Three Vertical Powers of the Soul

We continue in this series of posts our review of Dr Wolfgang Smith's 2019 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.

Smith begins Chapter 4 with a rallying cry calling us to engage in combat with the ''tyranny of horizontal causation'' by revealing the power of '' vertical causation'', defeating thereby the scientistic materialism that has restricted man's scientific operations to merely secondary causalities at work in the lower extremities of the integral cosmos. With this in mind, he shifts our attention away from fundamental physics to man's active and cognitive faculties. These are traditionally regarded as the ''powers of the soul''.

Reminding us of basic metaphysical conceptions, Smith explains that a corporeal entity is what it is by virtue of its its ''substantial form''. This determines whether the entity is animate or inanimate. In the case of an animal, the form is called the anima or soul (life-giving principle). In man, it is called the rational soul, precisely by reason of man's active and cognitive faculties. After death, when the soul has separated from the body, what remains of the body is a composite of inanimate substances, prone to decompose.

If it is a substantial form that founds each corporeal entity (animate or inanimate), what is it that founds the substantial form itself? St Thomas answers that it is the ''act-of-being'', which is like a form in regard to all that is in the entity. This act-of-being bestows to each entity being and a power to act with an efficacy of its own. Smith calls this act-of-being the ''cosmogenetic Act itself''' and refers to the efficacy bestowed by this Act as an ''efficacy delegated by God.'' This efficacy entails a capacity on the part of created beings to achieve effects by way of vertical causation.

In the case of human beings, the prime example of such vertical causation is man's ''free will''. An act of the will may be said to be free by virtue of the fact that it is not effected by a chain of external causes, but by the soul or anima, which acts from within and therefore by way of vertical causation.

At this point, Smith makes a bold and decisive move when he asserts that ''verticality'' applies not only to causation but to cognition as well. In addition to the active powers (powers to act) delegated by God, man is also endowed with ''cognitive'' powers. Man, for example, is endowed with the ability to make use of perception, whether visual (sensual) or intellectual (such as understanding the proof of a mathematical theorem). Both modes of perception, he argues, demand a super-temporal act, since the transcendence of time is a defining characteristic of his sense of the ''vertical''.

This section of the chapter concludes by noting that the capacity of corporeal objects to activate vertical causality (VC) increases as we ascend from the inorganic through the plant and animal domains and up to the highest (sub-angelic) domain, that of humans.

In the next section, we shall be considering the dramatic implications for vertical causation resulting from William Dembski's 1998 theorem about ''complex specified information.''

To be continued.