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Thursday, February 05, 2004
Lagao: The dogmas of religion and science
By Ani F. Lagao
THERE can be dogmas of religion as well as dogmas of science, and both of them can be revealed, the one by God, the other by man. Not only that—these fundamental dogmas, like the first principles of Euclid, can be used as raw materials for thinking, and just as one scientific fact can be used as the basis of another, so one dogmas can be used as the basis for another.
But in order to begin contemplating on a first dogma, one must be identified with it either in time or in principle. The church was identified with Christ in both time and principle. Just as a scientist must depend on the memory of the first principle of science, which he uses as the ground for other conclusions, so too the Church goes back into her intellectual memory, which is tradition, and uses former dogmas as the foundation for new ones. In this whole process the church never forgets her first principles. If she did she would be like the undogmatic dogmatists of the present day, who believe that progress consist in denying the fact, instead of building on it; who in turn to new ideals because they have never tried the old; who condemn as “obscurantist” the truth that has a parentage, like a shibboleth that do not know its father or its mother.
Intolerance about principles is the foundation of growth, and the mathematician who would deride a square for always having four sides, and in the name of progress would encourage it to throw away even only one of its side, would soon discover that he had lost all squares. So too with the dogmas of the church, of science, and of reason; they are like bricks, solid things with which a man can build not like a straw, which is “religious experience” fit only for burning. Right is right if nobody is right. And wrong is wrong if everybody is wrong. And in this day and age we need not a church that is right when the world is wrong.
The attitude of the church in relation to the modern world on this important question maybe brought by the story of the two women in the courtroom of Solomon. Both of them claimed a child. A lawful mother insisted on having the whole child or nothing, for the child is like a truth—it cannot be divided without ruin. The unlawful mother, on the contrary, agreed to compromise she was willing to divide the babe, and the babe would have died of broad—mindedness.
(February 5, 2004 issue)
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