Turtles All the Way Down Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray February 20, 2011 Opening Words From UU Minister, Rev. Joy Atkinson The Womb of Stars The womb of stars embraces us; remnants of their fiery furnaces pulse through our veins. We are of the stars, the dust of the explosions cast across space. We are of the earth: we breathe and live in the breath of ancient plants and beasts. Their cells nourish the soil; we build our communities on their harvest of gifts. Our fingers trace the curves carved in clay and stone by forebears unknown to us. We are a part of the great circle of humanity gathered around the fire, the hearth, the altar. We gather anew this day to celebrate our common heritage. May we recall in gratitude all that has given us birth. Sermon Turtles All the Way Down Rev. Susan Frederick-Gray
The topic for the sermon today was purchased at the UUCP Auction by Gary Ezzell. The topic Gary gave me to discuss was Turtles All the Way Down. Now of course, with the auction sermon, the winner gets to provide me the topic, but where I go with it--that is up to me. So here goes: I begin with the story that Gary shared with me about Turtles all the Way Down. It is perhaps the most widely known version in European-American culture. It appears in Stephen Hawking's 1988 book A Brief History of Time, which opens with this story: 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!" Stephen Hawking uses this story to launch into questions of why we think what we do about the universe, and how what we think changes with time. He offers some history of earlier ideas that humans held about the cosmos, from the earliest reasoning for the belief that the earth is round, as well as early models that put the earth at the center of the universe with the sun and all the planets, as well as the stars revolving around the earth. Slowly, over time, with new observations, discoveries, and technology, these ideas changed. Hawking proposes that what we think we know now of the earth and the cosmos may one day, 100 years from now, look ridiculous. And the questions we struggle with most today may one day seem obvious. So Stephen Hawking uses this story of Turtles All the Way Down to talk about the evolution of human knowledge, and how our understandings about creation, life and the universe have changed over time--and how they will continue to change as new discoveries and understandings are found. But this is just one reference to the story. There are many others. I found references to something similar to this story among a few 19th century American writers and philosophers, including the American Unitarian Henry David Thoreau. Bertrand Russell did reference something like this story, although like Thoreau, he attributed it to Hindu cosmology stories that describe the earth as flat and resting on the back of an elephant which stands on the shell of a tortoise. I also began asking around to see who knew anything about turtles all the way down. Many had never heard of it--but of those who did, they nearly all referred to it as an old joke about a woman who stands up at the astronomy lecture...and well, you know the rest. Other than these few references, the information I found on the story was sparse. That is until last week, when I found a different version of the story in the book The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative by Cherokee novelist and professor Thomas King. In his book, King opens every chapter with this story, although it is, as you will hear, a little different than Hawking s version.
Here is how King begins his book: There is a story I know, it s about the earth and how it floats in space on the back of a turtle. I have heard this story many times and each time someone tells the story it changes. Sometimes the change is simply in the voice of the storyteller. Sometimes the change in is the details. Sometimes in the order of events. Other times it is the dialogue or the response of the audience, but in all the tellings of all the tellers, the world never leaves the turtle s back and the turtle never swims away. One time it was in Lethbridge, I think, a young boy in the audience asked about the turtle and the earth. If the earth was on the back of the turtle, what was below the turtle? Another turtle, the storyteller told him. And below that turtle? Another turtle. And below that? Another turtle. The boy began to laugh, enjoying the game I imagine. So how many turtles are there, he wanted to know. The storyteller shrugged. No one knows for sure, she told him, but it s turtles all the way down. So, here we have two stories similar in many ways. The ways they vary are in who is telling the story and from what perspective and for what purpose. Stephen Hawking uses the story to talk about how human understanding of nature and the universe changes over time, and how with enough time, even our deepest held beliefs and assumptions, including our current thoughts about a Big Bang, can seem unbelievable. Philosophers over the years have used the story to point out a philosophical problem of basing an argument on a presumption, which is based on another presumption, which is based on another presumption until all the way down at infinity there is only presumption and no fact at its base. In Stephen Hawking s telling the two main characters, the astronomer and the woman, are trying to best each other--their ideas are in conflict. The astronomer is smug. The woman calls the ideas of the astronomer rubbish. Yet, in Thomas King s telling, the characters are a storyteller and a young boy. The questions are playful and he says the boy is enjoying the game of it. In the first, there is a debate over fact. In the second there is storytelling. I have to say that the challenge of this topic is that at the heart of this story is cultural misunderstanding. And not only that, but it is taking place between a dominant European American culture that sees the story as a joke, and a Native American tradition which sees the story as valuable, even sacred. Add to this the history of genocide and colonialism between these cultures--and well, there is an awful lot to unpack here--and I don t have much time. So, I will try to get to the heart of what these stories speak to me of. On the one hand you have creation stories--which all cultures have--bumping up against the discoveries of science. Hawking could have easily had the woman stand up and say to the astronomer, This is rubbish, for the entire
universe is our solar system, and it was created just 6000 years ago --as some biblical literalists will argue. In his book, The Truth About Stories, Thomas King compares the creation story from Genesis with the Iroquois creation story about the sky woman who falls from the island of the Sky People down to the waters of earth and is saved by the animals. They keep her head above water until frog dives to the bottom of the waters and brings back mud that he puts on tortoise s back. Out from the mud grows green plants, and they place the woman on the back of the tortoise and the plants continue to grow-- becoming North America. He compares this to the Spirit of God hovering over the waters of the deep, and then creating light, then day and night, then sky and water, then land, then plants, then animals and then man from dust. And God makes man ruler of the animals. Both stories would equally perplex an astronomer, but the meaning of the stories contains a great deal about the values of the culture. One is hierarchical, God creating earth and humankind and giving humanity dominion over nature. In the Iroquois story, the animals save humanity, by saving the woman, and creating a home for her. The heart of the story is about dependence of humanity on the animals. For Stephen Hawking and for the story that has remained in the consciousness of European Americans (at least those who know it)--the point is the absurdity of the image of the turtles all the way down. However, King lifts up the key to the story, even before he tells it. In all the tellings of all the tellers, he writes the world never leaves the turtle s back and the turtle never swims away. The key is not the tower of turtles, but the unchanging relationship of earth and animal. I cannot truly tell you what these stories mean. All the meaning contained in the story that King tells will escape me because of my lack of knowledge--on any very deep level--of the culture from which is comes. However, one story I can share is a story that Sylvia Sharma, a member of our congregation and a Mexica grandmother, told me about a sculpture at the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. It is a statue of a person--although all you see is the face, crouched beneath a turtle shell. The sculpture tells one of the Mexican Indian devastation stories, similar to the flood story of the bible, when the world is virtually wiped out. However, in Mexico the stories are of the world being wiped out by fire--by volcanic eruptions, and one story tells of how humans survived by finding cover under the shells of giant tortoises. The turtle is a sacred animal in many North American Indian cultures--an animal that in many stories saves, or protects and supports humanity. In Unitarian Universalism, we look to religious stories, cultural stories, not for fact, but for meaning. The findings of science do not compete with our beliefs. They rest along side them. Sometime the two are in conversation with each other, sometimes one deepens, expands or tests the other--but we do not see the two in conflict. When we look to the stories of the Torah, the bible, or Native stories--we are looking for meaning, keys to understanding our lives, and living better in our lives and our world. I have talked a few times here about the challenge before us of creating a new culture. On the one hand our Unitarian Universalist tradition is rooted in the Enlightenment, in Western European and early colonial American thought. At the same time, where we have come to since those roots is a
desire to wrestle and expand the tent of our religious community to speak to the increasingly multicultural world we live in. In Unitarian Universalism today, and even in this congregation, we are having a conversation about how we can become a multicultural faith, a multicultural community. Well, the only way to do that is to be willing to embark on the journey of creating a new culture--one that invites many cultures in and discovers, negotiates and creates new norms that welcome and make room for the diversity that being truly inclusive creates. As an example, (and I offer these as generalizations, meaning I hold them lightly--they are not always true), so as a generalization, European American culture, the culture I come from, values fact, directness, clarity. A familiar phrase is mean what you say, and say what you mean. However, and this is again generalization, Native American culture values storytelling, imagery, metaphor. This is also true in Persian culture. There is a quotation from Jelaladin Rumi, Muslim poet and Sufi mystic that captures this. He writes, It s good to know truth, but it is better to speak of palm trees. Now, the person who taught me this quotation explained that palm trees are mystical in Persia and in some desert cultures. So, what Rumi is saying is that it is good to know truth, but it is better to speak of mystery. One of the cultural norms of our faith is that we look at religious stories not for fact but for meaning, for symbolism and for metaphor. There was a time when we threw those old religious stories out, because we thought they were not true and therefore of no meaning. And even now, for those of Christian background, looking at them through the lens of metaphor is difficult because of baggage we carry from how they were first taught to us. And yet, perhaps we should remember Rumi s counsel, that it is better to find ways to speak of mystery, of what is indirect and hard to express. Sometimes the best way to do this is not in direct statements of fact, but through storytelling. I cannot count the number times that people tell me that it was the children s story at the Sunday service that most stuck with them one week. We love to be told stories, because it is through story that we see ourselves, in those stories, and share what really matters, our core values. The stories we love, the ones we tell again and again, often say more about who we are as a people, what we value and what s really important, than any of the statements that seek to directly describe those values. And yet, storytelling, some say, is becoming a lost art. One of the things we try to do here each week is rediscover and share that art. After Thomas King shares the story of the storyteller and the boy discussing the earth and the turtle, he ends the story by writing: The truth about stories is that that s all we are. You can t understand the world without telling a story, the Anishinabe writer Gerald Vizenor tells us. There isn t any center to the world but a story.