From: Scott Roberts (jse885@localnet.com)
Date: Thu Apr 28 2005 - 17:32:31 BST
Ian,
Give me a break :-) All I am trying to do in this thread is deny that
science and theism are in conflict. To make the point in re
transubstantiation, I am only pointing out that science can study the
material wafer and wine, but has nothing to say about the significance of
the wafer and wine to the believing Catholic in the Eucharist ritual.
"Significance" is not a subject of science. "Material" is shorthand for what
science does study, but to raise the nuances you are concerned with at this
point is inappropriate.
If one wants to point out that in modern physics there is nothing in the
wafer and wine that fits the 19th century notion of "material", then I
agree, but that's a whole other topic that does not bear on the subject at
hand. If there is something about the quantum view of the wafer and wine
that bears on the "conflict" question, I don't know what it is.
- Scott
----- Original Message -----
From: "ian glendinning" <psybertron@gmail.com>
To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 28, 2005 1:58 AM
Subject: Re: MD Transubstantiation
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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