Turtles Ad Infinitum

“We are all made of stars,” so says the song by Moby. Indeed, theoretical physicists suggest that hydrogen and helium were constituent results of the original big bang. They further suggest that all of the heavier elements could only have been made within the thermonuclear furnaces of stars. Carbon based organisms that require oxygen to support their life-processes owe their elemental existence to the violent end of stars as nova or supernova explosions. In the distant past, these cataclysmic events discharged from stellar interiors the heavy elements that were the detritus of the fusion reactions from which stars derive their energy. These castoff remnants then found new purpose as they formed the foundation of planetary development, which in turn supported the emergence of life, in at least one case. This causal history of the development of the universe appears as a progression of well-understood physical events. It is at the juncture of causality punctuated by the emergence of life that physical ecosystems impinge upon the creation legends of religions.

Stories of creation and existence are found in most religions; descriptions of how people came into and upon the world, while offering an understanding of how their existence melds with that of their physical and spiritual universes. These seminal events of mankind’s existence are the focus of the curiosity of virtually every person as they grow from infancy to adulthood. The stories that have been passed down through the generations are based on imagery, metaphor and allegory, just as are the languages used to recite them. Hearing these stories from our earliest recollections of consciousness, they form within us the foundation of our perception and understanding of the world. It is from this foundation that we derive trust. Trust is then a salient feature of the platforms from which the levers of our collective minds can move the universe. Through the ages, the great philosophers and scientists have given rigorous voice to the imagery and allegory recited to us by the storytellers and historians.

The epigraph for this chapter is a perfectly reasonable translation of an act of creation, although theoretical physicists tell us that we haven’t quite got the full text available yet, so our translation is currently incomplete, if not incorrect. That notwithstanding, we generally recognize Maxwell’s equations, a detailed specification of electromagnetism, as a sentence of creation. For the devoutly secular, the existence of the sentence is sufficient; a speaker of the sentence is not required. For the religiously devout, the speaker is central. When the two views bump into each other the amalgam can be interesting. As an old joke goes, a little old lady recounted to a young student the certain fact that the world was indeed sitting on an elephant that was riding the back of a gigantic turtle. “But,” questioned the young man, learned in the ways of science, “What holds up the