May 28th, 2010, 7:42 pm
Actually some interesting background and some entertaining disputes on that Turtle reference:Hindu myths: World Turtle "The most widely known version appears in Stephen Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which starts: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 center 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!" The origins of the turtle story are uncertain....Hawking's suggested connection to Russell may be due to his 1927 lecture Why I Am Not a Christian. In it, while discounting the First Cause argument intended to be a proof of God's existence, Russell comments (with an argument not relevant to modern Hindu beliefs):If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject."Philosophical allusion to the story goes back at least as far as John Locke. In his 1690 tract An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke compares one who would say that properties inhere in "substance" to the Indian who said the world was on an elephant which was on a tortoise "but being again pressed to know what gave support to the broad-backed tortoise, replied - something, he knew not what."Henry David Thoreau, in his journal entry of 4 May 1852, writes:Men are making speeches? all over the country, but each expresses only the thought, or the want of thought, of the multitude. No man stands on truth. They are merely banded together as usual, one leaning on another and all together on nothing; as the Hindoos made the world rest on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and had nothing to put under the tortoise.Despite these accounts, Hindu myths do not actually contain the myth in the form described. Locke appears to have got the image through Samuel Purchas. Some accounts involve the earth supported by a single unsupported tortoise, as Jñānarāja argued: "A vulture, which has only little strength, rests in the sky holding a snake in its beak for a prahara [three hours]. Why can [the deity] in the form of a tortoise, who possesses an inconceivable potency, not hold the Earth in the sky for a kalpa [billions of years]?""...Excerpted from Wiki: "Turtles all the Way Down." See also "World Turtle" and "World Elephant".
Last edited by
Trickster on May 27th, 2010, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.