Turtles all the way down.
Watching Newsnight on BBC2 while feeding the baba I saw a piece on Paul Davies who's written a book called "The Goldilocks enigma"
He mentions the problem of infinite regress during the interview. I first heard of this quite a long time ago from one of my best friends in secondary school. Its called "Turtles all the way down"
The story goes ...
"A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the Earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. "At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." "The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down."
I was thinking about this again this evening., in light of Paul Davies. The question for science being - where do the laws of physics come from. With the answer from religion being that they come from god. The problem is the next question I want answered is where does god come from ? To my mind all the proposition of god adds is one more level of regress without answering any of the questions.
The friend of mine who introduced me to this and much interesting thinking was http://science.jpl.nasa.gov/people/Cleary/">Kieran Cleary who is now working on understanding the early universe.
Now that really is mind expanding.