Scientific Dogma
There is no such thing as scientific dogma.
Anybody who teaches science as dogma is teaching bad science. There is, unfortunately, a very great deal of bad science teaching.
Why, then, do scientists seem so intolerant of beliefs which contradict the generally accepted science? Why do astronomers reject Velikovsky’s theories? Why is astrology anathema to science? Why are biologists appalled by the notion that "Creation Science" should be taught in schools? In what way do these attitudes differ from dogma?
The answer is that there is a big difference between "faith" and the sort of thing that science cares about. If you expect the sun to appear in the sky tomorrow, or alternatively that enough light will penetrate the clouds to illuminate the roads, countryside, and streets, would you say this expectation is based upon "faith"? You know perfectly well that for all reasonable purposes it is just simply true. The same thing goes for the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology, even when for extraordinary cases their predictions are counter-intuitive. For a case in point, consider the notion that the Earth is round. For all the practical purposes of a sane person on foot, horseback, or sailboat the Earth is a pretty good approximation to flat. You need extraordinary speeds, or immensely time-consuming voyages, to care about the difference. But it was in fact quite well known before Columbus that the Earth is round.
It makes no difference to a farmer whether or not the Sun goes round the Earth or the Earth rotates and goes round the Sun. But no farmer who has been to school in America would admit to ignorance or disbelief in the prevailing scientific view. By contrast, the fact of Natural Selection, the core of Darwin's theory, has an impact upon every farmer or gardener that uses pesticides or antibiotics. It predicts that the target population will become resistant to the poisons. How many farmers do you suppose there are who reject Darwin's theory of evolution?
Dogma in religion is the sort of thing that brings penalties of death or excommunication if you contradict it with a new theory. Science demands of your new theory only that you prove it fits the known facts (including those you can prove happened in your laboratory, or can document that you discovered and did not fake them historically) better than the existing body of theories. If you succeed in doing this, you are praised in proportion to the extent of the change. Isaac Newton showed that the observations of the solar system could be predicted by the mathematics of his laws of forces, and his equation for the force of the gravitational attraction of two bodies. This abolished the entire mental edifice of "the heavenly spheres" which had seemed a pretty good approximation since Aristotle’s time. Then Einstein predicted certain tiny discrepancies between Newtonian calculations and experiment, based upon a radical restructuring of the framework of measurement, which he called "space-time", and the necessity that the speed of light should be the same for all observers. Thus his "relativity" theories explained some known problems, and correctly predicted others, in the existing scientific theory. Einstein’s fame does not eclipse Newton’s, although Newton’s explanations are technically obsolete. We know that Newton’s laws are good enough for piloting slow-moving objects like spacecraft, even although they are hopelessly inadequate for sub-atomic particles in a synchrotron.
The trouble with astrology, Velikovsky, most "miracles", and the "religious fundamentalist" views of science, is that they have all been shown to be hopelessly contradictory to well known facts. Asking "well, couldn’t Almighty God have made that statue’s eyes weep?" leads to the response "theoretically, yes, but it’s inconsistent with all well-established theories and observations of (God's) Nature." Or more briefly, "Yes, but if there is a God, She just doesn’t do that."
In other words, it’s difficult to overthrow established religious or political dogma, because the authorities discourage or forbid such new ideas. It’s difficult to overthrow established scientific theories, because the evidence for them has been subjected to severe scrutiny, and so will be the evidence for a new theory. But if "scientific" authorities, or governments who fund science, or schools where science is supposed to be taught, use the methods of religion to suppress politically unpopular scientific ideas, or to reinforce popular ones, science is weakened. It happened to biology in the Soviet Union.
