Richard_Hurtz:
If I may ask an impertinent question; How as a scientist do you defend to other scientists transubstantiation?
If you find the creation account problematic to argue, how on earth can you argue for the Real Presence?
It seems to me that Catholics are granting the materialistic objections of sceptics. The same acid that eats away at the creation account eats away at the other parts of faith as well.
Blessings,
Richard
Hello Richard,
Transubstantiation is pure mystery. There is no way to scientifically analyze it; therefore, I do not try to defend it scientifically any more than I try to defend the existence of the soul, the Trinity or any other spiritual/philosophical element of the faith. The beginning of life, on the other hand has significant scientific implications. There is the fossil record to contend with, for one thing, a big thing I might add.
Attempting to reconcile Scripture with geologic evidence is not “granting the materialistic objections of sceptics”. I have found that scientists are willing to accept that purely spiritual concepts have no scientific explanations, however, people of faith lose objective credibility when we try to ignore scientific data.
Our understanding of Scripture passages has changed as scientific data has come to light. I’ll give an example. When Gallileo postulated that the earth orbited the sun, based on the mathematical theories of Copernicus, this was a revolutionary concept in science. It didn’t line up with empirical observations because every morning people could clearly see the sun “rise”, “move” across the sky and “set”. It also didn’t line up with the contemporary interpretation of several Scripture verses, such as when the “sun stood still”. How could the sun stand still if it wasn’t moving? For nearly 200 years this was only a theory until it was shown in the early 1800s that the earth did indeed orbit around the sun. Did this undermine Scripture? No. It simply changed our understanding of some Scripture passages. The same can be said for the creation account in Genesis. Many people assume that the account was meant to be taken literally, as though it were intended as a science text or historical account. If they are wrong does that undermine Scripture? No.
Science may shed light on how life was created, but that won’t change the fact that God created life. Science can debate how the human body came to be, but science will never shed light on how the first soul came to be. That, like transubstantiation, is a matter of faith alone. In my personal opinion, it doesn’t matter to me how God chose to create the human body, whether instantaneously or through some evolutionary process. That is immaterial compared to His creation of the first human soul (Adam) and that of his spouse (Eve). Science pales when considering the wonder of the infusion of a new soul into a fertilized egg. We don’t have to defend matters of faith to our scientific colleagues, but we do have to deal with scientific data, whether we choose to engage in the debate or ignore the data.
