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Notes -
Reposting a comment I made that got lost during the rollback:
On the contrary, transubstantiation is a belief that is almost designed to be perfectly compatible with science.
Specifically, Catholicism claims that all the "accidents" of the wine and bread remain the same, but that the "substance" of the wine and bread become the blood and body of Christ. In other words, in every single way that we can observe and measure, the wine and bread remain wine and bread. But in some deeper, fundamental way, the wine and bread become the blood and body of Jesus.
Which is nonsense, but it's nonsense of the not even wrong variety. And while "not even wrong" is a bad thing for a scientific theory to be, it is a very good thing for a religious belief to be. Partly because it means the religion is safe from being falsified by scientific evidence, but much more importantly because the religion will not be driven insane by the need to deny reality.
Contrast creationism; if you have committed your faith to 7 days and Noah's ark, then when Darwin shows up with dinosaur fossils in his arms you have to either renounce your God or you have to turn your back on biology. And geology. And cosmology. And...
In "Universal Fire", Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that all of reality is connected, and that you can't change just one little thing without changing the whole.
In "Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning", Scott Alexander elaborates on the sociopolitical consequences:
As the Dreaded Jim famously said:
And:
Among rationalists I think the simulation hypothesis is given greater probability of being true than transubstantiation being true.
Yet in a simulation it would be trivial for all objects to have a property that represents whether it is or is not the literal body of Christ.
I know that I sound like an absolute moron saying it, just a completely Reddit sentiment, but this unironically gives me some notion of the idea that I have previously failed to grasp. Sure, it still looks, smells, and tastes like bread, but it has the [Christ] tag whether you can see it on your HUD or not.
Transubstantiation is somewhat like the Theory of Evolution; a lot of people like to seize on the "theory" part to go "Aha! you admit this is only a theory, not proven fact!"
Transubstantiation is heavily based on Aristotelian logic/science and is an attempt to provide a logical explanation for the mystery, but it's not meant to be the definitive be-all and end-all of the mystery, and that it is a mystery of faith is the final word on the dogma. God does what God does, and it is beyond our understanding, this is the best guess our limited mortal reason can come up with. Because religion is not outside reason, even if reason alone does not encapsulate the totality.
We believe the theory of evolution and not other theories, because, the facts back it up, not in spite of those facts like Aristotelian metaphysics and transubstantiation. If the facts showed the theory of evolution was likely false I would believe in t was likely false. The Church just throws up it's hands and says it's a mystery don't think to hard. If transubstantiation was true it would be the greatest discovery in physics ever, even more important than a theory of quantum gravity; yet, people are fine just shrugging their shoulders and calling it a mystery.
Yes, it is.
Because we're not talking about "how many tins of beans are on that shelf?" levels of being able to access measurements. Let science stick to counting tins of beans, I have no quibble with that.
God the unjustified attitude of superiority here is remarkable given all the scientific progress we’ve made in recent centuries and the complete lack of theological ones.
Let religion stick to counting angels on pinheads; I have no quibble with that.
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