It's a simple story: a major scientist (Stephen Hawking in many versions of the story) is in front of an audience explaining the latest findings in cosmology. An elderly lady stands up and objects. For she is a Hindu and believes the world rests on three elephants, which in turn are standing on a giant turtle. The auditorium explodes with laughter but the scientist is unphased. Rather than mock this woman's idiotic primitive religious superstition directly, he asks her: "very well, but what is the giant turtle standing on?" Without blinking an eye, the woman delivers her simple-minded punchline: "there are turtles all the way down." More info/versions here. A great image here. Some good links here.
There are many interpretations to the story - I think the most common one is that the story is a joke that exposes the ridiculousness of religious belief. This is ironic because the butt of the joke gets transferred to the joker. Any belief system is turtles all the way down! Whether atheistic, religious, scientific or superstitious. Especially ethical systems which MUST always be based on another ethical belief leading to a regress (see David Hume). Ultimately we are all standing on turtles. No matter what our belief system we eventually come back to our motivation as humans and then it's just like the annoying child that keeps on asking "why?", each question leading to another turtle.
This does not mean that all views are equally right. That would just mimick one of the most annoying postmodern arguments (and there are many to choose from!):
- there is no objective truth
- therefore all truths are equally valid
- therefore I'm right.
What then? There are a few solutions. Evolution is probably the only concept that avoids the turtlestack. If we look at the origin of our motivation, their historical origin is the only account that does not end in endless whys. But for me to do that I need to look at myself as a human being with a psychology that's resting on infinite turtles. Which makes the old woman's story a bit humbling as well as ironic -- a koan for the 31st century.
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“Evolution is probably the only concept that avoids the turtlestack.”
Is it though? Where did evolution begin?
If you mean organic evolution then I’d say with the first carbon-based replicators. Of course it doesn’t explain everything in the universe before that — what I meant is that evolution is the first idea we’ve ever had that shows how “you don’t need something more to have something more”. If that make sense…
I agree with Alan. Whether you’re into the big bang, or evolution, or cyclic universes, or singularities, or whatever, you’ve always got to ask where it came from.
Where did the matter of the primeval soup come from? Where did the contents of the big bang come from? What was the singularity contained in? What is the cyclic universe contained in?
Every philosophy is standing on turtles. There must have been something first. I think the Judeo-Christian God makes the most sense.
Thanks for commenting — I agree we can ask where everything came from. But that doesn’t mean every philosophy must be standing on turtles. The theory of evolution showed us the first example of a theory that explains how complexity is created from something very simple and trivial. We need the same kind of explanation for the universe at large — we just aren’t there yet!
What the turtles represent is passing the buck — when you explain something by using something equally complex and equally in need of an explanation. And I think the Judeo-Christian God is a perfect example (in this case the turtle-stack is only a few turtles deep).
For suppose you’re right, that there must be “something” first that’s a causeless cause. You seem to be saying that the YHWH hypothesis makes more sense than the Zeus hypothesis or the “it was just a causeless cause” hypothesis. Is that right? Cause I don’t see how that follows.
Just saw a TV program last night on dark matter and dark energy, and how a lot of physicists think it explains the universe, but some key physicists that it’s passing the buck.
It seems to me that it’s trying to explain something with something very complex, and that no-one has been able to even prove it exists.
There was one physicist that said cosmology is very much like religion.
I’d say [modern] cosmology is more like philosophy but he has a point. But I do think they have shown it exists since the gravitational force present in galaxies and galactic clusters is much greater than could be expected given what we see. So at the very least it suggests some kind of matter currently invisible to us (whether or not the current theories of dark matter/energy are any good)
um… all the way down to WHERE? Remember, you don’t HAVE to walk to the bottom turtle by turtle.
Or to rephrase the question, are there aleph-null turtles, aleph-one turtles, or some other quantity?
Chainsaw — this question is answered in a great story by Scott Aaronson: http://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/pancake.html
(If only I managed to understand it all!)
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