Turtles All The Way Down: ways in which the abyss smiles back

As I was walking up the stair,

I met a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today.

I wish, I wish he'd go away.

 ― Hugh Mearns

The last post on the prime mover – the entity or thing that got the universal ball rolling - left me thinking. In it, I was concerned with the ways in which – leaving aside the validity of the argument itself -  it is sometimes misused to sneak in other preconceived notions about the attributes we think a Ultimate Cause should have. Here, I’d like to pick apart the issue of validity as a springboard for some musing on why that validity goes largely unquestioned. In essence, the argument takes something we think we know about ‘normal phenomena’ – effects have causes, ‘motion’  is imparted rather than self-generated, contingent events rely on necessary precursors – and makes the same claim of the whole shebang: the overarching System itself. Is this valid? What it it that makes us so sure that reality itself is constrained by the same apparent rules as the things it contains? 

The Big Bang is touted as the ‘scientific’ view of the origin of the universe, but it's important to note that the claim is quite specifically constrained within the system. The claim is that, in the words of Wikipedia (my emphasis, and minus citations):

Extrapolation of the expansion of the Universe backwards in time using general relativity yields an infinite density and temperature at a finite time in the past. This singularity signals the breakdown of general relativity. How closely we can extrapolate towards the singularity is debated—certainly no closer than the end of the Planck epoch.

That is - using the rules that are derived from the regularities of phenomena - we have an model of how to run the tape backward, but we can’t get back at time zero. The rules evident within don’t make it through the bottleneck at the start of things to explain the system’s very existence. I’m not knocking the theory – I’m barely equipped to understand the thinking behind it in anything other than crude terms – I just wanted to make clear at the outset that the following isn’t an attack on certain peoples’ ideas of ultimate origins, but an exploration why we feel the need have them in the first place. 

There's a story that has some great scientist, lecturing on modern ideas on cosmology, who is accosted by an old lady who insists the world is flat and carried about on the back of a giant turtle. The scientist, scoffing at this, demands to know: what is supporting the turtle? Quite clearly - the woman tells hims – it's turtles all the way down. Deliciously, the story itself appears to exist unsupported: there's a string of attributions for the source of the story or the identity of the scientist including – apparently inaccurately – Bertrand Russel and William James and individuals before them. What it brings out nicely is the way in which humanity, when faced with an abyss it can’t seem to fill, populates that void with things it can relate to. It’s as if, given the capacity to ask the great questions, we can’t bear the possibility that they’re unanswerable. I wonder how much of our certainty in our metaphysical systems – religious or otherwise – is compensation for our own awareness of the existential abyss we find when we delve for Complete explanations.    

  

“There was a young man who said "God

I find it exceedingly odd

To think that this tree

Should continue to be

When there's no one about in the quad."

"Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;

I am always about in the quad.

And that's why the tree

Will continue to be

Since observed by,

Yours faithfully, God.”

― Ronald A. Knox

This notion of god as the guarantor of reality and the wellspring of everything is certainly comforting, and perhaps that’s the best we can do: faced with a troubling, impenetrable lack we have to negate it with something big enough, but human enough for us to comprehend. Personally though, I can’t help but ask the next question: from whence does it come? This tension - between needing some active creative principle that is comprehensible enough to be accessible in its motivation, and the recognition that anything sufficiently up to the task of being the ground for that creation must be so beyond our ken so as to render it equally disquieting – is evident in both western and eastern traditions. Gnosticism distinguishes between God – the ground or totality of reality – and the ‘evil’ Demiurge who created the material universe, variously identified as both Satan and Yahweh among other contenders. Hindu writings, in the form of the Rig Veda, nicely encapsulate the dilemma: 

But, after all, who knows, and who can say
Whence it all came, and how creation happened?
the gods themselves are later than creation,
so who knows truly whence it has arisen?

Whence all creation had its origin,
he, whether he fashioned it or whether he did not,
he, who surveys it all from highest heaven,
he knows - or maybe even he does not know.

- Nasadiya Sukta, a.k.a. Hymn of Creation, The Rigveda (10:129).

Maybe it’s us – not nature – that abhors a vacuum.

PHOTO BY DAVID DREXLER

   

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Whats in a name? Stench Blossoms, Einstein and the prime moves of God.

Whats in a name?

- In Act II, Scene I, Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare 

Lisa: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.

Bart: Not if you called 'em stench blossoms.

-          The Simpsons, Season 9, 'The principal and the pauper'

If you’ll be patient with me, I’d like to – briefly – talk about another book I’ve been reading recently: Mind in Science by Richard L. Gregory (LINK). The book’s larger interest is the ways in which technology has, throughout history, influenced our thinking about the workings of the universe and our own minds in particular.  I bring it up for a peripheral speculation the author makes early on in a chapter cataloguing the development and kinds of technologies available to the Greeks and earlier civilizations. The author speculates that the general lack – for much of human history - of autonomous power sources other than living organisms may explain some of the mystery and fascination that accrues to ‘Prime Movers’ or causal initiators, and our tendency to understand them in terms of entities or beings. 

The argument for a prime mover as well as its siblings (Necessary Beings, First Cause etc.) is that in the normal mortal run of things, change is apparently not self-initiating: movement requires a mover, contingency requires a necessary precursor. If we follow this chain of causation back, so the argument goes, we must come to a first cause, a prime mover. So far so good: if we accept the assumption that the universe at large requires a cause in the same way that events within the universe seem to, the argument doesn’t seem unreasonable. My objective here isn’t to critique the import of the argument itself – insofar as it rests on an assumption which is difficult to evaluate in its validity, including in its “Big Bang” form – but rather to address the use the conclusion is sometimes put. St. Aquinas uses theargument to support the case for a Christian god, but the argument was formulated first (or at least recorded first) by Aristotle. Aristotle obviously wasn’t interested in supporting the case for Yahweh, but thought the argument implied the existence of gods – plural – not a god. Clearly, even if we accept the need for a prime mover, the argument says nothing more about the attributes of that prime mover: whether it’s an entity or force; singular or plural; nice, nasty or naughty – or even if it still exists. Even if you accept ‘movement requires a prime mover’, that in itself lends no credence to ‘a prime mover equals (my) god’. To give a sense of the kind of attributes that can sneak in and attach themselves if we accept the attachment of the label ‘god’ to prime mover, I used the Wikipedia entry on the ‘Attributes of God in Christianity’ to create a word cloud – where the scaling of the words indicates their relative frequency on the source page: 

 

But, I actually don’t think that its theologians or religious people who are the only – or most unthinking – culprits of allowing peripheral and unjustified associations with the word ‘god’ in by the back door. It’s understandable that if I want to make the case for my god, I interpret the ‘Prime Mover’ in that context. I can reasonably add ‘prime mover’ to the list of attributes I think my god has, as long as I don’t claim that attribute somehow ‘proves’ the other attributes. 

Another trope you sometimes see in debates about god is the proposition that very clever people believe in god, so who are you to say nay? Einstein is a common example, despite being quite clear about what kind of god he was talking about:                   

I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. 

- (Albert Einstein, 1954)

But then, why call it god? If what you mean is the Prime Mover, or the Grand Architect or even just the Implicit Order, why add the theistic connotations to what is usually – at its most ‘spiritual’ – a deistic conception? I wonder if it’s because there’s a kind of wondrousness attached to ‘god’, and the deist or non-theist purveyors of this view want to express that in relation to the world as they see it. As regular readers will know, I get that. But I sometimes think that by appropriating the language of ‘god’, one might be propagating the view that non-religious perspectives are poor relations to their religious counterparts, and that the only language these feelings can be properly expressed in is religious. I don’t believe that is the case, and I’d rather mainline the mystery of the world in as pure a form as I’m capable rather than have it sugar-coated in borrowed epithets that – for me – as much to obscure the wonder as reveal it.    

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