Like PZ Myers, I have a strong, almost visceral reaction to the whole notion of transubstantiation. I can’t speak for PZ, but in my case it all goes back to about 1958. It would not be unreasonable to say that the doctrine of transubstantiation is what made me an atheist.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, I was raised as a Roman Catholic. (I got better.) I can’t remember exactly when I had my first communion, but by 1958 I was certainly being exposed to Catechesis in preparation for the big day. The woman who handled this class (not, I think, a nun, though they were in the vicinity) had the delicate task of explaining the significance of the Sacrament of the Eucharist without risking questions about (eeeew!) cannibalism. To do this, she relied upon the adverbs stressed by the Catechism (and originally by the Council of Trent): “truly, really, and substantiallyâ€. I think that she also used the technical terms “substance” and “accidents”, which was probably a mistake.
Up to this point, I’d been asked to believe a great many religious ideas “on faith”, and for most of them I didn’t see any reason to object. Souls? Sin? God? Holy ghost? Angels? Heaven? All very intangible, none of the ideas clashed with common sense. Jesus? Mary? The Gospel stories? Miracles? All a long time ago: many of the ideas seemed implausible, but I couldn’t refute them.
But transubstantiation was a direct affront to my 7 year old empiricist epistemology! I was reading everything about science that I could find, from articles in my encyclopaedia to books that my mother brought home from her work at the U.K. Atomic Energy Authority. In catechism class, I asked if a scientist in his laboratory could tell the difference between a consecrated and an unconsecrated host. I was bundled off to talk to the parish priest. I’m pretty sure that I would have been happy with a vague answer, whether metaphorical or mysterian in nature, but he stuck with the party line: even though all appearances and any kind of scientific investigation would show that the wafer was still made of bread, the underlying reality was that it was now the body of Jesus – and not just a bit of his body, but all of him: body and soul, human and divine.
And even though I would not then have used the term, I smelled bullshit. We use science to grasp the reality of everything in the world – rocks, turnips, giraffes, nuclear reactors. Why introduce this “underlying reality” stuff for just one thing: to explain away a bit of religious gobbledygook? Why (using the contemporary term) apply magical thinking to something so concrete and immediate as a wafer of bread in one’s mouth? It was all too convenient, too ad hoc – and completely unconvincing.
Over the next three or four years, my skepticism about transubstantiation spread to just about every claim of religion: to souls, deities, life after death, and the entire supernatural realm. Various writers helped: Shakespeare, of course; Roger Lancelyn Green with his magnificent retellings of the Greek, Egyptian, and Norse mythologies; Bertrand Russell; and finally Jean-Paul Sartre, through a couple of English expositions of his key idea that “existence precedes essence”. (I still haven’t read La Nausée.) Like Christopher Hitchens, it wasn’t so much a matter of conversion, or change, as of realization.
One reason why people stick with their religious beliefs is that they are able to compartmentalize their thinking. How else can they go along with creationism in church and yet trust that DNA testing can establish paternity or assess the risk of breast cancer (or as a plot device on CSI)? For me as a child, transubstantiation was one of those ideas that refused to stay in its compartment, and the result was that the whole edifice collapsed. And that was a good thing: reality is better than magical thinking.