Dogma

Today we discussed dogma.

Dogma: noun. That which is fundamental to a system of beliefs; that which cannot be debated.

It was remarked that we don't use the word dogma this way anymore. In general this is true; I'd like to point out a few places this concept is still visible today.

Obviously, the Catholic church still conveys its central teachings as dogma.

Remember in biology, how DNA sequences are copied as RNA strands? Think waaaay back; those RNA strands are then used as a data source for producing proteins. The other direction doesn't work; that'd be silly! Proteins don't produce DNA! This one-directional flow is taught here at BYU to freshman in PDBio 120 as the Central Dogma of Molecular Microbiology.

James, in our post-class discussion, brought up physics. The law of gravity is pretty central and rather irrefutable, right? No. Gravity is one of the last frontier in quantum mechanics, and it's well-known that Newton's model for gravity is wrong in significant but small ways. In physics we find 'dogmatic' teaching in the fundamental assumption that everything in the universe can be modeled with elegant mathematics.

We don't call it such, but the older concept of dogma is still around!