The contrast between dogmatism and doubt was expressed succinctly by Claude Bernard (1813–78):

In more recent times, the same contrast is often made. Sam Harris stated (p.43) that “the problem with religion – as with Nazism, Stalinism, or any other totalitarian mythology – is the problem of dogma itself.” To call dogma problematic depends of course on what is meant by the word ‘dogma’. In its original Greek context, the word δογμα meant nothing more than an opinion or a belief. It is connected with the verb δοκειν, which means ‘to appear’ or ‘to seem to be the case’. In other words, it meant something far more tentative than our understanding of the word ‘dogma’. But from that beginning, the word dogma came to mean in Greek a public decree or law or ordinance, something that cannot be contradicted or even argued against.

So the word ‘dogma’, like the words ‘myth’ and ‘sceptic’ (also derived from Greek), has changed and taken on a new meaning. For us the word ‘dogmatic’ has come to mean ‘laying down an opinion in a way not open to argument’, and a dogmatist is a person, as Burnyeat once put it (p.27), “with an obstinate and unreasonable attachment to his opinions.” As Galbraith observed, “When people are least sure, they are often most dogmatic”; or as Ring Lardner put it more briefly in The Young Immigrants: “‘Shut up’, he explained.”