutions that make it difficult if not impossible for the general public to know the distribution of wealth, as the taxing power will generate accurate records.

Piketty is happy to place a great deal weight on 3P. This means that if 3P fails, it is an enormous problem for the normative arguments in the book.--Kevin Vallier

Vallier and I agree that 3E/3P play a huge role in Piketty's book. I had called attention to them in one of my earlier posts, but Vallier's post is very useful for the careful focus he puts on them. Vallier goes on to argue that (i) that taxation is not necessary for generating this transparency; (ii) the goal of transparency can’t justify the level of taxation Piketty endorses. Let's grant (ii), although Piketty has different arguments for the level he advocates. Let's grant (i), too.

Even so, all Piketty needs is the argument that (i*) taxation is among the most likely to succeed means for generating transparency. One might worry that because Piketty has been working with tax-related-data he might be biased in favor of (1*). So, here's an argument-strategy (3P*) in favor of (i*) that Vallier does not consider and that I am pretty sure is what Piketty is after and that deploys premises that are independent of his framework:

• When governments have an interest in the matter then they will do their very best to get the data on the table.
• Governments survive on taxation.
• There is a LOT of global wealth
• So, once governments tax global wealth, governments will put their full power behind getting the best data on global wealth on the table.