All regards for Clapaucius!
Where have been eliminated the original theme: what is the centre of Lem's philisophy?
You are right. The question is: Lem are an atheist, or a believer? He declare: "I'm a non believer", but his works shows he is.
He never admit that the human nature or the whole universe can not conclude from the (spiritual?) forms of accidental falling athoms (Demokritos), but what he wrote ever made ridiculous it.
The next question is: anybody, who can't beleive in materialism could be a beleiver in the same time? It seems not. Because to be a believer must take a huge step: isn't enough to believe in "kharma", or such supernatural powres, but must believe in a Person, Who wanted that we (and the whole univers) can egsist. Lem didn't wrote a word about it, because if anybody start to thinkin on human history, can see that the nation of Bible had a very unic state in that, and it can not expicable with tools of any science.
Therefore he can't reach that level when the phillosophy starting to be interesting, but nobody was near to his thoughts in the XX. century.
An example: there was a philosopher in the "dark" middle ages, who stated that God could create a universe, if He(?) wanted, what seems to be an everlasting (non created) one. Why not?
The answer of this question is not a "scientific" (object) one, but a moral. Some evolucionist thinkers (exp. Lem) states that the moral is simply a strategic tool in the fight of life, which can explain from genetics, but they can't answere to that question: maybe it is possible, but why much more successful tool the moral than a claw or a horn. (...)
In that point leap out the non realistic dilemma: individual or mass (not only genus or race). But this ideas are only in our thinking: a delphin has never thinkin about himself as a delphin, he have a name. (In his thoughts, just like dogs, cats, birds, etc..) Therefore the "evolution" can not work with mass, or race, it can work only with individuums. What's with the ants? A dont know, but I think the individuum needs free choices, like dogs or cows, and that I don't see between insects (or some others).
But this isn't important. What important is that Lem point of view is a non-believer, but non materialistic one. Why? Because he didn't know nothing about JHWH? Or the amazing history of the nation of Bible? I think not, he started to live in a difficult world, when one person's origin can be a crime. I understand that he can't understand the religious ideas, when more than six million people was killed just because born "at the wrong place".
The "egzact", "objective", "overmoralist" science isn't capable to solve the most scientific questions, because the end of this ideas is the death, and not a simply one. It is vain, to think that the death of a genom is same that a death of an individuum. In the true world is not such thing that a death of a genom. The extinct of the dinosaurs isn't true: distinct anymals was destroyed. If I could, I wrote a story about the last Iguanodon, who lived thousand years after the death of itkinds (sorry...).
Summa: Lem is a moralist, not an atheist, despite of what he states about himself. this is the true philosophy after the ancient greeks.
regards
Laslo Katona