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.
It’s always confused me how someone that believes in a religion can be a scientist. They directly contradict each other. It just makes it sound like people are in denial.
With all due respect, my friend, you’re assuming a false dillema. The majority of academic scientists are religious, reflective of the general population’s religious affiliation.
Of course there are a minority of highly vocal outliers on both sides of the spectrum who profit from the discord, real or imagined.
There’s a few Neil DeGrasse Tyson clips I remember seeing around about various scientific and religious interactions.
Like he calls nonsense on the BCE/CE vs BC/AD change because scientists, and really most of scociety, operates on the Gregorian Calendar which was created by the Catholic Church under Pope Gregory XIII and is the most accurate calendar we’ve ever made to account for leap years. Why deny the creators of a fantastic calendar their due respect just because they were religious in a time when everyone was religious?
And in a different he also talked about the Baghdad House of Wisdom and how throughout the Middle Ages of Europe, Baghdad was a center of intellectual thought and culture, until the Fundamentalists got into power and declared manipulating numbers was witchcraft, and ended up being a huge brain drain in Baghdad for centuries.
NDT is a massive blowhard. I’m not religious but I got turned off by his weird interview with God thing.
He’s one of the profiteers, in my opinion.
His point about the change to BCE/CE is the actual nonsense. His point is that we should keep religious terminology being used in science? Out of respect for the creators? When have we ever done that? Science is secular and should be a secular pursuit. Every biologist and anthropologist shouldn’t have to reference Christ just to date their samples even if the calendar is the same. I respect NDT for his work but his awful takes like this hurt what he says often.
I think the BCE/CE thing is dumb because it’s just a religious calendar under a different name. It doesn’t change what Year 1 represents anymore than changing the spelling of a word changes its etymology. If we want a secular calendar we should do something like add a few thousand years to count from the founding of the first cities, or have it start in 1945 with the founding of the UN, or even 1970 when Unix time begins. As I see it, calling it the ‘common era’ does absolutely nothing to divorce the calendar from the birth of Jesus.
Planet names, days of the week, months, which year is zero - even that we have 7 days in the week - All of these are direct religious references that we’re fine with.
Months are actually numbers and politics. For instance, August is named for Augustus Caesar and December basically means ‘tenth month.’
January is named for Janus, February for a religious feast, March for Mars and June for Juno (Jupiter’s wife). April may also be a goddess Apru but the connection is still not agreed upon.
Humans are fantastic at compartmentalization
Not throwing a pike here, but you are short sighted.
To think it needs to be compartmentalized or that religion and science are mutually exclusive is a false dilemma as said above.
Science can simply be the way that God/s would choose to interact with our world.
They’re not necessarily incompatible, technically, but I am very suspicious of anyone who claims to be a scientist yet are willing to believe such extraordinary claims despite a complete lack of evidence.
If they would never use such a low bar for evidence in literally anything else in their lives (such as, presumably, their academic and scientific career, which I hope didn’t involve “faith” at all), and yet are willing to completely suspend that need for evidence for their belief in the supernatural, then I don’t trust them.
This is the real issue. Sure, science and religion COULD exist at the same time, but science is all about not making assumptions where you can instead build data, and heavily distrusting anything you can’t build data for. Religion is specifically designed to never be tested. It can never be meaningfully supported or negated through observable mediums, which makes it the antithesis to science regardless of their potential coexistence.
According to the philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, making assumptions and dismissing contradictory data is a regrettable but very common part of the scientific process that eventually results in a shift in the paradigm of thinking. Every scientific theory that we know today has gone through these phases and will likely continue to change in the future.
Humans are fallible, yes, and we do have biases that inevitably worm their way into our data and corrupt it. It’s one of the greatest reasons why we’ll never have real truth - only an approximation of it. However, that is not a reason to accept biases as an integral part of the scientific process. They are something we need to incessantly strive to minimize, specifically to keep the cycle you showed to a minimum; it’s a cycle of the failures of science, not the inherent process of it.
So, because you don’t understand how can someone accepts that something they don’t have proof for, can exist, because they don’t have proof against after all, you’re ready to start doubting their professionalism or their capacity ?
That seem even more unscientific than what you tried to condemn through a fallacy.
I do when they are making unsubstantiated claims about “truth” in their field of study. If a geneticist claims that people lived longer because of peer review evidence shows their genetic makeup up allows for it would be one thing. But to make that claim when he should know better means he can’t be trusted and is already abusing his position
Soooooo, you’re saying every religious scientists make those kind of claims ? Because what you answered to wasn’t about that anymore.
I understand it just fine, it’s called cognitive dissonance. And you’re correct, I doubt their ability to do their job as a scientist.
Very scientific answer, nice.
It’s not that they accept that it can exist, it’s that they accept that it does exist. We have no reason to believe anything exists after death, or that any particular being created us, and to go even further, we have no reason to believe that one religion’s specific version of heaven exists after death, or one specific religion’s specific vision of god created us. Maybe something exists after death, but it’s just a huge everlasting game of dodge ball. Unlikely, but just as unlikely as heaven existing. Maybe a creature created us, but it’s a huge centipede. Again, unlikely, but just as unlikely as a human-shaped god creating us in his image.
There are virtually no universally-held consistencies even among all of the the relatively few currently-practiced religions, because none of them are based on anything but human imagination even if God does exist, since we’ve likely never had a real interaction with God even in that instance. Religion can exist, but not only is it highly unlikely, even in the event that it’s true, the likelihood that we randomly guessed the exact correct circumstances in which it does exist are nearly impossible.
The scientific approach to religion is to make no opinion on its existence, because to make a hypothesis about something that cannot be tested isn’t just worthless, it’s biased, which is even worse to a scientist.
If you were scientific, you’d know you’re taking a shortcut, ironically not being scientific.
The likeliness of it doesn’t matter, it can’t be proved either way, for now. There are a lot of consistencies between religions.
Because you can’t conceive faith existing with logic doesn’t mean it’s impossible, and that it discredites people you don’t know as a result, is a logic flaw.
Yes. And it’s just as likely that super-god created God to do exactly that.
But that’s not the point. The scientific mind requires evidence and repeatability. To believe in God without evidence or repeatability means they’ve compartmentalized that part of their thinking.
Can you prove that the scientific mind requires evidence and repeatability? That sounds like circular reasoning.
I have a hypothesis, I collect evidence, record the results and see if it supports the hypotheses.
The experiment is repetable.
Yes, of course. And we all love the results of this methodology.
It’s just that using the scientific method to prove the validity of the scientific method is circular reasoning. At some point, we have to think philosophically about the means of knowledge.
You’re claiming a fact out of one of your assumption.
That thread is delightful in irony today, lots of self proclaimed unbiased and scientific, acting very biased and unscientific.
He who smelt it, dealt it
You can be all sorts of religious and be a scientist.
But the moment you start to claim anything from one of the popular holy books is literally true, you become a massive hypocrite.
But there is no disconnect between deism and science.
You’re moving the goalposts now. This in not what the comment above said.
Its interesting to see your post to be so controversial. People who thinks all scientists are atheists either just don’t know any scientists or never been out in the real world. There’s really no difference between scientists and any regular population. I’m a engineer and in my group of about 40 engineers, many of us are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and some Atheists. We don’t let religion interfere with our work, and there’s no conflicts with each other. We do a mix of R&D in our work, and we build software and hardware that gets used by millions of consumers daily.
I agree with you. I think this is a result of the New Atheist preaching of guys like Dawkins and Hitchens. They’re rather crude and provacative in their anti-theism and their followers subsequently have a pretty simplistic view of a complex subject.
Of course, there are even more religious fundamentalists doing exactly the same rabble-rousing. It behooves us to ignore all extremists.
To an extent it depends how that religion interacts with science. There’s quite a few major foundational discoveries that came from priests and ordained clergy from the Catholic Church: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Catholic_clergy_scientists
Within the Catholic Church there are a few orders of clergy dedicated to scientific discovery, especially the Jesuits.
Granted a lot of them conducted science under the broad philosophy of better understanding the universe God created, but if the end result eventually improves the lives of people, I don’t see how that’s an inherently bad thing.
If we wanted to be a bit more accurate to the hustoru of the real world, religious fundamentalism is opposed to science.
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.
They don’t necessarily contradict each other (except for fundamentalist).
My understanding of religion is that the religion brings answer to the question “Why ?”, the science on the other hand answer the question “How ?”
Science will explain how human life appeared on earth but not why human life appears.
Religion is one way to answer why are we here and should we do with our life. I don’t necessarily agree with it but I could understand the appeal for some people.
It’s more to do with religion falling apart when you apply the scientific method. And if you don’t, what kinda scientist are you?
Thelemite here—we do apply the scientific method to our religion. Every Thelemite is advised to keep a journal and study the results of their efforts in life to discover their true purpose and how to pursue it. We also create experiments to find ways to have more control over ourselves and our world.
The problem is that even people who use the scientific method can fall prey to bad practices and confirmation bias. That’s why it isn’t a bad idea for both science and religion to be peer reviewed.
people have to put their faith in something. science itself can serve as a personal religion
If so, then they are horrible scientists.
Not how science works.
Not for scientists really. But for the average person that doesn’t understand it, absolutely. You’re just going of the word of some dude that said it was true. His friends agreed so it must be correct.
Science and religion (in the broad sense, not specific statements of a religion) are just two entirely separate things. Faith by it’s definition exists outside anything testable, so it’s just not part of science. Here’s the one hitch: science does in-fact point to faith. Bare with me here.
We know with whatever certainty anyone would require that the universe is expanding, and that the rate of that expansion is accelerating. We know with certainty that >90% of all that we know is there, just by looking up, is already permanently and irrevocably beyond our grasp. It will all blink out of the night sky, and no interaction will ever be possible.
Future scientists (human, alien, whatever) will look at certain phenomena, the cause of which we today would know to be a specific galaxy, etc, but we would have no way to gather a single shred of evidence. There would be no way, literally none, to ever interreact with those stellar structures.
To these future scientists you would be citing ancient texts and proposing a 100% untestable hypothesis. You would be proposing literal gods outside of the machine. And you’d be right. But it would all have to be taken on faith.
There’s a difference between working with the latest and most probable hypothesis under the assumption that it could be wrong and faith in a religious sense.
Faith and dogma leave no shred of doubt that they’re right. Science acknowledges that it could be completely wrong but we have no further data to replace at this point in time.
Well right, which is why they’re separate things entirely. And I am definitely taking some poetic license, but I outlined a pretty concrete example of how the way the scientific process is structured it’s a tool for what’s demonstrable, not inherently what’s correct. In what I outlined, it’s possible you could never gather that data. In every sense that matters most of the universe would no longer exist.
You can do the same thing in reverse (we’ll never actually know what happened at the big bang, we weren’t there, still we can figure out a lot). It just drives the point home more when you realize there are things you can look at, observe, make hypothesis and test against here today, that will essentially leave the realm of science in the future.
So again, this is definitely some navel gazing, and I’m just about as atheistic as they come, but the original spawn of this part of the thread was “how can any scientist be religious”. It’s because the scientific process isn’t actually concerned with being “correct”, now or in the future, just plausible and useful. I’ve worked in the lab with folks who viewed their work as understanding the universe someone created for them. That’s entirely compatible with the scientific method. You can take a minute to appreciate the insanity and beauty of everything we know about this universe and the fact that were even capable of comprehending some of it without it corrupting your scientific method. Some people choose to appreciate that insanity and beauty and assign divine intent. So long as the graph has a decent R^2, that’s just fine.
The beauty of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmentalization_(psychology) (splitting one’s mind)
The problem is that some people like this guy are clearly not compartimentalizing at all.
Nope, the problem with this guy is that he got a career when he should’ve been shoved out of science related academia and institutions a long time ago.
Well, I believe in a Creator directly because of science. We aren’t a result of chaos that just happened to line up at precisely the right time. Let’s take the rules that govern the universe. Gravity is a constant. Science proves that. It didn’t magically happen. The laws of thermodynamics. The math is always correct and it was occurring well before anyone could articulate it. Same with biology. It takes 3500 calories to change one pound of weight, so many grams of protein to maintain muscle mass. I can keep going but the point is, God said it was created and science proves its not a happy random accident. So if that points to plausibility, what other things in the Bible can be plausible, even pointing to truth?
This sounds like a whole lot of mental gymnastics to me to justify the logic. While I can’t explain how everything came to be, it also can’t be explained how God came to exist and until either one is proven, it makes far more sense that things have adapted over a billion of years instead of a single entity that there isn’t a single shred of evidence to exist. Religion just doesn’t seem logical to me.
I could try to explain it better for you to understand if you’d like. There’s no mental gymnastics. Can you explain why if there’s no definitive source, what makes God not a plausible explanation? Given the scientific method of observation, what rules that out as a possibility?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
We don’t have to rule it out, it is up to the person asserting it to provide evidence of it being true. I don’t have to disprove unicorns, I can demand that unicorn believers show me the data. You are reversing the burden of proof.
In any case the problem of evil pretty much rules out any god you would actually want to follow. So while there might be some diest god out there it isn’t like it gives us anything. You are not going to pray to a being that isn’t listening and wouldn’t care if it heard.
What does science say is not a random, happy accident, and where do they state this?
If the chaos had lined up a bit later, or a bit earlier, we might not exist. Everything might be a bit different, almost as if this slightly different universe was perfectly designed for the slightly different creatures living in it. Magic.
If we didn’t exist we wouldn’t be here to wonder why we didn’t. The miracle isn’t that we fit the universe we live in, the muscle would be a universe that we don’t fit in and yet here we are.
Yes. My point was that if the universe were a little different then we’d also be a little different. It’s all a weird crazy miracle though. Anything existing at all, or nothing existing, all incomprehensible, like magic.
If you say so.
If you can explain the existance of existance then i’m all ears, if you can prove it with the scientific method then you might as well be god. I’m just an agnostic atheist who happily sees the whole damn shebang as a big wtf.
It isn’t that I know it is your assertion that I can never know.
Cognitive Dissonance. I was raised very devout and I did it for years. It doesn’t confuse me, it evokes pity. I get to see people making the same fucking mistake I made and it hurts.
I made that mistake, no one else has to. Rip the band-aid off!
yep, same, for years. you WANT it to be true, so you ignore the contradictions.
How did that numpty ever end up in the Academy of Science in the first place?
Well it’s Russia so I’m gonna guess it was nepotism.
Nepotism also comes with future immunity in oligarchies though.
maybe he was banned from academia in soviet times for being a religious nutjob, and then he shown that “political discrimination get into any position free” card and they let him in no questions asked
Top guys are aging. Maybe he sold them an idea thet he can fix it? I mean, there’s many gossips about rich men turning from cosmetic surgery and sports to all kinds of fake science and mysticism just to stay there a little longer.
I’m guessing you’re not from America.
Fortunately not
Christians will cite this as an example of them being persecuted. Guaranteed.
It’s already there in the summary of the article. They’re calling it religious discrimination.
I guess I should have added “around the world.” I was going to say “in the US,” but then I remembered some of my religious family in other countries who would definitely say this, too.
It’s the church. They call it religious discrimination when they aren’t allowed to discriminate others. Or murder. Point is they cry and get super hard when they can play the victim.
This story could also title “East European State under Western duress had to fire Christian top scientist with life-prolonging ideas” /s
a ‘christian’ ‘scientist’ that actually read
the first bits of the biblea few wikipedia pages on early biblical persons; and decided it was factual historical accounts.
It’s like a fetish for them. They want to be oppressed so bad.
Am I on Lemmy, or the SCP wiki?
wow, that headline is a whole journey
bruh what
That’s quite literally in the Bible. People are stated as having extraordinary lifespans (e. g., Methuselah).
Then there was a flood after which people saw a rainbow for the first time ever. Gods promise not to flood us again.
The implication seems to be that the earth was in a firmament bubble and the bubble burst, sending down water. Then we had direct sun and not the filtered kind that He* created us for.
No longer in our best element, we die earlier.
I’m not saying the above is true, I’m saying I’ve heard this for decades now and it checks out against biblical description.
And this is why, while you can have smart Christians, you really can’t have smart biblical literalist.
Can you give a reference please? Sounds like sermon quoting to me, they tend to have a ranting quality to them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah
There ya go, all the references, plus a family tree!
Isn’t there a genealogy with a timeline somewhere in Genesis? It’s like a whole chapter of who fucked who and how long they lived.
Yeah, there are entire books in the OT dedicated to lineage, and I’m pretty sure it’s all been debunked. It’s not a historical document in any way whatsoever.
Lol I mean how do you debunk something that wasn’t originally intended to be a scientific document. (I know that’s not the mindset among Christians)
Ok it has been debunked because the events described are often not only internally inconsistent they do not match up with what we now know. And before you start on “it’s an analogy” keep in mind it wasn’t for the people who wrote it and lived with it as well as the confusion of what it is an analogy for.
Genesis 6 through 9.
You’re asking me to provide a reference for the biblical flood story. When I say it’s in there… It’s in there.
I get that you don’t know me, but the second sentence of your post isn’t helpful.
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Doesn’t matter, it’s in there. Even feeble attempts to find it using a search engine surface that theory.
I’ve done it a few times today. Each with less than 2 minutes spent.
So you mean to tell me that you’re weren’t raised by hardcore Christians who drilled this “fact” down your throat well into adulthood? And that it’s our fault for being sinners so we can’t live 969 years anymore?
You’re lucky son of a bitch, you know that, right?
I was having a normal conversation with a coworker about life expectancy rising medical advancedments and what not, she pivots and says yea in the bible people lived for like a thousand years. I was just like yeah haha
Listen. It’s not that hard. A flood happens and now we have nearly 1/10th the lifespan.
DONT YOU GET IT?!
/s
Bit of a tangent, but from what I can tell the language barrier (and cold war history) really doesn’t do Russia any favours. Because so many Russians speak poor English, they’re effectively cut off from the English speaking world.
Obviously, the Anglosphere has more than enough weird conspiracies, and there is some bleed through, but Russia has surprisingly popular stuff like Fomenko’s New Chronology. For those wondering:
Phantom time conspiracies are my favorite kind of dumbass conspiracies.
In the 80s and 90s people were so confused they believed in all kinds of scams. Charged water before the TV, gave money to financial pyramids, believed their kids dead in Afgan and Chechnya could be brought to life for a little donation, even japanese death cult Ayum Sinrikyo was filmed staying with Brejhnev and USSR got more of his followers than Japan itself. Some of these ceased to exist but some are still there, including that idiot, Dugin and others. One of the top programs on the TV in the 10s was an initially sceptical challenge show of self-named witches, mages, extrasensorically gifted people, that run for many seasons, and with time charlatans themselves started to use it as a kind of promotion to their services kek.
From all of them, at least Fomenko is too absurd to most and genuinely funny in how he intertwines random historical events and his own marasm. But all of them should go to court to be honest. Their success is just a symptom of bigger problems, but they further enable people’s idiotism and live in luxury extorting them.
Charged water before the TV,
Hah, i know at least one American preacher and one Dutch medium who did the same nonsense. Seems like it was quite the fad.
Whoa, that’s a fun one! Thanks for sharing! I love reading about these really different conspiracy theories.
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Some people go bonkers later in life
It’s embarrassing that he even got that far.
Wait until you hear about Lysenkoism
How long until this guy finds his way to Florida?
This is the brain drain in effect. Scientists and intellectuals fled russia when the war with Ukraine began and the sanctions were incoming.
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Although the report did not give a reason for the firing of Alexander Kudryavtsev, the influential Russian Orthodox Church called it religious discrimination.
Yeah, I don’t think they care.
Anyone else find it funny how the values bleed over in both directions? It’s westerners that would complain about discrimination, in Russia, that’s just life. Life is hard, so no whining, more or less. Off to the front lines with you.
why do i need to hear about Kacapstan, they’re irrelevant
Lyskenko LIVES!
