From: ian glendinning (psybertron@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Apr 28 2005 - 08:58:07 BST
Scott did we really get nowhere in our "Science" debate ...
When you say
that science has no bearing on [transub-wotsit]. [...] The Catechism
does not use the word "literally", but it does use "real". But of
course, the "real" to a Catholic is not just the material, and science
can only be concerned with the material.
I say again, absolutely not.
See Sam's Feyerabend quote - don't take my word for it.
Science (physics) left the material behind a century ago at least. Why
does "the church" insist on clinging to ancient science ?
I've said before as a "physicalist" I'm what would ONCE have been
known as a "materialist" (in olde-worlde times), when people equated
physical with material. BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT PHYSICS IS.
Grrrr.
Ian
On 4/26/05, Scott Roberts <jse885@localnet.com> wrote:
> Anthony, DMB,
>
> I should point out that, as I said in my first response to Anthony, I do not
> hold with the doctrine of transubstantiation, so I'm not trying to defend
> it. My only point in this discussion was to say that science has no bearing
> on it. Both of you, in using such words as "literally" or "actually" are
> using these words the way a materialist would to interpret the doctrine. The
> Catechism does not use the word "literally", but it does use "real". But of
> course, the "real" to a Catholic is not just the material, and science can
> only be concerned with the material.
>
> So the larger issue here is that you and the Catholic are speaking different
> languages. This is most obvious when David says:
>
> "Catholics have their own definition of the word "substance"? Well, ok but
> if we are going to have a discussion I'm going to insist that we speak
> English. You're certainly free to express Catholic "ideas", but you're going
> to have to express them in the only common language we have because I, for
> one, do not speak Catholic."
>
> Two replies to this are obvious: (1) if you don't speak Catholic, then you
> don't understand Catholicism, so what gives you the right to criticize
> Catholicism?, and (2) since the word "substance" is the trunk of the word
> "transubstantiation", you are not going to understand the doctrine without
> using the word "substance" in the way Catholicism did when it coined the
> word.
>
> But more generally, the Catholic use of the word "substance" is the usual
> philosophical meaning of the term. Descartes spoke of two substances: mental
> and extended, for instance. The materialist, in this vocabulary, is the one
> who says there is only one substance, matter, and from the domination of the
> materialist outlook, the word "substance" came to mean, in the popular mind,
> matter. Unfortunately, Pirsig only appears to know this popular meaning,
> mistakenly assumes that that is the philosophic meaning, and so David gets
> confused.
>
> Or as Anthony says:
> "as far as transubstantiation is concerned, the priest in a Roman
> Catholic Church after blessing the bread and wine, doesn't qualify, for
> instance, the statement "this bread is the body of Christ" with the words
> "but only in the sense of a being a non-scientifically known substance". He
> simply states "this bread is the body of Christ". It is publicly given as a
> literal truth in the Catholic mass."
>
> Well, he also doesn't go into the tortuous teaching of what "triunity" means
> when he says "Father, Son, and Holy Ghost". The mass is a ritual, not a
> classroom. But anyway, what I want to focus on here is the phrase "literal
> truth". As mentioned, the Catholic teaching of the doctrine of
> transubstantiation does not use the word "literal". The doctrine was
> developed before the materialist era, and it is only recently that "literal
> truth" came to mean "physically true". In the Middle Ages, the physical was
> still seen as participating in spirit. Hence a sacrament was where the
> connection between the physical and spiritual was especially celebrated. The
> modern age can be defined as the period (which we are still in) when the
> physical came to be considered as autonomous, as "just there". For
> science -- as opposed to scientism -- *it doesn't matter* whether one
> thinks of the physical as autonomous or not, it just studies it, and that is
> why there is no conflict. The language of the doctrine stems from the
> pre-modern meanings of "physical" and "substance". In that language,
> "substance" of the physical was the ultimate meaning (or value) of the
> physical, which was seen representationally. Hence when the substance is
> changed, the non-physical meaning is what gets changed -- it is not a change
> from one physical form to another, and hence science has no bearing on the
> doctrine. Thus you are seeing a conflict because you have mistranslated
> "change in substance" to mean "change in physical form", but that is not its
> meaning.
>
> One might note in this regard how the liberal Protestant theology of the
> nineteenth century bought into this materialist meaning of the word
> "literal". One reaction to that was the rise of fundamentalism in the early
> years of the 20th century, which in a kind of "in your face" attitude
> claimed that the Bible had to be taken literally in this modernist
> materialist sense. Thus this kind of literalism results both in the flatland
> of scientific materialism and in the flatland of fundamentalist religion.
> The problem here is that the criticisms you and others are making of theism
> are coming out of this flatland vocabulary. Until you can recover to some
> extent the pre-modern vocabulary in which the doctrines of theism developed,
> you simply don't understand them, and without that understanding, have no
> business criticizing them.
>
> This is not to say they shouldn't be criticized. One of the issues between
> Protestantism and Catholicism, after all, was this doctrine. But it is a
> mistake to see this criticism as coming from science. It is a very different
> thing to claim that intellect and theism are in conflict than it is to say
> that science and theism are in conflict.
>
> - Scott
>
>
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