The normal definition excludes physical change. If I order my sons to swap bedrooms, so that “Charlie”'s room is now “Tom”'s and vice versa, does this change occur once I have said so (as head of the household)? Has either room changed in a manner that even an electron microscope could detect?
Does anybody seriously believe science will ever prove anything supernatural? “Supernatural” means “not of the natural world”, and science is the study of nature.
So if a scientific test ever showed a difference in the post-blessed holy cracker, wouldn’t that prove it isn’t supernatural?
Besides, the whole “accidents” concept and such is clearly written to be non-falsifiable.
I’m not being coy, I’m really not. I invite you to read Bricker’s GD post on the subject, too. It expresses it very well. But I will just say here that no Catholic will claim that there is any detectable change on a testable/scientific level. The bread looks and tastes the same before and after transubstatiation, and any type of examination a scientist could make would verify that.
Change of ownership is not a change in substance. If a change in substance is not what Sarahfeena was talking about, I’m confused as to what she responded to post #356 the way she did or what sort of lab test she though science has failed to provide.
Just curious, not trying to be snarky, but was that the position of the Catholic church prior to the development of scientific tests capable of testing the claim?
I’m not saying science has necessarilyfailed to provide anything…it was hypothetical. My point is that who knows what science will eventually reveal?
I think you could revise my sentence to read:
The bread looks and tastes the same before and after transubstatiation, and any type of examination a person could make would verify that.
And they only threatened to kill them. Interestingly, we take threats of violence more seriously than threats of sacrilege.
Was that the position of the Catholic church prior to the development of scientific tests capable of testing the claim?
I have no idea, as I do not pre-date those types of tests. As far as I know, my second sentence has always been correct…that no physical examination that is/was possible would show the host to be anything other than bread. I’d need someone more knowledgable about theology to back me up, here, but I’m pretty sure it’s true by definition.
Upon thinking about it, I do have an idea…by “definition” I mean that the difference between substance and accidents (that Bricker explained in his GD post) has been part of the explantion of transubstantiation for a long, long time (going back to St. Thomas Aquinas, I think?). Our scientific understanding of the “accidents” of bread may have become more sophisticated over the years, where we now understand the molecular structures and so on, but this is still observable phenomenon. “Accidents” refers to what can be observed, vs. what cannot.
Yep. Around ~1200.
Even taking the cynics view, it’s not surprising that the church developed the doctrine.
Priest: Here, take this piece of bread. It’s Jesus’s body!
Medieval Peasant: Eh, what? Still looks like bread…Still tastes like bread…It’s still bread, innit?
Mmmm, [del]peanut butter[/del] body of our Lord.
Would it be more accurate to say that the wafer is possessed by the ghost of the body of Jesus, or is it more like the incantations cause a spell to be cast over the wafer?
Yeah, what if you spread a bit of peanut butter on the host before sanctification? What does the peanut butter become while still retaining its accidents?
Buddha?
- TBJ
P. S. Oh, good grief! I didn’t even realize that there was a pun here! This reminds me of a stand-up pretending to be clueless about religion, and then asking whether Judaism “was the one with the light sabers” – It made me laugh, but I couldn’t figure out why it did right away!
I would say that neither or those would be an accurate charactarization of what happens.
Dinosaurs aren’t extinct because I am a Tyrannosaurus rex. Rar!
Sure, my accidents happen to be those of a human, but I’m a T-rex where it really counts.
If you mean in the pants area, male Tyrannosaurs probably didn’t have penises. 
Sounds like you’ve answered your own question, now doesn’t it?
Well, that’s assuming your other ball has finally dropped.
Big kiss, Hon!
Identical to the current position.
All the expressions regarding the Eucharist, dating back to the first century, then passing through Platonic philosophy (courtesy of the students of Plotinus) and then being re-shaped by Thomas Aquinas using Aristotelian philosophy, have one thing in common. They believed that there was a real world that was separate from the perceived world. Such an approach to the world is a thread that may be found in a great many philosophies. For folks raised in an environment in which the perceived, physical world is considered to be the only world, such attitudes are, quite possibly, difficult to grasp.
It is one thing to insist that the phyiscal world is the only possible world and that beliefs in a separate spiritual world are fantasies or delusions. People holding that position may, indeed, be correct. However, when people act as though science might, some day, prove or disprove spiritual reality or pretend that the words substance and accident as used by Platonic or Aristotelian philosophers and theologians, has the same meaning as used by mechanistic or physicalist philosophers they are being every bit as silly as they are accusing the theists of being.
Challenging the Platonic/Aristotelian/theist definition of substance on the grounds that it makes no sense or that it appears to have no basis in one’s perceived reality is fine. Pretending that when a theist uses the word according to over 2000 years of tradition it really means something else simply makes one appear to fail to understand the language.