No need to be condescending, I was just providing the relevant paragraph of the Catechism. I’ve had over a decade of Catholic schooling, I know very well what transubstantiation is, though the sophistry in describing the “substance” of a thing often confuses me.
Why not? Jesus said it, you can’t pit doctrine against doctrine. That being said, you
can put science (or history, but that’s off-topic) against doctrine, but note that when it **can **be tested, such as scabbing or bleeding hosts or Lanciano’s miracle, it has done far more to help then to hinder faith and transubstantiation (what a long word that is!).
I think a quick read of Antony Flew’s “
Theology and Falsification” should clarify things a bit here.
Sure, hit me!
For example, let’s take the assertion:
“Now to assert that such and such is the case is necessarily equivalent to denying that such and such is not the case. Suppose then that we are in doubt as to what someone who gives vent to an utterance is asserting, or suppose that, more radically, we are sceptical as to whether he is really asserting anything at all, one way of trying to understand (or perhaps to expose) his utterance is to attempt to find what he would regard as counting against, or as being incompatible with, its truth. For if the utterance is indeed an assertion, it will necessarily be equivalent to a denial of the negation of the assertion.” (From previously mentioned article)
What? I think I missed something, but did Flew just say that if you make an assertion and somebody denies it, it’s false? I know a lot of things that would count against transubstantiation anyway, but nobody has done those things. I can list them if you like.
So what is the negation of this assertion? That the substance (or essence) of the bread and wine do not change. Now what’s the difference between an invisible, intangible, undetectable change and no change at all? Your assertion has been so qualified that it hardly an assertion at all.
Oh, NOW I see. Ignore the comment above. But you can observe it, just usually not. Most rules have exceptions. In my case, it’s the Eucharistic Miracles and the fact that they can and have been scientifically verified. In your case, the excepted rule is that something can only be one thing at a time.
Furthermore I think I can point out the root of all this poor theology: Thomas Aquinas employing the Aristotelian concepts of substance and accident in articulating the theology of the Eucharist, particularly the transubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood. (
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_%28philosophy%29)
Transubstantiation traces its ideas to well before Aquinas, or I may be getting you wrong here too. Aquinas just used this idea to aid it. Now, sometimes, their accidents
do, in fact, change, see my Eucharistic Miracle links for more. They do change, but they are only observable as bread and wine (usually).
But of course Aristotle’s idea of an essence is an ancient and ignorant one; that a chair has a “substance” which gives it its identity, regardless of physical properties relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of the physical forces that make up the chair.
Chair: A seat for one person, with a support for the back
So, if a seat for one person were made of wood, metal, water, plastic, rocks, leather, lightbulbs, human bones, or something else, as long as it had support for the back, it would be a chair regardless of its observable qualities, in this case its color, shape, material, and firmness.
So to convince someone of the truth of the statement:
relies on
- Convincing that everything has an invisible, intangible, elusive “essence” that resides outside of the observable, and
We need to do it with two things. Not everything. And those have circumstances for which we can make this claim.
- That the essence of the bread and wine is changed in the process of transubstantiation
Both of which rely on an appeal to the authority of the Catholic Church. In other words, this is a useless topic to argue over. Do yourself and your faith a favor and call it faith, don’t try to say it’s reasonable, you won’t get away with it.
I always called it faith. If you want to call it reasonable, be my guest. Even after I’ve read the multiple scientifically verified, similar Eucharistic Miracles (nudge nudge), I still call it faith, and I’m happy with that. And it’s not really an appeal to authority but an appeal to tradition, really. But that doesn’t matter either to you, I would think.
BTW: Who or what is your avatar an image of?
Needless to say, MindOverMatter2 is right. The ontologies of the bread and wine change, not the physically discernible elements. Of course, as Pieman has pointed, there have been many miraculous exceptions throughout the history of the Church, and I think there is one currently being investigated in New England, though I don’t have an sources on it at the moment.