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.
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REFERENCES
For more information JF's new course, Groundwork for a Philosophy of Magic, visit Nura Learning (https://www.nuralearning.com/groundwork-philosophy-magic).
Stanislaw Lem, “A New Cosmogony” in A Perfect Vacuum (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780156716864)
Weird Studies, Episode 118 The Unseen and Unnamed (https://www.weirdstudies.com/118)
Ramsey Dukes, SSOTBME (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780904311082)
Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9781441173836)
M. John Harrison, The Course of the Heart
Michael Harner, The Way of the Shaman (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780062503732)
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780198788607)
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780156027601)
Stanislaw Lem, His Master’s Voice (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780262538459)
David Pruett, Reason and Wonder (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780692568743)
Andrei Tarkovsky (dir.), Solaris (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0069293/)
Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” (https://bookshop.org/a/18799/9780345404473)
Andrew W.K., “No One to Know”
Special Guest: Meredith Michael.