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.
