Sixty Symbols: Do Physicists Believe in God?

[ciphergoth]

My, I guess, departure from religion came I think as early as nine or ten when we were being taught about a big element of the Catholic faith which is called "transubstantiation". Transubstantiation, for those that don't know, means that during the Eucharist, during the sort-of communion ceremony, the bread is actually physically changed (whatever that means in terms of Catholic doctrine) into the body of Christ. And I got very excited as a nine-year-old, and stuck my hand up excitedly in the class, and said "Look, look, I got a microscope for Christmas! What we can do, we can do this really great experiment, we can look at the host beforehand, and we can do the holy communion thing, and then we can look at it afterwards. Wouldn't that be a great experiment?" And I got sent out of the class, and also, a note was sent to the parish priest. And I was told that those type of questions are not the questions you should ask.

(Updated to add: block quote is from video, not my own story!)

Comments

[marnanel]

It's sad: a halfway competent teacher would have said "That's an interesting idea. Let's talk about what Aquinas thought when he considered the same question."

[marnanel]

(And even if the teacher wasn't halfway competent, it's sadder that the parish priest didn't.)

[doug]

Yes, yes it would be a great experiment.

I can see that the response you did get might turn you from the church. Just as well they didn't have theological ninja Jesuits on your case, though, or they'd have had your intellectual curiosity trapped in a twisty maze of transubstantiated passages.

[alextiefling]

I have to say, the philosophical gymnastics around transsubstantiation turned me off Catholicism at the time, and subsequently led me to be gravely sceptical about the Greek philosophy they used to back it up. Another fine example of the uselessness of arbitrary dogma.

[badgermind]

The really odd aspect of this is that neither the teacher nor the parish priest appear to have understood the doctrine of transubstantiation, which is that the substance (essence) is changed while the accidents (properties) are not. Aquinas would have agreed that no physical measuring apparatus or microscope could detect any change, and therefore there is no scientific way of testing the doctrine.

I remember concluding as a teenager that the whole distinction between substance and accidents in the philosophy of Aquinas and other thinkers is a prime example of mistakenly attempting to infer the structure of the world from the structure of language. This perception was met with blank incomprehension.

[ciphergoth]

You might enjoy Thirty seven ways that words can be wrong...

[battlekitty]

Never was the term "LOL" more appropriately used :)

I think my teaching was summed up by "It's a metaphor", but I don't actually recall learning of it. Maybe I was supposed to know before high school...

And in the meantime, I'm just hearing DAAS (Paul McDermott specifically) in my head singing: "Iiiiiif you're happy and you know it, go up to a catholic vegetarian and say "Body of Christ?""