Aristotelian substance theory and transubstantiation

[Love4All]

Given that it 100 the early church Fathers decades to come up with an acceptable statement of the trinity, I think it’s pretty unreasonable for you to ask one individual to do so in any reasonable time frame for an internet forum, don’t you think?

Copout. Very sad to see that when your substance is exposed as fluff, rather than admit it, you choose to dissemble. I think we’re pretty much done here.

 

[Love4All]

I find the RCC’s claims of infallibility and being the only true church to be unacceptable theologically and historically. If we are ever to achieve unity in the Church, the RCC will need to abandon these, as they are two of the major barriers to Christ’s command of unity.

Hold your breath until that happens. We’ll send the ambulance around.

The obstacle to your becoming fully united with God’s Church, is in you, not in God’s Church. You are separated from her by your obstinacy in your own will.

There already exists Unity in God’s Church; you just don’t choose to participate in that Unity.

 

[Muze]

Why are they human then?

Because that’s what our language defines them as.

 

[Muze]

Ah! So NOW, you are showing your true colors. Why didn’t you just say so in the first place? Why all this distracting nonsense about Aristotle? Your objection is not to Aristotle, but to Jesus Christ!

You reject the Real Presence.

False accusation. I believe that’s commandment #8.

I’ve stated multiple times in this thread that the Eastern formula of mystery AND the Lutheran formula of consubstantiation both represent Real Presence and don’t have the issues the RCC doctrine does.

You adhere to some strange theory of some “psychological” presence of Christ in the Eucharist. According to you, it is impossible for the Sacrament to really be the Body and Blood of Christ because, according to you, the entire reality of anything is in its appearance. Everything is as it seems. Death is permanent, and there is no God.

Nice straw man. I like the hat. Too bad you had to burn it.

Perhaps you should go back and read what I wrote again.

My point was that the “substance” only exists as a concept in our minds, and that if we embrace transubstantiation, then the change of “substance” would have to occur in the mind.

Which was my argument for looking at another doctrine of real presence.

Again, commandment #8,

Why again do you call yourself a Christian? Seems hypocritical.

Using ad homenim in place of a real argument? That’s a clear, begrudging (and satisfying) admission of defeat.

 

[Muze]

Hold your breath until that happens. We’ll send the ambulance around.

Not holding my breath. But that is the obstacle.

The obstacle to your becoming fully united with God’s Church, is in you, not in God’s Church. You are separated from her by your obstinacy in your own will.

Yeah, because the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox and Anglican and all the other churches out there are false churches.

Thank you for re-articulating the problem.

There already exists Unity in God’s Church; you just don’t choose to participate in that Unity.

Yes, all the errors of the RCC should just be ignored, and we’ll all drink the kool-aid, and everything will be fine.

 

[Muze]

Actually, the Roman Catholic Church IS “The Church.” Nice try on the false dichotomy though.

Yeah, because there isn’t an Eastern Orthodox church.

I think you and your pope need to have a little chat.

 

[Muze]

So can transubstantiation.

Real presence can, yes. Transubstantiation is based upon substance theory, so that’s a contradiction on definitional terms.

 

[Muze]

Also, Muze, do you think that a “mysterious or spiritual/consubstantial Eucharist” has any more a place in modern physics than substance theory?

Yes, as they appear to deal with Real Presence outside of the physical universe.

 

[Muze]

Muze,* take a closer look at John 6.* Jesus says in verse 53 that,* “I am the bread which came down from heaven, not as manna your fathers did eat and are dead; he that eateth this bread shall live forever.”

And in verse 49, “I am the bread of life.”

Again, contrasted with manna from Moses.

Now look at the comparison that Christ makes between the manna, which is a real food that the Jewish fathers ate in the desert, and another bread–His flesh.* This is called a ‘typology’.

The rule in understanding biblical topologies is that the fulfillment of a type is always greater than the type itself.

And the New Covenant is greater than the Old Covenant. Kinda the point.

An example of this is when the apostle Paul compares Adam to Christ in 1 cor. 15:45-47, where he calls the first Adam, “a living soul,” and “earthly” to the new Adam who is a “quickening spirit” and “heavenly”.** Jesus who is the second Adam, is greater than the first Adam.

Another typology exists between baptism and circumcision, where in Col.* 2:11, Paul calls baptism the “circumcision of Christ”.** Again, where according to the old law, circumcision brought one into covenant relationship with God, baptism is the perfection of that rite by truly making one God’s child.

So where both Adams are men, and both circumcision and baptism are sacramental rites, when Christ spoke both of manna from heaven, and His own flesh, He very purposely meant His flesh to be thought of as real food.* If He hadn’t wanted to point to His own flesh as true food, or true drink, then He would not have brought to mind the manna in the wilderness to the attention of the crowd surrounding Him as the typology He was fulfilling by the “devouring” (Trogos in the Greek) of His own flesh, because the comparison would have been too gruesome if He really didn’t mean it.* While this isn’t as apparent in English, the context of the verse in Greek doesn’t allow for any other interpretation.* Trust me on this.* That is why John mentions the grumbling and the comment from the crowd, “this is a hard saying.* Who can hear it?”

To add confidence to this interpretation please read Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, chapter 11,* specifically verse 29,* “for he that eateth and drinketh unworthily,* eateth and drinketh judgment unto himself: not discerning the body of Christ”.

Consider something else.* The feeding of the five thousand, curiously occurring just prior to the events in John 6, was also a type of Eucharistic foreshadowing.* When He blessed the loaves and fishes, did the accidents of bread or fish change?*

The quantity did.

No, of course not or the people wouldn’t have eaten it.* But the loaves and fishes did change in one way–by increasing.* So if the accidents didn’t change, since fish can’t be more “fishy” or loaves can’t be more, well “loavy” --what did?* The matter did.*

More accurately, the quantity changed.

You’ve just contradicted yourself. If the matter changed, then the accidents would have changed. All that happened was that more of the same was brought into existence.

You do consider this to be a miracle, right?

And in the same way, Christ shows us that in the Eucharist–where the accidents don’t change, nevertheless does change in its nature, by becoming the body and blood of Christ, just as Paul states in his first Corinthian epistle.

That’s not even close to the same. The bread for the 5,000 was still bread. Even in substance theory, the substance didn’t change. There was just more of it.

And once again consider the apostolic fathers like Ignatius, Clement, and Polycarp.* Both Polycarp and Ignatius were direct disciples of John the Evangelist, and so the meaning of John 6 was quite clear to them.** Remember again that as Ignatius was being escorted back to Rome for not paying tribute to Caesar, to be martyred for the faith in a macabre display of death from a pack of lions purposefully starved for a week before being loosed on him, he took the time to write an epistle to the Smyrnians, declaring the Eucharist to be the true flesh of Christ, and heretics were those who didn’t believe it.* If He lied about what John himself told him concerning John 6, then he was willing to be killed for it, and so were the rest of apostolic fathers for the same reasons.* And It doesn’t make sense that he was just wrong about his understanding of John 6.* One doesn’t die for something he isn’t convinced of.* And Ignatius was not a casual Christian.

So, we have real presence. I’m fairly sure Ignatius didn’t articulate Aristotelian substance theory. And there are more than ways to do real presence.

But do I expect you to buy any of this?* Not really.* Because more than suffering the truth, you would rather suffer the defect of pride, and forego legitimate reasons to believe in a Catholic doctrine.** And I know about this because I suffer from the same.* I don’t like to lose arguments either.* But listening to more enlightened arguments as many of the posters have submitted here I think is the start of a wiser response from you than some of the ones you’ve been writing.

God bless.

Ah, the ad homenim comes out again. The most begrudging and satisfying admission of defeat.

 

[Muze]

plato.stanford.edu/entries/substance/#AriAccSub

There are two interpretations of what Aristotle meant by this, one of which seems compatible with modern science and the other not.

First the compatibilist one. Empiricist philosophers of science used to believe that the concepts in higher order sciences could be reduced, either by means of reductive definition or by ‘bridging laws’, to those in the more basic sciences. (See, for example, Nagel 1961.) By such means, everything could be understood in terms of the most basic science—presumed to be physics. Concepts in the other sciences are thus only a kind of shorthand for laborious descriptions in the language of physics. Few, if any, philosophers of science believe this now.

So, potentially compatible, although no one embraces it.

The stronger, **incompatibilitist **interpretation is that Aristotle did not believe that the behaviour of complex entities followed from the laws that govern their parts or their matter. (Gotthelf 1987, Robinson 1983) By contrast, the behaviour of the matter is influenced by what it is the matter of. The nature of the matter places restrictions on what the enmattered thing can do—an animal can only be made from living tissue, not of stone or fire—but exactly how that matter behaves depends on the substantial form present in it. The substantial form plays, therefore, an essential role, not merely in certain kinds of scientific explanation, but by being a fundamental efficient cause in its own right. Whichever of these is the correct interpretation of Aristotle, it was the second which was the core of ‘Aristotelian science’ as found in scholastic philosophy, and it was this aspect of the Aristotelian doctrine of substance that aroused most opposition amongst seventeenth century philosophers and scientists. They insisted that bodies behave as they do because of the mechanical consequences of the nature of the matter from which they are made: the matter is not ‘pushed around’ or organized by a substantial form. Philosophers and scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries believed that in rejecting such influences they were rejecting the Aristotelian doctrine of substance.

Not compatible with modern science (as I’ve stated.)

There were two major problems that the Aristotleian tradition has faced in the modern period. They are: (1) explaining and justifying the sense in which substantial forms have causal or explanatory power, especially in the light of a developed mechanistic chemistry or physics; (2) the difficulty in understanding the relation of substantial form to properties, especially those in terms of which a given substance is defined. These are connected. It is because the substantial form has genuine causal force that it is conceived of by Aristotle as a unified entity in its own right, and not just as a name for the collocation of properties in terms of which it is defined.

And these problems are exposed by modern science.

My apologies if I wasn’t as eloquent as Stanford University in expressing the issues.

(The article also mentions that Aristotle was NOT an atomist, he didn’t accept that atoms were what matter was comprised of.)

 

[Alberti_Devoveo]

Because that’s what our language defines them as.

So there is something more to being human than the physical?

 

[Muze]

So there is something more to being human than the physical?

There’s physical and spiritual parts to the human being.

 

[Alberti_Devoveo]

There’s physical and spiritual parts to the human being.

Can science define and/or describe the spiritual?

NB: I said, “being human” not “human being.” There is a difference

 

[Alberti_Devoveo]

In other words, the parts determine the whole. However, this view, mechanistic materialism, is fundamentally flawed. If we were to appeal to DNA as the fundamental reality of the cat (as if DNA was a building block for the cat) we would still need to explain the parts of the DNA. Otherwise, how do we explain what these parts are if DNA is the prime building block of the cat? A mechanist materialist would probably then appeal to the atom as the prime building block of DNA and hence the cat. Of course, atoms are composed of sub-atomic particles, which demand explanation. These particles are also made of sub-particles, and so on… Eventually, the materialist must arrive at some particle which is the fundamental reality of the cat; the one thing that makes the cat real.

Source (under the header “Critique”)

 

[Eleve]

Muze, you’ve grossly misinterpreted what the SEP article is saying about the “compatibilist” position. The view that “Few, if any, philosophers of science believe … now” is the view “that the concepts in higher order sciences could be reduced … to those in the more basic sciences.” The “compatibilist” substance theorist makes the claim that those few philosophers are wrong, that claims about substances cannot be reduced to claims about fundamental particles or fundamental physics. In this, she agrees with the vast majority of philosophers who reject the reductionist position.

 

[Muze]

Can science define and/or describe the spiritual?

NB: I said, “being human” not “human being.” There is a difference

“Human” is short for “human being”.

No, science does not describe the spiritual.

 

[Muze]

Muze, you’ve grossly misinterpreted what the SEP article is saying about the “compatibilist” position. The view that “Few, if any, philosophers of science believe … now” is the view “that the concepts in higher order sciences could be reduced … to those in the more basic sciences.” The “compatibilist” substance theorist makes the claim that those few philosophers are wrong, that claims about substances cannot be reduced to claims about fundamental particles or fundamental physics. In this, she agrees with the vast majority of philosophers who reject the reductionist position.

After reading this again, you’re right, I misread it.

The key point is this:

There are interpreters of Aristotle who think that this kind of irreducibility is all that Aristotle means—or needs to mean—by postulating an **explanatory **role for substantial form.

Thus, substance is simply a way to make language for particular forms.

 

[Alberti_Devoveo]

“Human” is short for “human being”.

No, science does not describe the spiritual.

According to Oxford Dictionaries:

Human:

relating to or characteristic of humankind

Human Being:

a man, woman, or child of the species Homo sapiens, distinguished from other animals by superior mental development, power of articulate speech, and upright stance.

Definitely a difference between “human” and “human being.” Using your equivocation, what I said was, “something more to being a human being than the physical.”

So if science cannot describe everything in this world, in particular the non-physical, why should one expect that science can disprove something that is explicitly stated as being non-physical?

 

[Muze]

So if science cannot describe everything in this world, in particular the non-physical, why should one expect that science can disprove something that is explicitly stated as being non-physical?

The spiritual isn’t a part of the physical universe. It isn’t subject to the laws of the physical universe.

To quote the article above:

By contrast, the behaviour of the matter is influenced by what it is the matter of. The nature of the matter places restrictions on what the enmattered thing can do—an animal can only be made from living tissue, not of stone or fire—but exactly how that matter behaves depends on the substantial form present in it.

Modern science has proven the behavior of matter is, in fact, wholly dependent upon the materials that make up that thing. Thus, the “substance” of physical things is found in what we CAN observe, and not in some unobservable form.

That’s why it’s called “incompatible with modern science.”

 

[Alberti_Devoveo]

The spiritual isn’t a part of the physical universe. It isn’t subject to the laws of the physical universe.

To quote the article above:

Modern science has proven the behavior of matter is, in fact, wholly dependent upon the materials that make up that thing. Thus, the “substance” of physical things is found in what we CAN observe, and not in some unobservable form.

That’s why it’s called “incompatible with modern science.”

You have missed the point: science cannot prove or disprove the non-physical, so why should science be able to say anything about substance theory?

And, going back to the previously linked source:

A mechanist materialist would probably then appeal to the atom as the prime building block of DNA and hence the cat. Of course, atoms are composed of sub-atomic particles, which demand explanation. These particles are also made of sub-particles, and so on… Eventually, the materialist must arrive at some particle which is the fundamental reality of the cat; the one thing that makes the cat real. However, even if he were to stop his sub-atomic chain at such a particle (such as pure energy or super-strings) he would still have to explain where the particle derives its “reality”. In this event, the materialist would just admit that the energy particle (for arguments sake lets call it a super-string) just is real; it has no explanation for itself and must be a completely simple reality. If he did this he would find himself agreeing with Aristotle. Why? The reason is that the materialist will have agreed that the super-string is a fundamental reality. The super string has mass, quality (such as brightness or texture), quantity and possibly other modes of existence called accidents by Aristotelian thinkers. The materialist must agree that the fundamental particle (the super-string) has accidents, otherwise where does the quantity, quality, position, posture, etc. of the cat come from? If the materialist agrees to the fact that the super-string is a fundamental reality with accidental qualities, then he has just defined an Aristotelian object. His object has substance (a primary mode of being which fundamentally just is) inhered with accidents (secondary modes of being which give the substance discernable characteristics). In the end, the materialist will be forced to admit the reality of substance and accidents over the philosophy of an endless string of mechanistic materialism. We can also simply say that the cat just is a simple substance inhered with accidents that are divisible into parts (DNA, proteins, atoms, quarks, super-strings, etc.) The cat is defined as a whole rather than a sum of parts. The cat is fundamentally composed of primary matter with the form of a cat. The parts (such as cat DNA and its constituent atoms) are also feline since the form of the cat is inherent in every part of the cat. The substance of the cat determines the parts to be what they are. An individual atom separate from the form of the cat is substantially different because the substance of the atom is atomic, but an atom in a cat is only part of the whole: therefore its substance is feline. The bottom line is that a whole must be defined first before parts can be predicated to it.