For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.

Words change their meanings over time. Often it's just the general decay of language, but sometimes deeper things are afoot. For instance, until quite recently propaganda was a neutral term that meant `information to be disseminated'. Similarly, dogma used to mean `things the Church has established as truths about God and man'. Since then, the words have acquired less savory connotations. Propaganda we can do without, but dogma is of the greatest practical value, and needs to be recovered.

Theology is a science, and dogmas are generally the most secure conclusions of that science, the equivalent of Mendelian genetics or the conservation of energy. Solid conclusions are of supreme value in every science, because they supply firm footholds for the start of further work. Without them, every investigation would have to start at the very bottom, and progress would soon become impossible. Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead wrote a masterpiece of mathematical logic, Principia Mathematica, which starts from self-evident notions and takes over 700 very dense pages to be able to prove that 1 + 1 = 2.[2] It is important to do that once, but we need to be able to start from there the next time round, or we'll never make it out of the first grade. So too in theology.

Up until about 1750, theology was called `the queen of the sciences'. Sciences are built on inferences from evidence. There are many different scientific areas, each with its appropriate methods of gathering and using evidence. Experimental scientists can arrange experience of highly relevant kinds, as in smashing subatomic particles together to see what comes out. Observational scientists such as astronomers and meteorologists can take more data and build more detailed models. Historical scientists can dig in ruins and libraries in the hope of finding more evidence, though what they find is almost always of a fragmentary and random sort. (They may find this frustrating, but since they have the whole history of the world to choose from, there are very many other topics to occupy them while they wait.)

Theology is much tougher than any of these. Not only is the source material far more limited in scope, but for 2000 years, many of the best minds of East and West have written and argued over the same ground, making theology roughly 100 times more heavily trodden than the most crowded fields of the other sciences. If we want to make an original contribution to such a crowded field, we have two choices: spend half a lifetime learning what others have done,[3] or make up something plausible. The one is honest but laborious; the other, easy and politically quite defensible. Honesty often loses, especially among those coming from other fields. The result is that the same errors are made over and over, though better answers are easily available; a good 90% of the `new ideas' are actually old ideas that had been disproved quite conclusively by the mid-fifth century AD. It would be amusing if it weren't so expensive.

Scholars in most ages have been quite content with amassing deep learning; but in the last century or so, we have become obsessed with originality—that is, with ourselves. After all, the only difference between my original contribution and something I read in an old book is that it's mine. Unfortunately, this attachment to mineness has to be crucified in theologians as well as in the rest of us.

To be fair, virtue of this sort can be very costly indeed, in terms of professional advancement. Academic committees, publishers, and professional societies have the originality disease as well. Nobody gets tenure for agreeing with his predecessor, and the highest human respect is reserved for those who found schools of thought—without serious regard to whether the thought is true or false. In many respects, this devaluation of learning in favour of originality is responsible for the disastrous decline of rigour and (ironically) of creativity in the humanities in the past 50 years.

But theology is a science, and science is not as far down that road as the humanities. Theology deals with realities, and those realities—even though invisible—are more permanent and more powerful than the stars and electrons and protozoa of other sciences. As a historical and philosophical science, theology piles inference upon inference. Physical theories are tested against experiment; theological ones are tested against Scripture and cross-checked with other, independent, lines of evidence. There are also very important contributions from the practice of the Church and the collective wisdom of the people of God. The last two points give rise to some of the dogmatic differences between Christian groups, comparatively minor in scope though often very firmly held, on subjects such as the Assumption and double predestination. Some of the most important and most secure conclusions have been adopted authoritatively, for example by an ecumenical council (see Authority), and these are the dogmas of the Church. A dogma is a careful statement of something which has always been part of 'the Faith once delivered to the saints'; it has been true from all eternity. It isn't like a law, which being arbitrary can always be amended or repealed; it's more like a prime number or a subatomic particle—it's always been part of God's world, whether we knew it or not. Thus, strictly speaking, new dogmas can arise, but they can't be invented any more than prime numbers can, and dogmas can't develop once they've arisen. This does not of course exclude all doctrinal development—but it has to preserve the truths of the Faith unaltered. Trees grow by adding new layers every year; at the centre of every tree lies the sapling it once was, and the shape of the sapling is the shape of the tree. Dogma is like that.

The major dogmas such as the Trinity, the Resurrection, and the Day of Judgement are securely based on Scripture and the living tradition of the Church, which maintains contact with the original witness and teaching of the Apostles, both directly and through the writings of the Church Fathers.

The tremendous nature of these doctrines perhaps supplies a clue as to why the modern age feels so uncomfortable with dogma: if these conclusions are as reliable as all that, then I have to take them into account in deciding how I will live my life this very day, and that limits my freedom of action—like a good wife, a bad knee, or the balance in my checking account. If we do not know Christ personally, it is difficult to live with the knife-edge balance of the Christian, poised between heaven and hell, who must daily choose life or death, blessing or curse. If we can discredit the dogma (whether it is true or false really) we can seemingly avoid that uncomfortable position. Thus the problem many people have with dogma seems to be moral, rather than intellectual, and that's sad.