I encountered this on a website - an argument against transubstantiation by means of empirical deduction. It reminded me of what some have called the Baconian epistemology of Fundamentalism which is closely related to the Common Sense Realism so dominant in the early days of America. The pastor in question appeals to a perceived problem with the bread....
A slice of bread weighs approximately 40 grams. Approximately 11.5 slices of bread make a pound. It takes about 10 bites to eat a piece of bread. Every 115 masses, a person eats about one pound of bread. At one mass per day, a person would eat 180 pounds of bread in about 57 years. The most devout Roman Catholics will eat more than the weight of a whole person in their lifetimes.
Put another way, every 20,340 persons taking mass consume 180 pounds of bread, about the weight of an adult male. If a billion Roman Catholics partake of the mass in one day they have eaten either 49,165 Christs or they ate one Christ who weighed 8,849,700 pounds. What Christ are they partaking of? Certainly not the Christ of Scripture. The perversion, repugnancy, and blasphemy of transubstantiation is abundantly evident.
All I can say is 'Oy vey!' If you want to argue against Transubstantiation, fine - but this is not the way to do it. This is to reduce Christ and the Eucharist to some kind merely material mechanistic object - completely dissectable. Does he not understand that such rules would not apply to spiritual meat and drink - to the bread of heaven? Can the communion of the Body of Christ be reduced to verbal and formal math equations? Transubstantiation and the theology of the Mass is certainly an error to be rejected but I'm afraid this critique reveals a real paucity in understanding - an almost frighteningly reductionist grasp of theology, let alone the sacraments. I find it rather embarrassing to be honest.
This sort of thing is to be expected from an Independent Fundamental Baptist. I must say I was taken aback to find it was authored by a pastor in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. He's in the wrong denomination - the Bible Presbyterians might be a better fit. This is certainly not the kind of theological reasoning one would find with Machen or Murray - let alone someone like Van Til.
This kind of Baconian reasoning is still seen in the Creation Science movement and elsewhere. Often well-meant, it is misguided. It's one thing to apply it in terms of the fossil record and thermodynamics, but when it's applied like this to theological questions it undermines Scripture and wreaks doctrinal havoc. What to many seems like good old common sense engaged in a plain reading of Scripture - in actuality, it is an epistemology that is just as rooted in philosophy and Enlightenment thought as some of the systems they would wish to oppose. This view emerged in reaction to the debates of the 17th century and in particular in response to the rationalist-idealist trends in Continental thinking. Ironically at times it exhibits a strange overlap with aspects of positivist thought and Scientism. In this author's opinion it has also led to some serious defections within this faction of Fundamentalist Evangelicalism as such 'faith' will inevitably be challenged and encounter a serious crisis. It's not surprising that many of their youth when exposed to a larger world of ideas end up abandoning not only the Fundamentalist-Baconian understanding of Christianity, but the gospel in its entirety.
The 'plain' sense they seek does not engage in Empiricist reductionism but in epistemic submission - acknowledging the effects of the Fall, the supernatural nature of revelation and the necessary dynamics that emerge as the eternal interacts with the fallen temporal order and the limitations and corrupted capacities of the Adamic mind.