Well, I’ve said my piece to Tony so let’s get on with it. Regarding squirrels: you may not have noticed but one regular poster on CAF recently claimed X-ray pictures were taken before they were even invented, and another outed himself as a communist imperialist sympathizer. So imho squirrels are the least of our problems.
Regarding X and Y: You’re asking a religious question. Not sure of this as I’m not Catholic, but it seems to me that for your purposes here you could speak of transubstantiation or the Incarnation. If the bread is only physical, how does it become the body of Christ? It’s a miracle, a mystery. How can a physical man be Christ? It’s a miracle, a mystery.
You are deflecting again. You are attempting to sideline my point by directing it towards transubstantiation when I never even brought it up.
This is merely the kind of standard Christology that Lewis would call “mere Christianity.” Christians, including Baptists, as far as I know, believe that the second person of the Trinity (God) became the man Jesus. Jesus was fully human, fully divine.
The question isn’t “How can a physical man be Christ?” The question is: How can God become “fully human” if what it means to be “fully human” is reducible to nothing more than a specific agglomeration of neuro-chemicals? There is nothing for God to become because “fully human” is fully explicable as a formulation of those chemicals.
Catholics aren’t the ones claiming that to be a “physical man” is nothing more than being a collection of chemicals. You are the one claiming that, so you can’t deflect from answering by insisting that Catholics have to answer for YOUR problematic notions.
By the way, the understanding of transubstantiation is not that God mysteriously or miraculously becomes merely physical bread. Catholics don’t believe that. Catholics claim that God is fully present and fully divine under the outward appearance of bread. Essentially, the Eucharist is no longer bread, but has substantially become God even while appearing to be bread.
The other issue is that “bread is only physical” isn’t a proper depiction of Thomistic metaphysics because neither Thomists (nor Catholics) claim that the essence of what bread is is reducible to the mere physical accidents of what bread appears to be – its quantifiable properties. That is applying your materialistic framework to the theological understanding, which completely misrepresents it.
Now I realize that might be a problem for Thomists, as they seem to expect everything can be rationally explained, but I’m not a Thomist, so squirrels to them. Metaphysically of course.
No, Thomists don’t have that problem because they aren’t the ones insisting that things like bread or human beings are reducible to their physical properties or accidents. You are.
As far as the mind is concerned, all the evidence, and that’s mountains and mountains of evidence, is that there’s no immaterial substance involved, so squirrels to Descartes.
The “mountains and mountains of evidence” is worth nothing more than squirrel nuts since it presumes only tangible physical evidence can serve as evidence in the first place. So discounting the “immaterial” as an essential part of your method will not even permit, let alone produce, anything immaterial within the process of collecting evidence. It is called turning your method into your metaphysics.
And if all substance is physical, if there is no other kind of substance, logically that’s the end of it, the fat lady sings. The soul is the form of the body - the mind arises from the configuration of physical processes. Just like bread is a configuration of physical processes.
Can’t see the problem. I mean really, can’t see the problem logically, evidentially or biblically.
No squirrels were harmed writing this post.
Again, this is pure deflection because I am not asking you to explain how Thomists might explain things, I am asking you to explain how you can legitimately hold a materialistic metaphysic at the same time as claiming God became man in Jesus.
Or are you denying that God did become man in Jesus?
If not, then kindly stop deflecting to what Thomists propose or fat ladies do or to the harming of squirrels, and answer the straightforward question: How do YOU reconcile your belief that God became man in Jesus with your belief that to be a man means nothing more than arranging a collection of chemicals in a particular way?
Did God merely become a bunch of chemicals – and nothing more – in Christ?
Is that what you believe? That God turned himself into molecules, proteins, minerals, and assorted other chemical constructs?
NOTE: It will NOT do – neither in response nor to deflect once more – to ask whether Catholics believe Christ becomes wheat flour, salt, oil and water. That isn’t what Thomists or Catholics believe.
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