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Forget about the existence of God, life after death, the meaning of life. There is only one real question in philosophy – and no, with apologies to Albert Camus, it’s not about suicide. It’s the problem of infinite regress, particularly in a metaphysical framework.

“Turtles all the way down” is a metaphor used to explicate the problem of infinite regress in metaphysics. There are many variants, but the basic idea is that someone (usually a member of a so-called primitive tribe), when asked about the origin or existence of Earth, argues that the world rests on a giant turtle. Faced with the question, but where then does that turtle stand on, he replies: “You don’t fool me, it’s turtles all the way down“.

To us modern Westerners, the problem of infinite regress usually appears when, as children perhaps raised to believe in the existence of God, we wonder: “But who made God?” We were never offered an answer, because there was none. “God was always there”, came the usual non-reply.

But even those of us (such as myself) who don’t believe in a supreme being, are still deeply troubled by infinite regress. It just doesn’t feel right, as we’ll see in this post.

Infinite Regress as a Problem of Metaphysics

To be clear, the concept of infinite regress has many manifestations. It creates problematic aspects in various areas of philosophy, such as logic, and you can find all sorts of analyses and repercussions.

My goal is to keep this post accessible to a lay audience. My personal interest in infinite regress is also clearly in its metaphysical aspects: What it entails for the ultimate “what it is” of existence and the universe.

As a result, I will only focus on the “turtles all the way down” aspect, and do so using a simple, conversational style. In effect, I’m trying to discover whatever available to us to discover through the act of writing this text. If you’re interested in more theoretical analyses, there are some wonderful resources online.

Infinite Regress Chains: Who Made the Turtle who Made God who Made the Big Bang?

As I mentioned in the introduction, even if you don’t believe in God (or giant turtles), the problem of infinite regress in a metaphysical framework is impossible to ignore. Unless you ignore it deliberately, and back to Albert Camus and philosophical suicide we go.

Otherwise, if you obey your natural human instinct of wanting to know the truth, you’ll ask yourself: What existed before the Big Bang?

Though there are answers available (speculative ones), consistent with purely scientific frameworks, there is a problem. They answer in a way that doesn’t remove the infinite regress issue. Indeed, they introduce it!

But new theoretical physics research has recently revealed a possible window into the very early universe, showing that it may not be “very early” after all. Instead it may be just the latest iteration of a bang-bounce cycle that has been going on for … well, at least once, and possibly forever. 

Space.com “What Happened Before the Big Bang”

This is remarkably reminiscent of the “turtles all the way down” formulation. To be absolutely clear, my intention is not to belittle the scientific method (or alternatively, to prop up the folk tales involving giant turtles or elephants). Rather, to show that there is a deeper problem involved.

Is the Answer Unknown or the Question Unanswerable?

There are known unknowns and unknown unknowns. If you roll a pair of dice behind my back, I don’t know what the result is, but I can tell you with 100% certainty (assuming the dice are ordinary and your cat didn’t eat one of them) that it will be between 2 and 12. But if you tell me you have a bag containing an unknown number of dice, perhaps dice with figures other than 1-6, and you roll an unknown number of them, there’s no way for me to tell you anything.

The first case is an example of a known unknown; the second, of an unknown unknown. But there is more: Questions that don’t make sense.

The Marital Status of No. 5

If I asked you, “Is number 5 married?” you’ll laugh then look at me in disbelief. You’ll say “No, don’t be an idiot”. Then I’ll say, “Ah, then number 5 is a bachelor”. To which you’ll laugh (or punch me in the face) and say “No”.

As the perceptive reader that you are, you likely see the chance for an infinite regress there:

1. If one is not married, then one is a bachelor.
2. If one is not a bachelor, then one is married.

>> Is no.5 married? >> No; then no.5 is a bachelor >> Ah; if no.5 is not a bachelor, then no.5 is married >> Ah; then no.5 is a bachelor >> etc. etc

What this little example demonstrates is that some questions simply don’t make sense. There is an insidious element there, however, complicating matters further:

How do we know whether a question is sense-making or not?

Is “Who Made the God who Made the Turtle?” a Sense-Making Question?

As these tongue-in-cheek headings perhaps indicate, such questions are so bizarre that they approach the absurd (ah, back to Albert Camus we go). But the real issue here is to separate whether asking “what existed before God/the Big Bang/the First Turtle” is:

• sense-making
  • answerable
  • unanswerable
• not sense-making
  • only to us
  • to everything

It’s the last set in particular that intrigues me. If we assumed the question “Who made God?” is not sense-making, is there something inherent about our humanity and ability to conceptualize that prevents us from being able to make sense of it? Or, rather, it’s universally not sense-making. To me, that seems like a critical point.

To be clear, I don’t claim something in the style of “aliens/other gods could make sense of the answer”. That would lead to more infinite regress, probably. Rather, I wonder whether all beings – in the sense we can understand the term “being” – are necessarily unable to formulate the question.

The Importance of Establishing the Validity of Asking

“What is the weight of the color green?” is a question that, like the marital status of no.5, does not have an answer. If anyone attempted to offer one, it would be a not-even-wrong answer – see the post on solipsism. To me, it seems obvious that establishing whether a question is valid or not is of paramount importance.

So, can we ask “who made the first turtle?”

I would have to say that, in this form, the answer must be no. “Who made” entails an entity/agent before the “first turtle” (whichever way you can put it).

How about if we rephrased it to “how did the first turtle materialize?”

This seems better, but I’m troubled by the implied temporality involved: a passage from a state of there not being a turtle to the state of there being one (if this sounds familiar, you likely remembered this). It almost feels as if time itself perpetuates (!) the predicament, by becoming part of the infinite regress chain.

Perhaps the problem lies in us.

It’s not You, It’s Me: Anthropocentrism and Infinite Regress

Anthropocentric behavior is, to an extent, inevitable. As with stupidity – it’s hard to know you’re stupid when… you’re stupid – it’s hard to understand we’re biased and limited because of our humanity, precisely because of… our humanity.

To put it plainly: Some things are simply beyond our grasp.

Evolution has given us a brain that is remarkably capable. It’s stunning, utterly breathtaking to realize we’ve been able to move from caves and hunting with rocks and spears – themselves an incredible achievement by comparison to other animals – to sending probes to Pluto (and beyond), that transmitted back to us detailed, color images and other scientific data from another celestial body.

Yet our brain, for all its magnificence, can’t handle infinite regress, the way it can’t quite conceptualize more than three dimensions or quantum mechanics – the calculations work fine, with stunning precision; the whole thing is just not intuitive.

In the end, we just have to accept the depth of our ignorance:

• We don’t know.
• Perhaps we won’t ever know.
• Perhaps it’s not possible we will ever know.

The last one in particular is a very difficult thing to accept, counter to our innate curiosity. But it might be inescapable.