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Re: Re: NOTRE DAME, IN - New Faculty Hiring Policy Undermines Catholic Identity as University Declines to Release Hiring Results
by Adrian
"In courses where clear FACTS are being taught, ideology could be kept out of the process, but in courses where the subject is based on opinion and "fuzzy" science, such as the social sciences, or artistic interpretation, the instruction will always reflect the opinions of the Professor." I must disagree with this, because everything taught in this or any university is interpreted by the professor. In other words, there is at the university level very little teaching of just facts. The teaching goal of the university is to form minds, to enable young people to become scientists (with scientifically formed minds), literature scholars (with literarily formed minds), philosophers (philosophically formed), etc. If we look at even the hardest of the hard sciences—say, physics or math—the data are factual, but the interpretations are not. What do physicists know? Do they know the inner structure of all reality? or only of physical reality? Or do they simply know (as J J C Smart holds) how to predict future experiences involving physical things? And what do our sciences say about the human person? Many people have believed that since mathematics is the key to physics, then math is the key to everything. And this would mean that the human person is ultimately a machine working out a very complex, yet to be understood, algorithm. The result is that I do meet in the classroom students who have learned in another course that human beings are not really free, that the existence of God is a purely subjective matter, that morality is relative and dependent solely on cultural or biological conditions. There is no truth independent of the knowing subject, and for this reason, the faith of the professor makes a critical difference. Knowing Christ will not make up for ignorance of quantum theory, but knowledge of the quantum equations does not tell us what these equations mean for the real world.
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