The Four Great Dogmas - By Selim 'Selim' Talat

The Four Great Dogmas

        Dogma, with its authority of force and power, with its reliance on tradition and ritual, cannot be used to discover truth. Dogma is often used by manipulators and liars to control people, and has no 'higher' motives of bettering our understanding of the cosmos, and our place within it. This has been understood by a lot of people, since the dawn of civilization. History is full of thinkers who defied the dogma imposed upon them; not only the great philosophers but also religious thinkers, such as the lollards; the levellers, and so forth. There have always been people who understand that the discovery of truth requires freedom of thought and emotion - the first to explore avenues of knowledge free from authority, the second to ensure that one is not attached to truth because of familiarity or manipulation of one’s feelings.

Freedom can overcome dogma, though it is an endless struggle. For new ideas also become set in stone, and it is not long before we lean on them without realising it. And old ideas grow upon us like old friends, and they are very difficult to overcome.

Descartes came to the well-known phrase ‘I think therefore I am’ by exploring everything there was doubt, being left only with a doubting ‘I’ which can think. The way to truth is found along similar lines: extreme scepticism can remove us of our dogma, like a crab discarding its old shell. Yet like that same crab, being without a shell is not so useful in this sea! And so a new one grows. Our doubting is not a position we hold forever, or else we end up thinking nothing substantial. This is perhaps equally as bad as thinking something purely because we have been told to do so. I will now cover four big categories of dogma I believe to be limiting us. These are the dogmas:

Of the Mind - Constrained by politics which dictate its limits and declares what can and cannot be achieved. By doing so, it creates those same limits. An identity which is shaped and limited by these same politics, and which sees those who disagree with it as enemies who can never be reasoned with. Such obedience is well cultivated, and its basis is rational, grounded in well selected evidence to support its case, whilst ignoring or undermining any evidence against it.

Of the Body - Trained to satiate its desires at a certain pace, ever increasing as the creation of new technology brings about abundance and luxury. Those luxuries, the great wants, evolve into needs and the body is always at a loss to obtain them, endlessly struggling and labouring to satiate itself. Why else are people who live in the most advanced societies imaginable still working so hard; why haven't the advanced machines we construct eradicated the need for pointless drudgery? Why do we confuse simple things with complex, refined bodily desires?

The body is trained long before its commander has matured to the age where it might make choices. The devouring of flesh is a prime example - those who no longer wish to do so must struggle to alter their ways, so engrained are they from a young age, so normalized are they by the culture surrounding them.

Of the Soul - Blackmailed into obedience by religions-of-threat, which condemn people to damnation and then offer them salvation from their own warnings. The more dogmatic strains of religion tend to reign supreme, offering people easy answers and hopeful (highly marketable) solutions to existential problems, all at the price of submitting to a spiritual collective. Such warmth and comfort for the soul is veiled in vague language and historical tradition which make its roots immune to the gardener’s trident.

A morality of after-worlds and divinities can then be created, none of which have any foundation in this world. It prepares people for a life that will never be, like baldly lying to a grandmother on her deathbed about the wonderful existence she will soon be privy to, because it is so convenient to do so.

Of the Heart - Perhaps the most deeply entrenched dogma of them all, flying too low to be detected by our radars of doubt! A heart which loves those immediately around it more than any other. A heart taught to respect sacred bonds of family and marriage. Before it has pounded but once, before it has found its own rhythm, the heart is deemed to love in a certain way, or else risk isolation.

In such an environment as this, how can we tell who is choosing freely, and who is coerced, threatened, prodded, or just going along with the tide? Who has come to their conclusions by searching for the truth, and who has swallowed the four great dogmas whole? We cannot say, and thus we cannot judge people, pointing the finger and declaring them asleep where one is awake. How immodest and evangelical we would be if we did!

However, what we can all do is retreat into total doubt, and see what emerges when we return to face the world anew. This I believe is truth, for from it follows total and terrifying freedom of thought and emotion. Or at worst, it is not truth, but at least it is not falsehood, designed to maintain structures of power and pressure.

Selim 'Selim' Talat

The Philosophy Takeaway 'Truth' Issue 42

Dogma, religion and its sometimes contempt for science - By Philip Overal

Dogma, religion and its sometimes contempt for science

  So, this months topic is religion and science. Alone, you could write volumes. I love both these subjects. Taken together, what you get is a history of reaction and spite.

  The issues are that deeply held beliefs spur the religious side to deny science legitimacy. The most notable moment of this was the Copernican revolution. Copernicus, through his theories, challenged the view of the world held by religion. Copernicus avoided the ire of the church, but it fell instead upon Galileo, whose works supported the view that the earth revolves around the sun. Dogma at the time held that the earth was the centre of the universe, and the evidence Galileo offered caused controversy. For this, he spent the rest of his life under house arrest at the order of the church.

  This shows up the main issue. Dogma. In the film of the same name, the 13^th disciple Rufus, notes “he (Jesus) said man kind got it all wrong by taking a good idea and building a belief structure on it...you can change an idea, changing a belief is trickier. People die for it, people kill for it”. Dogma and belief, at their most extreme, fight against science.

  Islam and Christianity both have big proponents of biblical and koranic literalism - which is a problem. Once, a priest counted back through the bible, and discovered the world was made in 4004 BC. The earth is 6 billion years old. One of these things doesn't mesh

  Yet the bible, claim some Christians is the literal, infallible word of god. It can't be wrong. Science must be. Science, they claim, is conspiracy, put forth by the devil

  Well, now you have an issue. And this ties in for all things. Where creationist's accept the universe, they deny evolution. They tie themselves in knots to explain the moon, and the flood, and so on, as natural occurring events, attempting to co-opt the scientific paradigm, whilst evading its most important strictures

  What are the structures of the scientific paradigm? Observation, test, result, conclusion. You learned it at school. You start with an aim. Personally, I quite like it when the aim is “I want to see what happened when you apply X to Y” but, alas, the age when you could just do this kind of science is long gone (although the ignoble awards, show productive research that often seems to be of this sort).

  Then you predict something. You don't have to do this. I’m sure a lot of scientists went in not knowing. However, with so much theory about, you can often make a prediction. This means there’s theory backing it up.

  Then you need a method, which is rigorous and fair, perform your experiment, or gather your samples, and then, in your results and conclusion, try to work out what it all means. Good science should go through this whole thing. A lot of time should be spent on method. A lot of time should be spent explaining your conclusions. When you’ve done that, you see how it changes your view of the world. That’s the most important key to the scientific method. It self-corrects. It changes to match the world. Nothing is set in stone, so to speak, only that we should push closer to the truth, and be willing to examine and re examine everything

  So, back to religion. Many religious types feel compelled to try and co-opt this. Science like language offers a veneer or “properness” to something. Add some super script numbers, go ahead and use some solid speeds. Suggest scientific principles are at work. But this is all done with the conclusion written. The aim of the paper is to make sure prediction and conclusion match. Evidence is cherry picked. And dogma is saved

  This paradigm is done for a lot of things. Religious types use it to try and deny evolution, and explain the flood. “God did it” is not good enough. It needs to be more 'sciencey'.

  Homeopaths do it. So do drug companies, probably with an increasing amount of competence in hiding the shallowness of their efforts.

  But whilst drug companies do it to turn a profit, the religious types seem to feel compelled to do so, to prove they are right. Its not enough to believe themselves, everyone else must believe. It must be true. Every logical fallacy, and many non-logical fallacies, are met in this effort. Appeals to authority are common (the authority is often the bible).

  Science can't be true. It challenges god.  The church must be in the science class room. Over the past umpteen years, there has been a bitter fight to get first creationism, and then Intelligent Design, into the science class rooms in the conservative American states.

  This is because evolution (over which there was a court battle in the 1920s) is seen as godless, and wrong. If children are taught it, the literal word of the bible will be challenged. Dogma must be defended. Children must learn only the biblical way.

   And the sad thing is, it needn't be this way. Religion is not for everyone. I am an atheist. But religion is not incompatible with science. God can know things, God can exist in a world of science, being the first cause, knowing everything. This doesn't require one to wash ones hand of the bible. Further more, there is the view that it was divinely inspired, but interpreted by men. Fallible and trapped by limits to their knowledge.

  Science does not preclude faith. It never has. But dogmas pull has tugged many people against science. It was not enough to have faith that god set it up. That gods about in the back ground. You have to prove it to others, lest they challenge you. This kind of fight seems insecure. And its sad to watch.

  Did god make the universe? I don't know. We will never know. Some questions will never get a proper answer. What I do know is that if it did make the universe, it just switched the on button. Its existence did not, can not, invalidate science. And when I'm asked to believe otherwise, I just feel saddened by the lack of reason, (in an enlightenment sense) .

By Philip Overal