Hog’s bisons and turtles, all the way down

Gintas writes:

And where does the Higgs boson come from? Let me guess—it’s Higgs bosons all the way down, like “turtles all the way down.”

As Wikipedia explains:

“Turtles all the way down” is a jocular expression of the infinite regress problem in cosmology posed by the “unmoved mover” paradox. The phrase was popularized by Stephen Hawking in 1988. The “turtle” metaphor in the anecdote represents a popular notion of a “primitive cosmological myth”, viz. the flat earth supported on the back of a World Turtle.

LA replies:

When you look to particles as the source of existence, you really do have the problem of infinite regress. But when you look to God as the source of existence, you do not have the infinite regress problem, as I explained here in 2008:

As for the question of infinite regress that Mr. Sanchez keeps returning to, if he and I were walking along and we came upon a marble statue of Zeus, and Mr. Sanchez said that the statue had created itself through a process of random change, and I said, no, this statue has been created by a sculptor, would I be starting or implying or making necessary an infinite regress? No. I’d simply be saying that this statue was self-evidently the work of a sculptor. I wouldn’t have to know anything in particular about the sculptor for that statement to be true. I wouldn’t have to know what his intentions were, or how he came to be inspired to make this statue, or what tools he used, or how he had come to be born, or what his parents were like, to know for an absolute fact that the statue had been made by a sculptor. End of subject. No infinite regress.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 15, 2012 04:24 PM | Send