Infinite regress

Here’s a photo of a pepper within a pepper. If that pepper contains a pepper within it as well, how many peppers are in that thing?! (Botanists, please note that this is a rhetorical question.)

Okay, let’s be honest: infinite regresses are big time fun. Or, at least they are by philosophy standards--which admittedly employ an extraordinarily low threshold for counting something as fun. (I mean, have you ever seen a portrait of Kant smiling? It’s also rumored that Hegel feared that laughter was the one thing in the universe that could disrupt the inexorable unfolding of reason in history.) But wherever we encounter infinite regresses—such as when we see ourself in a funhouse mirror or when we read “Horton Hears a Who”—we pause and wonder at the thing. One of the few philosophy jokes I know ends with the punch line, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

Infinite regresses are also unsettling. St. Thomas’ proofs for god runs something like this: nothing can cause itself and there cannot be an infinite string of causes going back in time, so therefore there must a prime cause (i.e. God). The proof hinges on the claim that there cannot an infinite string of causes going back in time. Is this a statement of logic or, just as likely, a reflection of our discomfort in not being able to tell a story about something without a proper beginning, development, and ending?