The property and characteristic of advocacy is, in effect, to make use of logic in the interests of a thesis that is to be defended, while, on the other hand, the strictly scientific method proceeds from the facts, the data, presented to us by reality, in order that it may arrive, or not arrive, as the case may be, at a certain conclusion.  What is important is to define the problem clearly, whence it follows that progress consists not seldom in undoing what has been done.  Advocacy always supposes a petitio principii, and its arguments are ad probandum.  And theology that pretends to be rational is nothing but advocacy.

Theology proceeds from dogma, and dogma, dogma, in its primitive and most direct sense, signifies a decree, something akin to the Latin placitum, that which has seemed to the legislative authority fitting to be law.  This juridical concept is the starting-point of theology.  For the theologian, as for the advocate, dogma, law, is something given—­a starting-point which admits of discussion only in respect of its application and its most exact interpretation.  Hence it follows that the theological or advocatory spirit is in its principle dogmatical, while the strictly scientific and purely rational spirit is sceptical, skeptikos—­that is, investigative.  It is so at least in its principle, for there is the other sense of the term scepticism, that which is most usual to-day, that of a system of doubt, suspicion, and uncertainty, and this has arisen from the theological or advocatory use of reason, from the abuse of dogmatism.  The endeavour to apply the law of authority, the placitum, the dogma, to different and sometimes contraposed practical necessities, is what has engendered the scepticism of doubt.  It is advocacy, or what amounts to the same thing, theology, that teaches the distrust of reason—­not true science, not the science of investigation, sceptical in the primitive and direct meaning of the word, which hastens towards no predetermined solution nor proceeds save by the testing of hypotheses.

Take the Summa Theologica of St. Thomas, the classical monument of the theology—­that is, of the advocacy—­of Catholicism, and open it where you please.  First comes the thesis—­utrum ... whether such a thing be thus or otherwise; then the objections—­ad primum sic proceditur; next the answers to these objections—­sed contra est ... or respondeo dicendum....  Pure advocacy!  And underlying many, perhaps most, of its arguments you will find a logical fallacy which may be expressed more scholastico by this syllogism:  I do not understand this fact save by giving it this explanation; it is thus that I must understand it, therefore this must be its explanation.  The alternative being that I am left without any understanding of it at all.  True science teaches, above all, to doubt and to be ignorant; advocacy neither doubts nor believes that it does not know.  It requires a solution.