Episode 119: Behind the Cosmic Curtain: On Stanislaw Lem's 'The New Cosmogony,' with Meredith Michael

Weird Studies

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel

Society & Culture, Arts, Philosophy

4.8 • 688 Ratings

🗓️ 30 March 2022

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over the last several centuries, there has been one thing on which science and religion have generally agreed, and that is the fixity of the laws under which the universe came to be. At the moment of the Big Bang or the dawn of the First Day, the underlying principles that govern reality were already set, and they have never changed. But what if the laws of nature were not as chiseled in stone as Western intellectuals on both sides of the magisterial divide have assumed them to be? What if creation was an ongoing process, such that our universe in its beginning might have behaved very differently from how it does at present? This is the central conceit of Stanislaw Lem's story "The New Cosmogony," the capstone of his metafictional collection A Perfect Vacuum, originally published in 1971. In this episode, Meredith Michael joins JF and Phil to discuss the metaphysical implications of the idea that nature is an eternal work-in-progress. Support us on Patreon Find us on Discord Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau! Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack REFERENCES For more information JF's new course, Groundwork for a Philosophy of Magic, visit Nura Learning. Stanislaw Lem, “A New Cosmogony” in A Perfect Vacuum Weird Studies, Episode 118 The Unseen and Unnamed Ramsey Dukes, SSOTBME Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene Stanislaw Lem, Solaris Stanislaw Lem, His Master’s Voice David Pruett, Reason and Wonder Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Solaris Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” Andrew W.K., “No One to Know” Special Guest: Meredith Michael. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spectrevision Radio
0:03.3	Welcome to Weird Studies, an arts and philosophy podcast with hosts Phil Ford and J.F. Martel.
0:23.3	For more episodes or to support the podcast, go to weirdst. I'm J.F. Martel.
0:53.5	Did the universe come into being on its own, the natural
0:57.0	outcome of natural processes, obeying the same principles as the stone rolling down a hill? Or was it
1:04.3	somehow created and thus endowed with intention and design from the start? The question is vexed
1:10.6	humanity for millennia, and while secular and religious types continue
1:14.3	to fight over it, sometimes viciously, there is a broad agreement between them that the answer
1:20.3	must be one or the other.
1:23.0	But in his story of the new cosmogony, the Polish science fiction writer Stanislav Lem, proposes
1:28.6	a third answer, namely that, while the universe may have originally arisen in a senseless
1:34.1	cosmic event, over the course of its existence, it has had plenty of time to evolve beings
1:39.3	powerful enough to rewrite the laws of physics, such that the universe we now inhabit, 13 billion years after the
1:46.9	Big Bang, is designed through and through. The French philosopher, Kanté-Meassou, made a similar
1:52.8	claim in his unpublished dissertation, L' Inexistence Divine, when he argued that while we can know for
1:59.0	certain that there is no God, we can also know, with equal certainty, that nature is capable of producing such a being as God in the future, and that we are therefore within our rights to believe in such a being.
2:11.8	Both Miesu and Lem are trying to end the deadlock of secularism and religion, of science and myth.
2:18.6	In Lem's case, we are offered a universe governed by, quote, unseen players,
2:23.3	godlike entities hiding behind the curtain of phenomenal reality
2:27.1	and working the levers of physics to fine-tune a new cosmos over countless eons.
2:32.9	In today's episode, Meredith Michael joins us to talk about this
2:36.4	fascinating story by Stanislav Lem. But dear listener, expect no answers from us, only more questions.
	...

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