The War on Design: Darwin and Einstein

Continuing our series of posts on Dr Wolfgang Smith's 2019 monumental monograph: Physics & Vertical Causation, the End of Quantum Reality. (Angelico Press, 2019, also available on Amazon Kindle)

For further reading on this and related material, see the Philos-Sophia Initiative website.

We ended the last post with a provocative but irresistible call to arms from Dr Smith: to ''jettison our Galilean, Cartesian, and Newtonian assumptions and become philosophically literate once again.'' An important key to the success of his campaign is the notion of vertical causality, which he proceeds to define and clarify.

The act of being confers upon creatures:

• existence; and
• a power to act by way of vertical causality (VC). 

This power of substantial forms to act may be referred to as substantial VC. There is a higher mode of VC which can give rise to substantial forms and which may be referred to as creative VC, which implies design. Examples of design include:

• speciation  (in the terrestrial domain) and
• immobility (pertaining to the cosmos at large).

Darwin. 1874

Smith now makes two claims which will shock those whose education has assured them that Darwinian evolution and Einsteinian physics are settled science:

1. The Darwinist claim, so far from constituting a scientific hypothesis supported by empirical evidence, proves to be in truth an ideological tenet, based upon the a priori denial of design in the form of speciation.[1]
2. Even as Darwinism rests upon the denial of design in the origin of species, relativistic physics at large is based upon the a priori rejection of design in the form of immobility. Einsteinian physics proves thus to be a kind of Darwinism on a cosmic scale; and turns out in the end—to the surprise and consternation of many—to be likewise untenable.

Elliott & Fry [Public domain]. Robert Ashby Collection.

[1] The discovery of DNA in the 20th century disqualified Darwinism as a scientific theory. Dembski's theorem on complex specified information rigorously disproved Darwinism on mathematical grounds.

The remainder of this fairly long chapter elaborates on Smith's second claim (see point 2. above). At times, the arguments become somewhat technical and a full reading of Smith's text is recommended for those readers interested in the details. We shall be giving a flavour of the implications of Smith's reasoning in the next posts.




Albert Einstein during a lecture in Vienna in 1921 (age 42). Ferdinand Schmutzer [Public domain]