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.
How many times do I need to tell you that I’m specifically saying that religion CAN exist? It CAN! I’ve never said nor implied that it’s impossible, and I’m not saying we should believe it’s impossible! I’m saying that it’s just as bad to believe it’s specifically real as it is to believe it’s specifically fake when we can’t measure it. To believe in religion is just as wrong as to believe in a lack of religion. We cannot know, so to believe anything about it is nothing more than an opinion and not a measurable fact. It’s fine to have an opinion, but to think about something scientifically is to remove any preconceived notions about whatever you’re studying and focus solely on what you can measure; since you can’t measure religion, you can’t think about it scientifically, which makes it the antithesis to science.
Yes, some things that are immeasurable end up being true - of course they do, but until they become measurable, they should not be assumed to be anything. If God shows up and we measure him, then he can be thought about scientifically, but until that point he can’t, and he shouldn’t be. Until we have something to measure, we should not assume any baseless ideas about its existence or lack thereof are true.
You say the logical mind has trouble saying “It might or it might not, for now we can’t say” but that has been my entire point this entire time! To be religious is to say “Yes, it does exist,” and to be atheist is to say “No, it does not exist,” both of which are wrong. The scientific way to think about religion is to specifically not make any decision one way or another, so when a scientist says they’re religious, that shows they’ve made a decision, which shows they’ve allowed unscientific biases to enter their daily life. Now, we’re all human, and we all have biases, but when we start making scientific presentations centered around our biases, as this man did, it’s incredibly problematic. Science and religion started out hand in hand, and most of our progress over the years has been due to our slow separation of the two.
That would apply if the scientists believing in their religion would claim to do so scientifically.
You’re again saying that a scientific can’t use faith in a case where he can’t know, or it means that he will do so for the entirety of his work, but we both know that’s not necessarily true. Because they choose to rely on opinion on this subject, does not necessarily mean that they do the same with their work ethic. (That would also mean doubting the work of a crushing majority of scientists, them being religious or atheist in most cases, unless agnosticism is much more widespread that last time I brushed the subject)
In essential, what I’m saying is because a scientist claims to be religious or atheist, thinking that their whole work should be doubted because of that, is a flawed argument.
PS : And because we can’t measure it, and don’t know if it’s “can’t measure yet” or “can’t measure ever”, we can’t say that religion is the antithesis of science. Which means we can think about it scientifically, we just don’t have the means to know if it’s correct.
You’re really desperate to find an argument I’m not making. Again, people can be religious. Scientists can be religious. However, if a scientist is religious they need to make very sure that their religion - that they believe in spite of no data, and is thus nothing more than an opinion - does not affect their science, which is required to be based on measurable data alone.
What this man did was make a scientific presentation based on his beliefs - his opinions - which were not based on measurements, and were thus unscientific. That was what crossed the line. I will always be wary of a religious scientist because I cannot determine whether their measurements are unaffected by the biases their religion gives them, but I can never truly dismiss their measurements, because I cannot be sure they are not legitimate. But when someone openly announces that they believe sin has caused a god to directly influence human genetics, and their claim is not based on any collected data, it shows that they absolutely have allowed their biases to affect the legitimacy of their work. In that instance, any past or present data that that person has collected will need to be re-measured by someone who has not shown to have allowed their biases to influence their work.
Something immeasurable is the antithesis to science, which is the act of measuring. If that thing later becomes measurable, it stops being the antithesis to science, because that immeasurability is no longer present. Insofar that we cannot know whether or not religion exists, it will continue to be something immeasurable, and will be antithetical to science. If someone wants to support both, they need to make absolutely sure that they are entirely compartmentalized, so that if the day comes that religion is either confirmed or denounced, it will not affect their work.