Russia’s science and higher education ministry has dismissed the head of a prestigious genetics institute who sparked controversy by contending that humans once lived for centuries and that the shorter lives of modern humans are due to their ancestors’ sins, state news agency RIA-Novosti said Thursday.
Although the report did not give a reason for the firing of Alexander Kudryavtsev, the influential Russian Orthodox Church called it religious discrimination.
Kudryavtsev, who headed the Russian Academy of Science’s Vavilov Institute of General Genetics, made a presentation at a conference in 2023 in which he said people had lived for some 900 years prior to the era of the Biblical Flood and that “original, ancestral and personal sins” caused genetic diseases that shortened lifespans.
Its definitely not true that science and religion have to contradict each other. Take Christianity—you can easily believe in scientific methods to discover the way the world works, while believing that ‘God’ is the Creator of those things.
The thing that gets me is this whole god thing has never in hundreds of years shown or done anything of biblical proportions and we are supposed to just believe it? Prove to me it’s real. I love how the defense for this is how you need to believe for it to be real but I’m sorry that’s not how that works. If you tell me you have a quarter in your pocket I’m but never show me it why would I believe you?
Why should we have to prove nonexistence when they can’t prove existence? If there is no proof, I simply can’t believe it.
But that’s me.
Yup. And having a quarter in a pocket is a perfectly reasonable thing that is not only possible, but happens all the time. And even then, there’s no real reason to believe it.
Now do the same thing for a claim of the supernatural.
So what imperial evidence would answer your questioning without you trying to debunk that? I mean if God literally spoke to you, would you accept that or were you just hallucinating?
Yes but that’s hardly the entirely of Christian belief. What about the part about living until 900 before?
Well, I suppose one way to reconcile those things is that God created genetic diseases at that point to punish us for our sin.
The big difference is that many religious beliefs can’t be tested. They are just believed in faith. In science, nothing is believed. It’s all evidence based and tested. A scientist doesn’t have to reconcile their religious beliefs with their scientific ways because their beliefs are outside the realm of the scientific method. They accept that they don’t have a way to measure or test those things.
Beliefs can’t, but those beliefs generally come from somewhere, and those books tend to be full of testable claims.
And those tests generally fail, meaning we can only assume those sources are not really literally true. And if they’re not true, you’re really just making stuff up as you go along and assuming things are true as you see fit.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with making stuff up, I do it all the time for table top gaming. But I don’t base my worldview on the stuff I just imagine into being
Deism isn’t incompatible with science, but any god who does stuff can be tested. Since I’ve never seen a single paper published showing any evidence for any god, I can only assume that either no gods exist, or they don’t do anything. For me, those are basically the same thing.
There are things in those books that are demonstrably true, but that doesn’t necessarily prove everything in them just as those things that are demonstrably false don’t necessarily disprove everything in them.
It’s just a matter of not being able to observe, measure, or physically test a god’s existence. From an objective standpoint, believing whether a god exists or not is still just a belief.
I’m only trying to show how a scientific person could compartmentalize their beliefs from their studies and to that end, I think we agree that they aren’t incompatible. What someone chooses to believe after that is up to them, because as you point out, there’s no peer reviewed published evidence one way or another.
Why is it acceptable to make such a huge leap to “[…] Therefore there must be a god (and it’s this specific one)” without any evidence? How does that comport with scientific thought?
Why would it be acceptable to believe such an extraordinary claim for this one specific thing, and yet require adherence to the scientific method for literally any other claim they evaluate?
That inconsistency is concerning to me, and that’s why I don’t trust scientists who are religious.