Elephants All The Way Down
(Fourth in a month-long sermon series on "God")
A story is told of William James, the great psychologist and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience. In his travels, James encountered an Indian holyman from whom he hoped to learn more of the Hindu religion. James had read the creation myth of the Hindus, in which Brahma, the creator, brings the world into being and then places it upon the backs of four celestial elephants to support its corners. And so he inquired about the myth: "I understand that you believe the world rests upon the backs of four white elephants. Is that correct?" "Indeed, this is so," replied the holyman. "Good," James went on. "Now tell me, just what is it that stands beneath the great white elephants?" "In each case," the sage replied, "there stands another great white elephant." "And what is beneath that set of elephants?" James pressed on. "Why, four more elephants." "But tell me what stands under all of the elephants," James insisted. "Dr. James, Dr. James," the Hindu replied patiently, "don't you understand? It's great white elephants, all the way down!"
In his book The Mask of Religion, Peter Fleck remembers hearing a similar myth as a boy in grade school. "It described the vision of the universe held by a Hindu tribe somewhere in India," Fleck recalls. "Its members believed that the earth and the sky above it rest on an elephant and that the elephant stands on a turtle."
"I remember that I was troubled by one particular aspect of the story. It was not the role of the elephant. Maybe I had already heard of Atlas, to whom the Greeks imparted a similar role; if so, the analogy may have reassured me. Nor did I feel disturbed by the idea of this obviously mythical elephant resting on an equally mythical turtle. What did bother me was that nobody apparently had raised the question: And what does the turtle rest on? It was the absence of that question, let alone a satisfactory answer to it, that made me feel, as a young boy, that our Western way of thinking was superior to what I experienced to be the primitive ways of the East."
As he matured, Fleck says, he came to appreciate the wisdom contained in the story. For every discovery seems to raise new questions. The latest findings in science are superseded by later findings. And just when you seem to be getting to the bottom of things, the foundation begins to drop out. Everything appears to rest on a turtle, who in turn rests on nothing.
The universe is ultimately a mystery. As it says in the book of Job, "God stretches out the north over the void, and hangs the world upon nothing." Why does anything exist? Why this particular universe of carbon-based life forms and daytime soap operas instead of some possibly more rational world? These questions may seem far removed from daily living, but trying for even a moment to imagine nothing instead of something--no space, no duration, no observer, nothing to observe--brings on a sensation close to vertigo, like having the ground drop away beneath one's feet.
"One need only shut oneself in a closet," says William James--and it is easy to imagine James, the pragmatist, carrying out this experiment himself--"and begin to think of the fact of one's being there, of one's queer bodily shape in the darkness, of one's fantastic character and all, to have the wonder steal over the detail as much as over the general fact of being, and to see that it is only familiarity that blunts it. Not only that anything should be, but that this very thing should be, is mysterious! Philosophy stares, but brings no reasoned solution, for from nothing to being there is no logical bridge."
"To that strange, disquieting question, 'Why does anything exist?' science can never hope to provide an answer," agrees science writer Martin Gardner. "Why does the apple fall? Because of the law of gravitation? Why the law of gravitation? Because of certain equations that are part of the theory of relativity. Should physicists succeed some day in writing one ultimate equation from which all physical laws can be derived, one could still ask, 'Why that equation?' If physicists reduce all existence to a finite number of particles or waves, one can always ask, 'Why those particles?' or 'Why those waves?'" Physicist Stephen Hawking puts the puzzle a little differently, noting that even if he and his colleagues should one day succeed in their quest for a Grand Unified Theory--a single mathematical formula that would encompass all the laws of nature--we would still have no idea of why the universe goes to the bother of existing. Nor would a Theory of Everything bring us one step closer to unraveling the enigma of a thinking animal that longs to know the mind of God.
Alan Guth, a particle physicist at MIT, has probably come as close as anyone else to unscrewing the unscrutable. A refinement on the Big Bang, Guth's theory states that we live in an "inflationary universe" which bubbled out of something called a "false vacuum." At the moment, this is the reigning interpretation of how it all began. Guth's equations show how, given the laws of nature as we know them, it really is possible for something to materialize from nothing. "It is rather fantastic to realize that the laws of physics can describe how everything was created in a random quantum fluctuation out of nothing, and how over the course of 15 billion years, matter could organize in such complex ways that we have human beings sitting here," Guth enthuses. "Fantastic" may be an understatement. But then the question intrudes, who made the laws of nature? Guth confesses, "We are a long way from being able to answer that one!"
What do we really know about this strange and beautiful world in which we find ourselves? A poet says:
We glibly talk of nature's laws
But do things have a natural cause?
Black earth turned into yellow-crocus
Is undiluted hocus-pocus.
The philosopher Bertrand Russell once remarked that the question of God had never particularly vexed him, but that there were certain ambiguities regarding the nature of mathematical axioms that threatened to unhinge his sanity. Like many young people, Russell was intolerant of ambiguity and set out on an expedition for absolute truth. Early in his career, he and Alfred North Whitehead wrote a treatise titled Principia Mathematica which they hoped would establish a formal groundwork for all possible mathematical knowledge. It was only a few years after Russell and Whitehead completed their monumental work that another thinker, Kurt Godel, showed that even in the realm of pure mathematical logic, there is no such thing as ultimate truth. Everything rests on a turtle, who in turn rests on nothing.
In his book Godel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter explains that "a system of reasoning can be compared to an egg. An egg has a shell which protects its insides. If you want to ship the egg somewhere, though, you don't rely on the shell. You pack the egg in some sort of container, chosen according to how rough you expect the egg's voyage to be. To be extra careful, you may put the egg inside several nested boxes. However, no matter how many layers of boxes you pack your egg in, you can imagine some cataclysm which could break the egg . . . Similarly, one can never give an ultimate, absolute proof that a proof in some system is correct. Of course, one can give a proof of a proof, or a proof of a proof of a proof--but the validity of the outermost system always remains an unproven assumption, accepted on faith." At some point, Hofstadter says, you reach rock bottom, and there is no defense except shouting loudly, "I know I'm right!"
In the church I serve, we do occasionally shout loudly. But we all know that shouting is no guarantee of being right. "I know I'm right," is what the Pope said to Galileo. Those are the famous last words. Many people imagine that they've found ultimate answers. In an 1894 speech, Albert Michaelson, the famous experimenter who measured the speed of light, stated that "the more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote." It was only a few years later that Einstein turned science on its head. In 1931 the physicist Arthur H. Compton stated positively that there existed three basic entities in the physical universe: protons, electrons, and photons. The next year, the neutron was discovered. Today scientists know more than ever about the fundamental building blocks of matter and energy that make up our universe, but they are as far as ever from arriving at ultimate answers. Few believe that any final truth is attainable. In the words of the chemist J.B.S. Haldane, "The universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
There are a few people who seem to be immune to mystery and impervious to wonder. The critic Irving Babbit was of this temperament, for instance. He once remarked that he saw nothing remarkable about the facts of birth or death. How else would people come into the world, or leave it at the end?
Most people do wonder at life at least occasionally, however, and the most creative minds, whether in science or religion, seem to gaze out on the world with eyes that see the marvelous hidden behind the matter-of-fact. Bertrand Russell observed that original thinkers have "the faculty of not taking familiar things for granted. Newton wondered why apples fall; Einstein expressed 'surprised thankfulness' that four equal sides can make a square, since, in most of the universes he could imagine, there would be no such things as squares." In the words of the contemporary Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel, "The way to prayer leads through acts of wonder and radical amazement." Michael Polyani, the philosopher of science, writes in a similar vein of Christian worship as being based upon "an eternal, never to be consummated hunch . . . It is like an obsession with a problem known to be insoluble, which yet follows, against reason, unswervingly, the heuristic command, 'Look at the unknown!"
Science and religion have this in common: both are better at questioning our answers than at answering our questions. At their worst, each becomes a fixed body of knowledge, a rigid corpus of doctrine beyond criticism or contention. But ideally, each can lift us beyond the known, toward fresh visions of the real. Like physicists, who know that an electron can sometimes be likened to a particle and at other times compared to a wave, but realize that neither simile matches the utter peculiarity of the subatomic world, theologians need to recognize that creeds and doctrines are far from capturing the reality they purport to describe.
Einstein was one who cultivated a taste for mystery. The last decades of his life, he was regarded as a bit of a crank by most other physicists, bent upon a lonely, seemingly quixotic quest for a unified field theory when the vanguard of science was busy advancing in other directions. Now, fifty years later, physicists have rejoined Einstein's pursuit, understanding that while he never did obtain his elusive quarry, he was at least asking the right questions, drawn on by an almost romantic attraction. "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious," he wrote.
It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed. This insight into the mystery of life, coupled though it be with fear, has also given rise to religion. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms--this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.
Such religiousness, for Einstein at least, implied humility, along with scorn for those who pretended to have attained to insights beyond their powers. In 1951, the great physicist reflected that "Fifty years of conscious brooding have brought me no closer to the answer to the question what are light quanta? Of course, today every rascal thinks he knows the answer, but he is deluding himself."
Many a rascal even now claims to know the mind of God. Some wear clerical collars and preach with great authority. But if Einstein was still so far from understanding photons or the nature of light, how much farther are we from delving the final riddles of existence? Those who think they can delimit and define the ultimate are deluding themselves--for God by definition is the reality that defies and surpasses human comprehension. That reality has been called by many names--Yahweh, Sophia, Allah, Vishnu--but none of these are God's names. Rather these are our names for the unnameable, conventional rubrics that point toward what is unconventional and inexhaustible, beyond categorization.
At the end of his life, Isaac Newton had this to say. "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Most of Newton's other pronouncements sound dated to the modern ear. But this simple confession of modesty is timeless, as pertinent now as the day it was written.
To see the wonder in each bit of time and space is indeed the occupation of a scientist or a saint. To perceive the mystery that lies behind and beneath this world is to live in a state of astonishment and reverence for What Is. All things exist, yet only we, the human creation, are fully aware that we exist. To become completely conscious of the mystery within us and around us, to look steadily at the unknown, to contemplate the infinite heights and depths of existence is what it means to be most deeply human and most genuinely alive.
"Why, who makes much of a miracle?" the poet Walt Whitman asked. The words "marvel" and "miracle" come from an ancient Indo-European root that means to laugh or smile. From the same root comes our word "admiration." To wonder is to be glad at life. To admire, to hold worthy, to worship, is to taste the fresh goodness of the world in which we live.
The Buddha told this parable: a traveler, fleeing a tiger who was chasing him, ran till he came to the edge of a cliff. There he caught hold of a thick vine, and swung himself over the edge. Above him the tiger snarled. Below him he heard another snarl, and behold, there was another tiger, peering up at him. The vine suspended him midway between two tigers. Two mice, a white mouse and a black mouse, began to gnaw at the vine. He could see they were quickly eating it through. Then in front of him on the cliff side he saw a luscious bunch of grapes. Holding onto the vine with one hand, he reached and picked the grapes with the other. How delicious!
Life is sweet, and we realize it most clearly in those moments when were become aware that it is a mystery and a gift. We realize it most clearly in those moments when we're dangling over the abyss, when we become aware that simply to exist is a rare privilege, an astounding and continuous miracle, when we realize that it actually is Elephants All The Way Down!
October 23, 2005
Excerpted and adapted from his Science and the Search for God (Lantern Books, 2003)