Several States Investigating the Catholic Church

Yes, which makes their failings more egregious. There is no divine force that makes the bearer of apostolic succession more moral - such a force would be in contradiction with free will, which is part of Catholic belief.

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You did but this is such a salient issue that it bears repetition. Also, this statement is ambiguous. It is not clear if by “His Church” you mean the victims or the institution or both. Especially with your view of the Church, it is not explicit the nature of your concern.

On another thread we’ll have to go deeper on this sometime, probably with @dga471. I don’t understand the epistemological justification of Thomism. It seems like nothing more than one view among many, not a normative position. While I can accept Thomists take it as normative, I’m not sure why any of the rest of us should agree. Especially as Ive observed it function more as an appeal to authority, I sense no espismelogical draw.

In origins too, Thomistic thought seems to be resistant to questions of ontogeny. It might be a sensible ontology of how things are as we find them, but seems to disengage from questions of how things come into being.

Any how I’m sure @Philosurfer and @jongarvey can set me straight too. Maybe even @vjtorley. Maybe this will become a new thread…

For Catholics, His Church simply refers to the Catholic faith as a whole, which includes the traditions, the line of apostolic succession, and the Faithful: the Churches Militant, Penitent, and Triumphant. I believe that not only have these men cause harm to the victims, but also jeopardizes the Salvific mission of the Church.

No - I’ve a very sketchy attachment to scholasticism so can’t set anyone straight. Page Ed Feser (or read his book on scholastic metaphysics).

However I compared A_T metaphysics with the alternative - let’s call it Cartesian - and found to my surprise it deals with most of the important issues in life, whilst the latter does not.

So it deals with causation more comprehensively, covering teleology and form, which enables it to deal with universals in a way the other doesn’t. It’s hard to talk about God in the world without a clear concept of final causation.

Its concept of “natures” is a lot more plausible and intuitive than the concept of “laws of nature”, for which ther is no very satisfactory explanation, even allowing for God and still less apart from him. Cartesianism causes huge problems with the concept of mind and free-will and its relationship to the world, which A-T addresses head on. It encourages realistic notions of chance, of quantum events, of providence, of divine concurrence, of the immaterial creation (and a bunch of other stuff I can’t think of on a Saturday evening) which simply pass under the radar of the “son-of-mechanical-philosophy” we work under nowadays.

If you believe that men taking vows of celibacy and wearing robes can, by saying words of incantations over a bowl of gluten containing wheat wafers, change said gluten containing wafers into the actual remnants of the body and blood of a 2000 year old human corpse, it really makes your mathematical arguments suspect. I know this is discriminatory but I was a skeptical child when I was seven years old and my skepticism has made my BS detector really good. So I question your math and your science.

Note that the hosts in a Roman Catholic Church mass must contain gluten. The Pope ruled a few years ago that gluten free hosts are not allowed. Apparently gluten is required in the transubstantiation process preformed by the priests in magically changing the gluten contain wheat into biological human remains with ancient DNA structure with 23 chromosomes pointing to Palestine 2000 years ago.

I understand what you are saying, and most protestants back away from Catholic teachings like this. This is one of the reasons Luther left the Catholic Church.

I do not think this is reason to doubt his math. There are a whole other set of reasons for that :smile:.

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Catholics do not believe that the wine and wafers physically turn into pieces of a 2000 year old human corpse. There will not be any ancient DNA in a consecrated host. The doctrine of transubstantiation refers to the fact that the wine and wafers metaphysically become the body and blood of Christ.

Incidentally, neither the celibacy or robes are necessary to perform the sacrament.

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Then why does the hosts have to have gluten in them?

The official rule book is quite different from just a metaphysical relationship.

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Tradition states that Jesus gave an example of how to perform a valid sacrament involves consecrating bread with gluten in them. The Church wants to make sure the sacrament is valid, and because there is no science that can probe whether a sacrament is valid or not, we do not know what sorts of perturbations are allowed.

In any case, the question was why the hosts need to have gluten if the transubstantiation is metaphysical. Just because the change is metaphysical does not mean that the physical conditions required for the change is arbitrary.

The wikipedia you linked state “the change of substance or essence by which the bread and wine…” The word “substance” here refers to the metaphysical substance of Substance Theory, not physical substance. Note that metaphysical does not mean metaphorical.

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I agree that this jeopardizes the mission of the Church.

The grammar here still leave me wondering if you are decrying the damage to the institution of the Church or the victims in the Church (and outside the Church). I’m confused.

In this quote:

I was decrying the damage to both the mission of the Church and the victims inside and outside of the Church. Note however that I have many concerns regarding this issue, and not all of them are listed in that sentence. Just because I decry some concerns in this forum and do not decry other concerns (which I do have) does not mean that I value some concerns more than others.

edit:grammar

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Thanks for making that clear.

Maybe, but the victims need to hear we are for them. Too often, it does not work that way.

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That is why a national investigation with subpoena power and questioning under oath is required. Nothing gets to the truth faster than a good ‘ole’ obstruction of justice threat from an FBI agent. Recall Penn State and Michigan State investigations.

Ditto on this one. You can learn a ton about Feser’s take on Thomism from simply reading his blog.

@jongarvey and perhaps @Eddie – and perhaps potentially useful for any future conversation regarding Thomism, Neo-Thomism, Analytical Thomism, etc… is a conversation about Ockham as well. Outside his razor, I don’t see his name pop-up much in conversation regarding science/religion. I’ve tried the primary sources and got discouraged (or lazy) rather quickly. Does anyone know of a really well done secondary source on Ockham that might help with situating him in the conversation?

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There appears to be confusion in people’s heads about ontology (the way things are as we find them) and ontogeny (how things got to be the way they are). This makes it hard to talk about origins, because what things are now, become how they have always been. This is not so much a well reasoned argument, as a rigidity of thinking.

With their strong sense of ontology, this is a prominent in conversations with Thomists. See: A Catholic Approach to the Genealogical Adam.

Has this problem come up before in any other context? What is the best way to overcome it?

In my ignorance I tend to have thought of William rather negatively, only in terms of (a) nominalism and (b) univocalism, both of which I think have done harm. And some of his later followers were occasionalists, which has relevance to divine action. But of course he is an example of many great thinkers at that time and somebody ought to retrieve his best ideas!

I feel bad about disagreeing with him, because he lived just down the road from where I was brought up.

All I’d say on this here is that one should distinguish the tools of Thomistic metaphysics from the dogmas of Catholicism (just as one needs to separate Aristotle’s outdated physics from his useful metaphysics)… which isn’t to suggest that Catholicism is “outdated,” but simply that Protestants can benefit from scholasticism too.

And the thing about Thomism is that it has a highly developed philosophy of change and origins, of “becoming”, which unlike the post-scholastic poor excuse for metaphysics that informed Darwin and evolutionary theory, includes things beyond efficient material causation, which is absolutely necessary if we believe God to be the God of history, and that it’s going somewhere.

[Aside - on the other thread where you think of man as part of nature, one important aspect, picked up by Wright in his Bampton lectures, is that there is no fundamental distinction between world history, salvation history and natural history - all are under God’s ongoing government, which is relevant to the matter of nature’s “becoming” in Christ. A point to consider in the discussion of methodological naturalism!]

So A-T “does” becoming, but because it went out of fashion not only in science but in philosophy, relatively little work has been done to apply it to “change over deep time”. The new Thomistic analytical guys like Feser have done work on that, but of course are also having to wave the flag to keep the Thomistic boat afloat in academia. But remember that physicists like Heisenberg were able to adopt Aristotelian ideas successfully into quantum science, so Thomism is not science-averse.

According to Feser, one of the books that has grappled most with the idea of how things can evolve, and yet be real “things” rather than temporary epiphenomena, is David Oderberg in Real Essentialism.

The problem for us mortals, though, is that analytic philosophy is written in Linear B :scream:, and becomes even less comprehensible when it’s translating Thomistic ideas into that language. Aquinas himself is delightfully easy to read, though, once one picks up the basic concepts.