Elephants and turtles
A Hindu cosmological myth, in which the world is borne upon the back of four elephants who in turn stand on the world turtle, Akupāra (Sanskrit: अकूपार), which has a pretty obvious logical flaw that atheists like to think neatly demolishes the intellectual pretensions of organised religion — which it does — while not noticing how neatly it also demolishes the intellectual pretensions of secularists, lawyers, scientists and, well, atheists at the same time. For what — or who — is Akupāra standing on? There is of course an infinite regression here. Had Douglas Hofstadter been a Hindu cosmologist he might have placed the lowermost turtle at sufficiently remove back on Earth. A strange loop. Anyway he wasn’t, and they didn’t so we’ll all just have to ponder the opportunity missed.
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Philosophy
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Note, though, that pace the atheists, this is not a problem with religion, but with epistemology. Every truth depends on a previous one. There is no bedrock truth; they loop around: Every good dictionary is circular. A non-circular dictionary is complete. Indeed, if you take Douglas Hofstadter at his word, that very circularity — reflexivity — is the special sauce of language.
So, like all good metaphors, the Hindu creation myth works best if you don’t interrogate it too closely. Once you start poking around in the basement, with all the turtles, it begins to run out of explanatory force. You see things you can’t unsee. Hence, successful religions have all kinds of mind tricks and guilt trips to stop punters rooting around with the turtles.
And all good creation myths have in common a profound commitment to truth. It’s in their constitution: their very purpose is to stop folks bickering and encourage them to get along, by means of a uniform, universal, comprehensive code of things: There is a truth about the universe, and it goes like so. So all the major religions have commandments, pillars, principles of behaviour and thought.
To make a whopping great narrative, try this: the Enlightenment slowly suffocated God: Copernicus started it, in the 15th century; it fell to Charles Darwin to deliver the coup de grace four centuries later, and Friedrich Nietzsche to announce it to the world.
Now, “God” is a Big Idea — it answers many questions and tells us how we should behave, and organise, ourselves. Over four millennia, religious scholars generated plenty of auxiliary hypotheses to adapt to our changing circumstances. God saved us a lot of existential angst. When we killed God, we gave quite a lot else away, too. Quite useful stuff: a settled means of telling right from wrong, for one thing.
Without God the enlightened western intellectual tradition needed to rebase all these organising principles from scratch: to ditch one Big Idea, it needed to replace it with another. The New Big Idea was there, waiting to take over, at the moment the old one finally fell back lifeless on Charles Darwin’s specimen table. It was, of course, the enlightenment scientific tradition itself. Now, here is an interesting thing: what if the very idea that there must be a Big Idea, at all, derives from the Old Big Idea that just joined the choir invisible. The enlightenment was, in a profound way, utterly bound to the intellectual mores from whose surly bonds it slipped.
For now, hold that thought, for the Big Ideas that rushed in to replace God all cleaved strongly to the notion that there must be a Big Idea. Science could yield physical truth about the world, but not moral truth. To paraphrase David Hume for modern ears:
Every moral system that establishes a God or observes human behaiour suddenly switches from propositions joined by “is” to propositions joined by “ought”. This is an imperceptible, but important change. Since “ought”, expresses a new relation, it must be explained (but usually is not) how this ought can be deduced. To try to explain this would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality and we would see that one cannot found a vice or a virtue merely on the relation between objects.[1]
These attempts to do so, from the rational precepts of enlightenment: the scientific method, we call modernism.
Science provided a foundation for truth, but needed rationalist programmes to coordinate the moral components. New Big Ideas were needed, and before long they presented themselves. In the early twentieth century there were two, both were utopian, and both disastrous. Between them, we can see the birth, and immediate crisis of, modernity.
In any case, failure of the “world turtle” metaphor is in its own inadvertent way, a potent symbol for the malaise of our time. A meta-metaphor. Knowledge, friends: we are getting rather close to the turtle.
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- ↑ “In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprised to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, 'tis necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.” — David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature.