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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Holy bookclub, Batman: The Gods of Fish and Men

Some recommended reading this time. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin...

Immense, of fishy form and mind,

Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;

And under that Almighty Fin,

The littlest fish may enter in.

Excerpt from Heaven, by Rupert Brooke.

 

I came across the poem ‘Heaven’, from which the above is an excerpt, in a book I’m reading at the moment, The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan. The title alludes to another book I’ve mentioned before: The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James. Both are collections of the respective authors’ contributions to the Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology – the knowledge of god accessible not by revelation but by experience and reason. In 1901 James used his lectures to argue for the role of science in the study of religion, and set out his vision of what that might mean. Sagan - an astrophysicist and science communicator par excellence – used his lectures in 1985 to set out why he felt the proper exercise of scepticism does not preclude a sense of the sacred in our approach to the universe, but why human religions, such as they are, fail to capture it. Awe and wonder - says Sagan - are the only proper reactions to the majesty of creation, all the more so if we take modern ideas about its scale and complexity seriously. Indeed, it’s precisely the appreciation of this scale that makes earthly religions seem so parochial – for all the swarming diversity of human religious forms, they do not represent the full set of logically possible types of gods, beings and forces. Rather, they seem to speak to a much smaller set of conspicuously human concerns. Hence the poem: from a neutral perspective, would the anthropocentrism of our revealed religions appear all that different from the poem's fishy theology?

Sceptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense. - Carl Sagan

Another book I’ve read recently – Religion Explained , by anthropologist Pascal Boyer – also draws lessons from the ways in which human religion varies and the ways in which it seems to embody common concerns. He starts by outlining why religion unto itself is a phenomenon demanding an explanation, as a peculiar form of human behaviour and not just a specific manifestation of general cultural activity. He also set out why he thinks the common garden explanations typically proposed – religion as Existential Consolation, as Primitive Science, as Failure of Proper Thinking and so on – fail to do the job: no one of them accounts for the all the actual ways and manners in which religion is practiced. His proposal is that religious ideas and ritual activate a specific set of evolved psychological tendencies – that facilitates their general plausibility to mankind – in combination with specific violations of the expectations of those systems, explaining the endless interest such ideas engender. That’s a little lacking in detail I know, but I don’t want to get drawn into the detail here and the argument is set out in entertaining psychological and anthropological detail well worth the read even if you don’t buy his perspective. I’m not personally sure he succeeds in providing an explanation of religion in isolation. What I want to draw out here is the sense in which its easy to point to religious or spiritual feeling when you see it, but much harder to separate it off as a proper category all unto itself.

 “For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” - Carl Sagan

One domain in which people sometimes seek to maintain a thick and fast division between science and religion is ethics – insomuch as the latter is meant to be a proper source while he former is not. I’m all for appropriate wariness as regards the naturalistic fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_fallacy) – deriving an ought from an is – but another of my recent reads has got me thinking about the ethics embedded in the practice of and motivation to do science. Its fiction this time, Antarctica by Kim Stanley Robinson. Among other things, it’s an exploration of the ideals embedded in science – the perfectibility or at least improvability of knowledge, the attempt to view things from outside of a human-centric perspective – and the treaty-model of Antartica as a ‘scientific resource’ as basis for our relationship with the natural world at large. It - along with the author’s excellent Mars Trilogy – is a compelling attempt to feel a way between humanity’s right to make use of the natural order to feed and sustain itself, and our duty as custodians to the very otherness and awe that we can all rightly agree is the only response to creation.

Carina Nebula

  “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

 

NOTE: I recently came across this website (for which there also a .co.uk version too), which I can recommend if you are thinking of looking for any of these titles: http://www.betterworldbooks.com/. They “…collect and sell books online to donate books and fund literacy initiatives worldwide. With more than 8 million new and used titles in stock, we’re a self-sustaining, triple-bottom-line company that creates social, economic and environmental value for all our stakeholders.”

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When god knocks on your door, how closely to you look at what he’s selling?

“I am no lover of disorder and doubt as such. Rather I fear to lose truth by the pretension to possess it already wholly.” ― William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

So, you might be forgiven for wondering where a self-avowed atheist gets the presumption that he’s qualified to write about religious experience. Not religious history, nor philosophy, nor the relation of faith and science, but direct honest-to-goodness personal experience of the apparently divine. Never mind that the operating thesis of this blog is that the feelings invoked in religious contexts are a common heritage of human experience, and that there other targets for our feelings of awe, duty and belonging. Never mind that – even if the following weren’t the case – presumption is not something I’m lacking in. No, the reason I feel I have a little something to say on the subject is that I’m no stranger to ‘religious experience’.

I’m not saying I’ve had experience of religion, in the sense of attending ‘church’ and engaging in ritual, although I have that to. I mean a particular, arresting event that on first sight is difficult to process except in the context in which it presents itself: divinely, religiously, miraculously – whatever. Don’t worry - this isn’t a confession of regular visions of messiahood or anything. It’s a story of the kind of Weird Shit I’ve mentioned before, but that happened to me personally and on which I’ve spent a lot of thought. As I’ve said, while it would be wrong to say I was raised Buddhist I was raised around it, and there have been times when that kind of faith has been more appealing. Once upon one of these periods, in an instructional context at a Buddhist centre I decided I couldn’t follow the in-depth notes about a particular technique, so I decided to meditate and just do the visualisations being suggested. After a while, I found myself in what one might call, for the frustrating lack of a better term, an ‘altered state of perception’. The most superficial aspect, and most easily describable, is that all my sensations of touch – the feel of my clothes, the weight of my body, the feeling of a paper clip in my hand – were experienced as something akin to ‘pins and needles’. Paresthesia, if you will. Harder to explain is the sense in which I feel I could ‘see’ the thinness of the phenomenal world, like the screen of a shadow-puppet show. By ‘see’ I don’t mean to romanticise a new intellectual perspective. But nor do I mean the phenomena was merely, or even really, visual either. Enough to say, the experience – not unpleasant while it was occurring – knocked for me for six after I came back to earth, and had me mulling it over for quite some time. 

It might not sound like much, but I can’t stress the lasting effect it had on me. But then, if that’s the case, you might ask why this supposedly religious experience was not also a conversion experience. Certainly, at the time, the pull of more worldly delights was a strong disincentive. But, over the longer term, I have other reasons for viewing this experience as formative, but not definitive in terms of the way I see the world. My academic training provides me with plenty of science babble to nicely box this experience in such a way that I wouldn’t need to think more deeply about its implications – hypnosis, suggestion, hallucination. Such are the terms that safe ‘scepticism’ is usually couched in. That not why the reason you don’t see me in red robes today.

I recently listened to this podcast , ‘A sceptics guide to the mind’, which I heartily recommend. In summary, the guest speaker makes the observation that while feeling and sensations – happiness, recalling a memory, feeling certain – occur in our conscious minds (and/or brains); the process by which they come about isn’t available to us. When you construct a sentence in your native tongue, the words spring to mind and you don’t have to piece a sentence together piecemeal selecting a verb here, a preposition there. When you pick up a cup, the subjective you doesn’t compute the force, the velocity, the geometries required. It just happens. The speaker’s interesting point is that this is also true of feelings of certainty. I may have a sensation of unassailable logical certainty in regards to a proposition, but the certainty is a sensation of mine – produced by a process I have no access to – not a feature of the proposition.

It seems to me something similar hold for the feeling of religious awe, of the numinous, of divine presence. They are a feature of us, whether or not they’re an appropriate reaction to something or someone out there. We, in our heads, don’t know how they arise - we don’t have access to the process that brings them about. So lights, trumpets and warm cuddly feelings aside, one still has to decide for oneself what view of the world makes sense for – or of - them. In the marketplace of ideas, even when the ads are overwhelming, you still have to haggle. 

Photo by Agnonymous, some rights reserved.

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I was a stranger, and you took me in

 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

For I was hungry, and you gave me food: I was thirsty, and you gave me drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in:

Naked, and you clothed me: I was sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came unto me.

-          Matthew 25:34-36

  

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pasukaru76/4777196383/

Putting my metaphorical money where my virtual mouth is, I went to my first Holy Communion at a local Anglican Church the other week, and also had good chat with the vicar. It was both more and less than what I expected, and my prejudices were confirmed and challenged in equal measure. I’ve been mulling over the range of impressions I have of the experience, each of which will no doubt be fodder for future posts. There was humour, definitely. The eagerness to impress and hook new and – heavens! – young blood was obvious. The experience of having to pray and sing things I didn’t know the words to in the midst of a very grey congregation where I my voice seemed to cut through everyone else’s mademe smile too. On the other hand, the welcome was clearly heartfelt and genuine, as was the comfort derived from the service and the community at the church, in addition to the obvious commitment and pride that goes into the churches impressive ‘secular’ charitable endeavours. The food bank operating out of the church is very impressive, as was the commitment of the congregation to be a hub for this kind of service. 

                The theme of the service was surprisingly apt. The reading was Matthew 25: 31-46, ‘The sheep and goats judgement’, from which the excerpt above was taken. The verse is concerned with the coming judgment, and – as the vicar told it – the point was that superficial religious observance is insufficient to ensure a place on the winning team when the end of days arrives. Rather, an active charity and love was required of Christians, and that we were to love one another as we should love Him. The vicar concentrated, oddly enough, on the welcoming strangers part. Not chosen for my benefit - unless they really do have special line to the Big Guy. There was another bible reference that I really liked: 

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

-          Hebrews 13:2

 

Definitely felt the feelings I associate with religious experiences – which, despite my atheism, I have had – but which I’d only previously known in Buddhist meditative contexts or while mulling over some whopper implication of a scientific observation. There’s a sense of calm, effortless joyfulness and unpredicated appreciativeness. It gives you a kind of mental spaciousness, and I don’t (just) mean airheadness. No, it’s not faithful feelings I can’t do. Instead, its committing to a cosmology, a sense of reality – be that a particular relation to the world, or to a personal god - that doesn’t ring true for me. I find easy, and I share, the comfort in religion as a choice one can make about ones relation to the world. I find it difficult to accept as a description of the universe in its own terms, given that – to me – it is so clearly anthropomorphic and anthropocentric. 

Maybe I should understand faith in similar terms to the way I have come to  – relative to my younger self – understand romantic love, after having had the (er...) benefit of a serious relationship for some years now. I find a lot of adolescents, and adolescent adults, understand love as something that happens to you, something that the universe arranges and that you have no part in creating. For me at least, love is something you choose to be able to commit to, to be ready for and worthy of. Perhaps faith is something you’ve got to engage with in the same way. William James, talking about the active acquiescence of religious life, makes a distinction between agreeing to, and agreeing with. 

            Perhaps. But, for me at least, I’ve yet to make the acquaintance of a metaphysic I could meet halfway.


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