feathers wrote:InfraRedBucket wrote:If Muscato can be a woman then a glass of water can be an Oak Tree
You just gotta have faith.
An Oak Tree is based on the concept of transubstantiation, the notion central to the Catholic faith in which it is believed that bread and wine are converted into the body and blood of Christ while retaining their appearances of bread and wine. The ability to believe that an object is something other than its physical appearance indicates requires a transformative vision.
No, it requires you to be a complete lunatic or under the influence of hallucinogens.
The belief in transubstantiation is an interesting one. Catholic theology is based on the Artistotelian theory of substances and accidents. For Artistoteles some properties were "accidental" while others are "essential".
An easy example can be made using balls. You can paint a ball red, white, blue or any other color, and it's still a ball. So color is an "accidental" property: its change doesn't "intrinsically" change the "essence" of the ball.
In transubstantiation, as Thomas Aquinas argued, the opposite happens: all the physical properties or "accidents" of bread and wine remain the same, but their "essential" nature change into the body and blood of his god-prophet. At his time, when people didn't know much about the nature of matter, the argument may have look persuasive.
At Thomas Aquinas' times this was a sophisticated defense of a theological assumption. But "natural philosophy", or science, marches on. Today
we know what bread and wine are made of, what is the physical "essence" of bread and wine, in chemical and physical terms. We
know that you can't change molecules of ethanol or glutein into amino acids and hemoglobin just by saying a few words.
So today if you believe in transubstantiation you have to believe that bread and wine (actually all reality) has some secret, non-detectable property which can be changes through secret, non-detectable acts of "supernatural" intervention. Basically you need to believe in magic.
The idea of an abstract "essence" to things separated from the "ALL physical accidents" is becoming more and more philosophically untenable. Actually the major philosophical schools of today are either anti-essentialists (Quine) or rigidly modal necessitarianists (Kripke, etc.), so they either negate the idea that "essences" exist or the idea that "accidents" exist.