This is apparently not true in Roman Catholic philosophy, which is what I’m trying to understand, by looking for another example of where there would be a difference according to that same philosophy.
That’s a change of accidents, though, isn’t it? When your daughter was born, you gained the trait of “fatherness”. When the one stamp was destroyed, the other got the trait of “uniqueness”.
But not one we can measure. We have no way of knowing if a particle that hits the host was once part of Jesus, can we?
You are not thinking homeopathically. 
But, What is “Reality”? That’s the key point at issue. Is it in fact delimited to the phenomenal world we share the experience of, or does it include some sort of “Higher Plane” – whether occupied by Hindu and Buddhist spirits, the J-C God and His Heavenly Host [no, it’s not a band name!], the eternal unchanging Forms of transient material things, or whatever.
I’m perfectly well aware that you personally reject any such metaphysical concept, and you share that view with every philosophical Materialist (not an insult or comparing you to Madonna, but the school of metaphysics you would belong to). But you do not get to posit that view when precisely that’s the subject of debate. That’s one form or another of verboten argumentation.
The theological point behind “transubstantiation” rests on the philosophical ideas of Aristotle; specifically, his discussions of substance in the Categories and Metaphysics. One key distinction Aristotle makes is between substance as it relates to the individualization of an object (e.g. what makes Fido the dog) and substance as it categorizes the object (e.g. what does it mean to be a dog).
Aristotle’s philosophical evaluation of this led him to a particular conclusion valued by Thomas Aquinas in this theory of transubstantiation. Some qualities we associate with individuals are “accidental”–a person can lose an arm, for example, and still be considered the “same” person, so “having two arms” might be considered an “accidental” quality of being a person (either individually or with the general notion of “person”). Some qualities, however, are “essential”, and while Aristotle had some difficulty giving good examples of “essential” qualities, he certainly believed they existed, and that such qualities would be ones an object would have to possess over its entire existence.
The “accidents” of the Eucharist, then, are the impermanent, changeable things that make the physical objects bread and water, and by a variety of philosophical/theological arguments Aquinas showed that all physical qualities of the Eucharist were accidental in the Aristotelian sense (Aquinas is following the logic of Aristotle’s famous definition “Man is a rational animal”, since Aristotle also found purely physical descriptions of concepts like “man”–such as “featherless biped”–to be essentially problematic). Aquinas then contended that what changed in the Eucharist were the essential qualities of the bread and wine via a theological event, carefully following Aristotelian philosophy in reaching this conclusion.
To summarize, to both Aquinas and Aristotle the substance of a thing is more than the sum of its accidents, because there is a feeling that essential qualities for both an individual and a category can be “teased out” from the term itself. It is very difficult to come up with iron-clad examples; most of Aristotle’s examples, such as “Man is a rational animal”, have been sufficiently criticized to not be worth hashing over here again. But the distinction between accidental and essential qualities is basic Greek philosophy, and it is certainly the starting point for Catholic theology (well, one of the starting points:)).
Now, I don’t necessarily buy the argument–the distinction between accidental and essential qualities seems so useless in philosophical application that I wonder if it is really the right way to approach the problem, and I’m not about to agree that a person is still a person if you remove their head–but I think it’s important to understand the basics of it before dismissing it as “doublethink”. There is some real thinking going on in Aquinas’ theology, so it is somewhat disheartening to witness the flippant glibness with which it is sometimes treated.
::: sigh :::
I was really hoping that a Philosophy major would step in and address this, but I guess I’ll give it a try. It’s been over 30 years since I studied some of this stuff and I am not going down into the basement to dig up my old class notes, so I’m sure I’ll get some of the details wrong.
The whole issue is one of the culmination of multiple ancient traditions coming together. The first tradition is that of the ancient Greeks.
When the Thales and Heraclitus and some of their buddies started ruminating on the nature of things, one aspect of the cosmos that grabbed their attention was the nature of being. The first one who put forth something like a systematized approach to his views was Plato. (Un)fortunately, Plato decided that the whole world was merely a shadow or reflection of some greater reality. The fact that this approach is a bit mystical explains, in part, why his philosophy has permeated a lot of subsequent religious thoughts. However, Plato’s student, Aristotle, was more nearly a practical or, at least, experience-centered thinker. He put aside the notion of our experience as a mere reflection of some greater reality, but he still wound up toying with just what reality means. One of his thoughts was that there is a difference between what something “really” is and the manner in which we apprehend it. The really, real essence of something he called (in later Latin translations) “substance” while those aspects of something that can be perceived he called “accidents.” Substance was “what something is” and he went on at great length to roll the idea over and consider it. A synopsis of his thoughts can be found (if not easily understood) on this web page. (Mind you, this was three hundred years prior to the birth of Jesus of Nazareth; he was not trying to establish any rules for the Christian Eucharist at that time.) The works of Aristotle that considered reality and being and essence and substance were collected in a book that was typically bound after his works on the physical nature of things. Since that work was [symbol]meta[/symbol] [symbol]fusika[/symbol] (meta physica–after the physics or physical) it was given the name, metaphysics and it was a series of considerations of things outside the physical. The consideration of being is called ontology. After Aristotle and Plato, the ancient world’s reliance upon authority (along with the self-destruction of Greek culture) pretty much put an end to any further speculations on the topic, since the two great authorities, Plato and Aristotle were recognized to have set forth everything that was important to those ideas.
Five hundred years after Aristotle, as the Roman society began to fray around the edges, there was a general movement to go back and reconsider some of the older thoughts. The first guy out of the gate was Plotinus. For some reason, he latched onto Plato’s works rather than Aristotle’s (although he did use some of the language that Aristotler had used, so we still had people referring to substance, even though Plotinus was much more of a Platonic “ideal forms” kind of guy). Plotinus studied under a man named Ammonius Saccus. Another student of Ammonius was the early Christian apologist, Origen. Plotinus did a very good job of re-organizing and explaining Platonism for the Roman world, so he became the primary influence for a number of later philosphers, who, by the historical accident of the rise of Christianity, were all Christian theologians. Origen later had a few of his works condemned by association with later heretics, but he still provided a strong (Platonic) influence on later church thinkers. So through most of Christian history, the theologians who were most involved in philosophy (metaphysics) tended to be Platonists: Augustine of Hippo, Anselm, Duns Scotus, and others.
The second thread is the Christian belief regarding the Divine Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Beginning with Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, where he says
and
and continuing through the Synoptic Gospels, where they echo the command (with minor variations)
culminating in John’s Gospel with the statement
Christians have long held that Jesus is in some way really present in the Eucharist.
For the first 800+ years of Christianity, among all the fights over whether Jesus was God or Man or God and Man and whether He had two natures or one united nature and all the rest of those discussions, no one actually got around to challenging the idea that Jesus was “present” in the Eucharist.
Finally, around the end of the ninth century, a few people who were still wrestling with the “God or Man” question invoked the Eucharist as a point of argument to “prove” their side of the discussion. After that, people began to worry over the question of how to decribe that Presence. (There was still no argument over whether He was present, only over how to describe it.)
The Eastern Church (that later took the appelation Orthodox after the great schism), tended to treat most theological issues from a mystical perspective, but the Western Church, (later called Catholic), always liked to nail down the issues in explicit terms of philosophy. At the end of the eleventh century, Hildebert of Tours reached back to neo-Platonic philosophy, (still relying on Plato’s ideal forms, but borrowing the Aristotelian term “substance”) to coin the term “transubstantiation” to indicate that the communion species changed their substance (what they “really were”) from bread and wine to Jesus. Shortly after that, Arabic writing re-introduced the thoughts of Aristotle to Western Europe. First Albert and then Thomas Aquinas took Aristotle’s metaphysics and applied it to Christian theology. Discarding the vague Platonic “forms,” Thomas found it easier to use the word Substance in its original Aristotelian definiton and made a strong case for transubstantiation as the description of the event that takes place at the consecration at mass. In that view, the bread and wine, while not changing any of their characteristics as wheat, grape, and water stopped being “bread and wine” and became Jesus in their essence. (See, below, for modern issues with that claim.) Initially, the Franciscans, Augustinians, and others strongly opposed the (Dominican) writings of Thomas (even trying to have his works condemned as heresy), but eventually his writings proved more persuasive and the Catholic Church adopted his definitions as the best expression. To understand that point, it is necessary to realize that there was already a nearly 1600 year tradition of thought, in Europe, that had been entertaining Plato’s “ideal forms” as some sort of super reality and a similar (if interrupted) tradition of dealing with Aristotle’s efforts to define essence, substance, and other ontological terms.
Luther, (being an Augustinian neo-Platonist), never accepted the philosophy of Aristotle and as he broke with the church, he provided a different and more Platonic description of what occurs at the Eucharist (while still maintaining that Jesus is really present in the host and cup). Later still, the Church of England, influenced by Calvinist and Lutheran writings during the various theological struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, also rejected the Aristotelian/Thomistic explanation although the RCC dug in its heels at the Council of Trent and, in 1551, declared that Transubstantiation was the official explanation of how Jesus is present in the Eucharist.
Meanwhile, philosophers continued to toy with metaphysics and ontology, although with the advent of the printing press and more leisure time for more people, a lot more philosophers began exploring the concepts regarding what is real (or what reality might be) to the point where there are now a lot more philosophical traditions than just Platonists and Artistotelians. With so many different traditions existing alongside each other, few people take the time to learn all of them (or study them, at all), and the ontological explanations of Aristotle or Plato may as well never be translated from the Greek for most people.
The proclamations of Der Trihs (to pick on one notable poster) may be correct if, indeed, the world is only material and there is no validity to the mental explorations of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Anselm, Duns Scotus, Aquinas, Locke, Hume, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein, and a few dozen more thinkers of the twentieth century. On the other hand, his pronouncements, in which he simply declares that material is all there is does seem to indicate a certain ignorance of a rather long philosophical tradition.
I really didn’t mean to slight CJJ*. I got caught up refereeing some stuff around the house and did not scroll down far enough during preview to see that someone had taken another shot at this.
Not ignorance ( well not only ignorance; as you point out few people have the time or inclination to gain a complete knowledge of the field, and I’m only mildly interested ). I simply see no evidence that there’s anything to do with objective reality in their speculations ( on this subject, at least ). I believe in the physical because there is evidence of the physical; there is no such evidence for forms or essences and such - in fact, as I pointed out earlier, evolution tends to undercut the whole concept. If there is some fundamental/transcendent Form or essence, how can one creature change to another ? At what point did birds lose their dinosaur essence and gain their bird essence ?
I see no evidence that there is anything beyond the physical to define a thing’s nature ( or as I put it, that a thing’s “substance” is anything more than the sum of it’s “accidents” ). Frankly, when I read about these complicated philosophical theories, I see a combination of premodern people trying to explain unscientifically things that science explains much better, an attempt to rationalize human mental prejudices ( see below ), and religious people trying to come up with confusing theories to cover up fact that the belief they are “explaining” ( transubstantiation in this case ) either makes no sense, doesn’t exist, or both.
As far as why it’s so hard to clearly define many things in purely physical terms ( as CJJ* mentions ) I believe the problem stems from a basic problem. Namely, there are no such clear definitions, no hard-edged catagories for many things. People have spent so much time trying to nail down a definition for such things as “life” and “human” ( and many, many other concepts ) because they are trying to do the impossible; there is no neat, absolute definition or catagory for many things; there is no “substance”, no Form, no essence; only a collection of “accidents” that usually, when combined, form the thing in question.
Definitions and categories are an artifact of the human style of thought ( and practical considerations; it would take forever to do anything if you considered and treated every object and creature as unique ) , not an objective reality. I think that such concepts as “substance” and “Forms” and “essences” are really just attempts to rationalize what is really just a tendancy of the human mind, not anything that is real.
That is fine as far as it goes–and you may even be right. I just note that your absolutist declarations about what is “real” are generally couched in language that gives the strong impression that you are not even aware of the other approaches to knowledge.
Sorry. That’s less an expression of my certainty on this subject than simply the way I tend to tallk, even when I try otherwise. I don’t seem to express uncertainty very well.
It’s perhaps worth noting in passing that William of Ockham did consider (the Christian, Catholic) God to be a “necessary entity” in accordance with his famous razor.
To go a step beyond the basic question of transubstantiation, since we’ve hared off into the epistemological question of what is the nature of reality and how can one know this, let me posit the putative existence of tachyons. These are elemental particles (akin to proton, electron, neutron, neutrino, pions, and all their friends and relations) foreordained by their nature to always travel faster than light, incapable of slowing to a speed of C or below, requiring increased energy to slow and accelerating with decreased kinetic energy. And, although relativists seem to think they can disprove them by the absence of expected effects, there is likely no way in which their presence or absence can ever be detected – making them an unfalsifiable hypothesis as regards the material universe.
The existence or lack thereof of a deus otiosus – one that has absolutely no effect on the physical world whatsoever – cannot be proven or disproven.
Phenomena alleged by various sources to be the results of divine intervention can be explored, and proven, disproven, or at minimum the degree of likelihood of their occurrence established. However, this is as much a critique of the sources as of the nature and existence of the God posited to have acted in them. (Good example: the Infancy Gospel of Thomas apocryphally claims that the boy Jesus brought a sparrow back to life which a playmate had killed and instead caused the instantaneous death of the playmate – when one reviews the provenance of the IGoT, however, the results are such that one’s skepticism needs to be directed more towards the invalidity of anything in the IGoT than in the reality or not of Jesus.)
And it’s also perhaps worth noting that he was wrong. Otherwise, believers would have no need of faith.
It’s unlikely that they or anything else in our universe would be truly undetectable, even indirectly. If nothing else, a universe with tachyons, even one where they didn’t interact with the rest of the universe at all - and I don’t think that’s even possible - would have slightly different physical laws, and the effects of those laws could be discovered and extrapolated.
There are other problems with your analogy. For one, tachyons are supposed to be physical objects, and we know can such objects can and do exist; not so with “Forms”, essences and gods. Second, a hypothesis based on a combination of known and extropolated physical laws, even if unproven, is still more plausible than ideas like we’ve been talking about, which don’t have even that much of a basis. Even if tachyons were shown to be unprovable, a theory that predicted them would still be more plausible than one with no basis in known physical laws at all.
Transubstantiation fails all the tests of plausibility. We have no evidence it happens, beyond the assertion of highly biased proponents. We have no evidence it’s even possible. It explains nothing; assuming it to be true solves no unsolved problems. The only reason we are even arguing over it is while it’s a silly idea, it’s a religious silly idea, and we’ve been enculturated to consider those worthy of respect. If I claimed to have invented a gadget, the Der Trihs Transubstantiator, that could turn wood into gold without changing it’s looks, feel or detectable physical nature, how many people would accept payment in my “gold” ? No one would consider me anything but a loon - because I didn’t couch my looniness in religious terms.
I don’t see that the existence of a higher plane beyond the material necessitates the existence of “substance”. Are there any faiths that say in an afterlife in which we become purely beings of another plane, we lose all sense of self? I’ve heard no-one suggest that we lose all individuality on death (though i’m sure there are religions which suggest it) - and yet those characteristics that go to make up our selves are accidents. And gods themselves have personality, ideals, attributes; they are beings of accident also.
Airman Doors, I have faith that you are a large, green salamander. My faith is very very strong, so you cannot ask me to demonstrate it scientifically. That is the very nature of faith- it defies the demand for proof. Otherwise it would be a fact.
I wonder what you would do if a doctor said to you that he is going to sever your head from your body to cure your headaches. When you ask him with great astonishment how that can possibly work, when you ask for for an iota of scientific proof for what he is proposing, he answers that he has faith in the procedure. “That”, says the doctor as he starts to strap you down and sharpens his scalpel and saw, “is the very nature of faith- it defies the demand for proof.”
I wonder how long it would take you to get off the operating tableand get out of that office.
This leads me to the following question: If the consecrated wafer is in substanbce the body and blood of Jesus and you recive it into your digestive system, you eventually shit it out. At what point does it lose its “substance” and become mere wheat flour again? Or does he body and blood of your saviour end up as a floating turd?
This is more relevant than you think, because I had Huguenot acestors who were forced under threat of death to reconvert to Catholicism. After they took communion, one of their forms of protest was to keep it in their mouths and spit it out again. Some of them were caught doing this and were punished for “desecrating the body and blood of our saviour”. So at what point does its substance change back to flour? Not in the mouth, apparently.
Why, that’s easy. Of course, the Jesusness “substance” is absorbed and not passed… your own metaphysical essential digestive tract and liver – which exist in the plane of Ideal Forms and are coextant but distinct from the accidents of your organic gut and liver – metaphysically metabolize it so it’s absorbed into your own substantial essence. 
Hey, look, I know the subject at hand is an amazing feat of otherwise brilliant minds contorting themselves into a Siamese Human Knot of explanations and rationalizations, and as I’ve mentioned numerous times, once you accept the “God” theory to begin with you’ve already taken the biggest leap outside the realm of the provable; I just find it really hard to get all het up about some specific doctrine with no practical impact in the functioning of society and that I dare say a majority of its own nominal followers could not begin to explain and am a bit nonplussed by the vehemence of some people in taking exception to it.
I could be a green salamander. If you take that as an article of faith you only have to reconcile it with what you see with your own eyes.
As for the doctor, I have the utmost faith that my decapitation, meaning of course that I will be dead, would undoubtedly cure any headaches I might get. That is only mitigated by the fact that I have no desire to die when Advil works just as well.
Outside of the Christian dogma of Transubstantiation, there is the gnosis of “Transubstantiation”. I believe the mystical meaning and teaching of Jesus when taken without manipulation is quite clear. In fact, it is just a §restatement of a universal law: theUniversal Law, The First Law of Thermodynamics-- Conservation of Energy. I am here and soon gone of this substance, but forever with you in transformation. This is me, and I am in you and you in me, forever.
There is no way around it. He and truly all of us are never annihilated, there is only eternity “transubstantiated”.
This is also another way of stating the truth of reincarnation, resurrection, and any other reinvention.
It’s ancient quantum physics.
No, it’s ancient nonsense. You are not energy; you are a pattern in your brain, and there is no Law of Conservation of brain patterns. If there were, brain damage would have no effect - but it does. You can be detroyed, you are not eternal, and there is zero evidence of anything else.
Fine, but that lead me to think an eternal hell was nonsense because it runs afoul of the second law. 
IMO it is much simple to assume symbolism, there is no need to assign quantum physics to it, BTW IIRC you are not even applying it properly here.