Here's an analogy I thought up to help other people think about Transubstantiation.  Suppose you  invent a machine that converts margarine molecule-by-molecule to butter.  The margarine looks, tastes, smells, feels and acts like butter.  But it's not butter, since butter and margarine have different natures.  Anytime someone or something loses any essential property, the loser becomes something of another kind.  A wood chipper changes a tree limb into wood chips, death turns a body into a corpse, a fire reduces a log to ashes.
 

Alexander wrote:

BillMcEnaney wrote:

Here's an analogy I thought up to help other people think about Transubstantiation.  Suppose you  invent a machine that converts margarine molecule-by-molecule to butter.  The margarine looks, tastes, smells, feels and acts like butter.  But it's not butter, since butter and margarine have different natures.  Anytime someone or something loses any essential property, the loser becomes something of another kind.  A wood chipper changes a tree limb into wood chips, death turns a body into a corpse, a fire reduces a log to ashes.
 

The immediate problem that will be pointed out with this analogy is that in no other case of substantial change do the accidents of substance A remain with substance B. The remaining of the accidents may be the bigger issue for many people than the change in substance.

Another obstacle: in all the cases you mention, some material element persists - there is a physical continuity between a log and ashes, for example, or a living body and a corpse. There is no such continuity in transubstantiation, as the Body and Blood of Our Lord pre-exist the change - they are not produced "out of" the bread and wine, if you get my meaning. Simply put, transubstantiation seems too far removed from ordinary substantial change for the analogy to be very helpful.
 

There's still another major problem, Alexander: A lab technician can tell the difference between margarine and butter.  Maybe my imaginary machine can change an egg substitute into an ego with no shell?

Last edited by BillMcEnaney (3/02/2016 1:13 pm)