Is there a basic substance that everything is made of?
"Could there be a 'basic substance' that everything was made of? If there was some such substance, how could it suddenly turn into a flower or an elephant?
The same objection applied to the question of whether water could turn into wine. Sophie knew the parable of how Jesus turned water into wine, but she had never taken it literally. And if Jesus really had turned water into wine, it was because it was a miracle, something that could not be done normally. Sophie knew there was a lot of water, not only in wine but in all other growing things. But even if a cucumber was 95 percent water, there must be something else in it as well because a cucumber was a cucumber, not water.
And then there was the question about the frog. Her philosophy teacher had this really weird thing about frogs.
Sophie could possibly accept that a frog consisted of earth and water, in which case the earth must consist of more than one kind of substance. If the earth consisted of a lot of different substances, it was obviously possible that earth and water together could produce a frog. That is, if the earth and the water went via frog spawn and tadpoles. Because a frog could not just grow out of a cabbage patch, however much you wanted it."