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Pardon me for laughing, but yes, I do. Anyone who got their hands on a consecrated Host and did this is engaging in (technical) blasphemy (see our good old pal PZ Myers), and if they managed to get an unconsecrated host, it wouldn't be any different than ordinary bread. But even back when I was younger (not dumber since I've never been very smart) I knew that putting the consecrated wine through a HPLC machine wouldn't show anything up, and it wasn't meant to do so. There's little other testing of the sort that science (or perhaps I should say instead, Science!) does; take the notion of testing if someone is in love by measuring hormone levels and so forth. You could indeed do it, but I think most people wouldn't find it a very satisfactory way of determining the question.
To quote Chesterton:
Next point:
The theology has been much argued about, and the formal language is an effort to use Aristotelian logical terms of the time. Luther, for instance, didn't like such because he felt it wasn't mystical enough, and his attempt at a formulation wasn't much better, as the fall-out between the Reformers over what was going on and was it a sacrament or only an ordnance and so forth demonstrated.
I can only give you the unsatisfactory "the accidents remain the same, the essence changes". It's certainly much easier and seems much more sensible to regard it as a ceremony or a symbol, and if you really need to be mystical about it that something 'spiritual' happens to the recipient who takes it in faith.
But that's not good enough. Yes, I know it sounds crazy and ignorant and science-denying and superstitious and all the rest of it. But if you strip the mystical out of religion, why are you even bothering with a religion? You just want - and end up with - a nice, polite, New England Transcendentalist debating society and ethics club.
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