RIP Wolfgang Smith: Philosopher, Scientist, Catholic

Catholic philosopher Wolfgang Smith died last Friday at age 94.

Smith was one of the first in the movement to restore classical metaphysics to physics. Recall all physics must operate with a metaphysics, even when this is denied or the metaphysics is unspoken. The classical metaphysics which Smith championed is now re-blossoming, and this is in great proportion due to Smith.

He was humble to the point of nervousness about his efforts. No, that’s not the right word. “Fear and trembling” are better. His writings evince a deep concern to reconcile his work with dogma. This is expressed best in the book In Quest of Catholicity, a collection of correspondence between Smith and Fr Malachi Martin. Smith had just given the 1998 Templeton Lecture on Christianity and the Natural Sciences, “From Schrodinger’s Cat to Thomistic Ontology“, which he had earlier worried his colleagues would not take well.

The anticipated opposition—for which I had prepared—did not materialize…In the course of my lecture I sensed that the audience was attentive to every word; there seemed to be a certain “magic” in the air, an angelic presence I like to think. I felt that something was being transmitted and received. The questions which followed were the most part intelligent and searching, never antogonistic.

The lecture followed 1995’s The Quantum Enigma, Smith’s first major work. Reading the lecture now (which you must), it seems wholly non-offensive. But you have to remember something about academics. Querulous is the nice word. The natural instinct of many is to snootily doubt everything you say, to dismiss it as useless, or to think they already thought of it. This is because, like every other human endeavor, academics is a competitive and often vicious sport. (I do not say this is a bad thing; indeed, as intellectual activities becomes more feminine, i.e. outwardly “nice”, they will become worse.)

“According to vulgar belief, there is color, the sweet and the bitter; but in reality, only atoms and the void.”

So said Democritus, and so say many modern scientists. Smith was fond of this quotation. He argued the vulgar are right and the (materialist) scientists wrong. Or, rather, Smith said they were right, but only up to a point. That point is that where metaphysics necessarily takes over from physics. Smith realized that the solution to the many enigmas of quantum mechanics (of which I’ll assume you have heard) could not to be found in atomistic metaphysics. He urged, right up until the end, a return to the beginning, to an Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics, which Heisenberg himself first suggested.

There are two main curiosities about discrete-movement (i.e. quantum) physics.

The first is the peculiar behavior of some small things when they are separated from big things. They can appear to be many places at once. Only when they are interacted with by measurement do they take measured values. Their “wave function collapses”, some say. This, following Heisenberg, Smith realized, as many now agree, could be explained by grasping being can possess degrees of actuality and potentiality, Aristotle’s solution to certain classical paradoxes. It’s not that these tiny entities are now waves, and now particles. It’s that “quantum” fuzz is part of their being. Objects (separated from substances) have much less actuality, like your screen now has, and much more potentiality. The interaction removes potentiality and forces an actuality.

You can read Smith’s Quantum Enigma to get an understanding of this, but I think a better introductory books now are Ed Feser’s The Last Superstition and Aristotle’s Revenge, as these outline the philosophy more broadly, and not just for quantum mechanics. But if you already know physics, get Smith’s book.

The second mystery, and the one to which Smith devoted much of his efforts, is to explain how two “entangled” entities can communicate faster than the speed of light. (See this on the EPR paradox.) The solution certainly isn’t “many worlds”, which Smith dismissed (as do I; blog, Substack). The answer, with reference to Bell’s theorem, is (again) that reality is more than atoms, or strings or whatever, bumping into one another. The visible cosmos is only the surface of reality. Underlying it is in Intermediate Realm, which itself is connected to the Prime Mover.

A favorite image of Smith’s was a circle, the circumference of which is, well, us. And bugs, rocks, stars, and all the rest. The interior in intermediate realm that communicates with the Center. This is an apt metaphor. Think of two particles on the circumference, separated by a far distance, much too far for a signal to pass between them in good time. Attached to each particle is a line that plunges to the depth of the interior. The two lines are connected. It is here vertical causation, said Smith, instantaneously interacts with the particles. There is no light speed barrier in the intermediate realm. Physicists say (now) that the interaction that is observed must mean reality is “non-local”. Smith carried out the implications of that thought. Vertical causation is different than ordinary horizontal causation, which takes place only on the circumference, and is of the kind that causes these letters to appear on the screen as I type them.

For those who have some background in physics (or who are following the Class), this quotation from Quantum Enigma might help:

…[I]t is nonetheless a mistake to speak of ‘chance’ in reference to the microworld. As I have pointed out before, the collapse of the state vector—which signals out an eigenstate from an ensemble of eigenstates—is not actually comparable to the toss of a die; for whereas the latter constitutes a temporal process, indeterminate though it may be, the collapse of a state vector cannot thus be conceived. Let it be said apodictically that state vector collapse is not the result of a temporal process, be it deterministic, random, or stochastic. A higher order of causality enters the picture, which needs to be distinguished categorically from temporal causality in any of its modes; the so-called ‘collapse’, it turns out, can be attributed no more to chance than to determinism, but actually entails a kind of causality which, strange to say, is ‘not of this world’. [p. 110]

The indeterminism of the die toss, Class takers will recall, is because we do not know all the causes and conditions of the toss. But when we take careful note of them, that indeterminism becomes determinism, as we have showed. But there is no knowing all the causes and conditions of certain entities; this has been proved, too. There have been many theories about this, but, I submit, only the account of classic metaphysics, as Smith insists, holds up.

Alas, these concepts, important as they are, will not appeal to many working scientists, because they does not come obviously equipped with formula that can be manipulated. They are metaphysical deduction. But that doesn’t mean that it can’t bear research fruit, and these ideas in acausal measurements show.

The books to read are Physics & Vertical Causation: The End of Quantum Reality (I have a review), Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology, and The Vertical Ascent. All Smith’s books, and his many articles, can be found (to order) at the Philos-Sophia site. And if you want to go hardcore, and have a solid physics background, get Robert Koons’s Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? I’ll let you guess the answer.

There is, of course, much more to all this. We have not even begun to sketch out what he defined to be corporeal objects, i.e. those of our ordinary perception, and physical objects, which are those parts of the corporeal that are amenable to quantification. A great fallacy of our age is to assume these are the same, that the unquantifiable can be quantified (by questionnaires, even!), or that all that is not quantifiable is unworthy of study. We also have to discuss his concept of irreducible wholeness, which is related to hylomorphism, the idea that all objects are composed of matter and form. Feser’s books are the best introduction here.

Smith’s other great passion, and likely yours, too, dear reader, since you are here, was scientism. He didn’t like it. We don’t either. The idea that science has the last word on everything was to Smith, and to us, was absurd. This area is so large, and so dear to our hearts, that we will in future articles spell out Smith’s objections. For now, one quotation on the consequences of scientism:

It is obvious to all our outer lifestyles are being drastically altered as a direct consequence of the scientific advance. What we generally fail to realize, on the other hand, is that the impact of this same development on our inner lives—yes, on the condition of our soul—is no less pronounced. To begin with, the mechanization of our work environment, the phenomenon of urban sprawl, the rising congestion and perpetual noise, the proliferation of concrete, steel and plastic, the loss of contact with Nature and with natural things, the invasion of our homes by the mass media—all this in itself is bound to have its effect on our mental and emotional condition. Add to this the uprooting of people from their ancestral environment, and unprecedented mobility which shuffles populations like a deck of cards!…For it must not be forgotten that people too have to be standardized, like interchangeable parts of a machine, so that the wheels of the mechanized civilization may run smoothly and efficiently.

Guided, he didn’t have to say, by Experts under the thrall of utilitarianism, another gift of the Enlightenment. Of that, we know too well.

His books on this are Cosmos and Transcendence: Breaking Through the Barrier of Scientistic Belief, from which that passage was taken, Ancient Wisdom and Modern Misconceptions, and Christian Gnosis: From Saint Paul to Meister Eckhart. The last, and Vedanta in Light of Christian Wisdom, might be more properly classed as theo-philosophical.

There are in addition to the Philos Sophia website, innumerable videos and interviews with Smith. Picking just one that is to hand, “Dr. Wolfgang Smith, Renowned Physicist, on Vertical Causation, Irreducible Wholeness and Meaning“.

Now I am the last person to do a detailed obituary on this great author, as this woefully incomplete effort attests. I only “met” Wolfgang a few times, and only over Zoom and by email, where he very patiently and kindly corrected some of my misunderstandings of his work. I stress kindly. This attitude was ever present, and obvious, in his writings and personal interactions. His correspondence with Fr Martin is saturated in humility.

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