DOGMA' IN SCIENCE, RELIGION AND LIFE THE EDITOR Next after our pride in being scientific comes perhaps the companion boast of being undogmatic. In our thinking we have established the two ideas scientific and dogmatic as contradictories. We lay the supposed superiority of science to what we deem its undogmatic character. We carry the distinction into many realms connecting lack of dogmatism with all our thoughts of progress, of mental breadth and of advancing civilization. We often lay claim to it ourselves as a personal possession, and assume a mental superiority because of our supposed freedom from all dogmatism whatsoever. The feeling thus indulged is not perhaps dangerous so long as it only increases our snobbery and atmosphere of pendantry, but it unconsciously creeps into all our attitudes and becomes also a disregard for institutions, a revolt against law, a fundamental carelessness toward the rights of others. By our self-styled "free spirits", Bohemians, intellectual faddists, and purveyors of world panaceas in general it has taken on the characteristics of a cult whose ritual of intellectualism is a mere jargon of swelling words giving the appearance without the content of knowledge. Thus is acquired a superficial superiority with which to browbeat and intimidate the benighted ones who still dwell in the darkness of settled principles and reasonable suppositions. This condition is made possible by the common aversion to being thought unscientific. The average man prefers being called devilish to being called unscientific. 'Any settled opinion or conviction; an accepted principle; maxim, or -New Standard Dictionary. "net." One might with less danger of unbrage call him a profiteer, a grafter, a heretic, or a wanton-"Unscientific" is the term that stings, and festers in his soul. The popular assurance of the absence of dogma in modern science, religion or irreligion, and life would be less perfect if the general run of people or even the leaders of our various new philosophies could be induced for even the shortest time to endure the tests of reflection and criticism. Their unwillingness to do this-their assumption of superiority to all previously accepted rules of the intellectual game shows that they themselves are in the truest sense, though unconsciously, dogmatic. They are like the man, who went to school to learn that literature was divided into prose and poetry and that he had been talking prose all his life without knowing it. Theoretically abrogated, dogma is practically and uncritically accepted. Lacking criticism, we are the victims of a crude and illogical dogmatism. We have no desire to resurrect from the grave of a dead past that unthinking dependence upon dogma which we think of as having characterized other periods. We aim to show that a certain measure of dogma is necessary in science, religion and life and at the same time to warn against any withholding of dogma from reasonable criticism, and advancing knowledge. We approach the problem of science first, because the assumption that science holds any place for dogma is the most subject to dispute. Strictly speaking and in theory we should call upon science absolutely to rid itself of all presuppositions and principles whatever and to confine itself strictly and empirically to the observation of phenomena. This simon-pure situation is often claimed for science as its distinguishing characteristic, yet how far 'Dogmatic: Philosophy characterized by dogmatism, opposed to critical. -New Standard Dictionary. from it is any helpful and tenable system of science becomes apparent upon reflection. We justly accuse theology of too often identifying religion with theories about religion. Is it not well before passing final verdict, insomuch as dogmatizing seems to be a common and much worked human trait, to ask if science has ever done exactly the same thing. To our horror we discover science has done just that in assuming as fundamental principles the independent existence of time and space, continuous energy, and the transmission of light by means of a material either. Similar reasonable but so far unprovable hypotheses will possibly on reflection be found in a like class of dogmas such as natural selection, the conservation of energy, evolution through "race experience" and others. If the break-down of dogma in religion has had disastrous effect upon the religious faith of the common man, what astonishment may we expect in the man of the street who in the future shall learn that the scientific hypotheses which have been taught him as of equal standing with empirical knowledge have suddenly decamped. Just as the theological dominance and certainty of dogma was greatest and most unreasonable before its hour of greatest testing, it may be that the arrogance of some of our so-called scientific assumptions are the marks of an approaching fall. The danger does not lie in the possession by science of certain dogmas-the danger exactly as in theology is in the refusal to hold those dogmas or hypotheses as tentative, provisional, answering to reason perhaps so far as we now can judge but not final, the refusal to submit them to criticism either of logic or of life. That spirit has been the bane and cause of misunderstanding both in science and religion. Some dogma in science is necessary if science is to be correlated, its different phases welded into a system. If nothing more were to be assumed the scientist must make this fundamental yet pure assumption, that we live in a correlated universe, and that causes however unknown act uniformly. Without this he could not proceed at all yet this assumption is as dogmatic as the theologians assumption of a world of moral relations proceeding from a morally active ground. Every time he passes by analogy of reasoning to new discovery he has perhaps unconsciously set forth some possible hypothesis, he has gone beyond science in the interest of science and the value of his hypothesis must be judged by the results. In the end his theory must submit to the pragmatic test. Furthermore, however useful it may be for the moment in providing a reasonable account of things it must stand not only the test of today's knowledge but of all future discovery before it can be taken as finality, and this can be only with the coming of perfect knowledge. At its best science can be but an approximation to the truth. There is at the present time great outcry against dogma in religion. The clergyman is rare who dares announce a series of doctrinal sermons. But impatience with ancient dogmas is strangely attended by an unquenchable thirst for new and bizarre dogmas, especially if these be characterized as in anyway scientific. So long as modern spiritualism put itself forth as religion it was a joke. Adopted as a possible field of scientific research the gullible and the uncritical "cry for it." Nevertheless, despite the jumble of dogmas and the discredit which is thereby cast on all dogma, dogma is necessary to true religious thinking. Unless we can assume that our world is one of moral relations-of moral cause and effect-of uniformities of moral sequence of true adaptations to each other and to the system of things, we can get on neither religiously nor morally. Theology is not the matter of indifference that is popularly supposed. There are certain fundamental pre-suppositions like freedom and moral ac countability which are the basis of our whole social structure. Without practical belief in them the whole building would dissolve as the fabric of a dream. Certain fundamental suppositions such as justice and equal rights though highly supposititious and debatable and never more than approximated lie at the root of our political institutions. When those dogmas fade out of the popular faith any political institution is doomed. So long as religion is able to maintain the distinction between goodness and wickedness, the reality of sin and of virtue and a theory of law relating thereto theologically known as judgment; so long as it can by the assumption of God set forward a reasonable system of moral relations between man and his world of associations so long it can build itself positively into the service of humanity. When these and other great fundamentals are gone it becomes as weak as water, for no service it can then render can possess any meaning. With the passing of faith in religious values all political and social institutions, as well as the church, will be at an end. The institutions of Greece were built upon a sublime spiritual consciousness voiced in her art and her great dramas. Rome owed her triumphs to the religious values of Stoicism. The Jewish prophets were the illumination of the dark night of Israel. Just as it is impossible to weave the cloth without warp so civilization must needs depend for its power upon the warp of widely accredited moral ideals. These ideals are necessarily dogmatic. They are to be justified as the best moral working hypothesis for life. The place of dogma in life scarcely needs discussion. Already it is apparent that man's unconquerable tendency to intellectualize his world will drive him to some hypothesis concerning it. His hypothesis is his effort to understand it, to visualize it and his relations to it. He does not yet understand the full system of relations of which he is |