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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Ok let’s take Christianity.
We are told a man came back to life violating what we know from biology. We are told the man had to die because original sin which was an event caused in the Garden of Eden, which breaks everything we know about evolution and the history of our world. We are told that 3 = 1 which breaks logic and math. We are told that women are to remain silent and yet the success of a country depends on the degree that women are able to be treated like equals. We are told that anyone who is LGBT+ is a bad person and yet the evidence doesn’t support that at all. We are told that Pontius Pilot decided to put down a revolution by stupidly only killing the leader and then let the rest of the group operate under his nose for decades which breaks what we know about history, Roman culture, and freaken common sense.
We are told that the followers of Jesus could heal at a touch, that Paul could drift thru jail walls, that the Romans would allow a privileged burial for a criminal, that demons inhibit buddies, that food can magically appear, that water can become wine by prayer, that the mustard seed is the smallest seed, that leprosy can be cured with prayer, that there is another dimension full of human minds without human brains to power them, that two Jewish women would prepare a male body for burial, that a wealthy guy would randomly give away a section of his family estate for burial to a criminal, that the secret police of the Pharisees would break their own rules they had with Rome and have the local king do their dirty work, that 12 people would abandon their families to follow a cult leader just because he asked nicely…
List goes on and on. Christianity is not compatible with everything we know to be true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No.
Faith isn’t outside of science by it’s nature it was decreed to be as such. We can study faith perfectly fine. Go join all those studies where they get people to pray while getting a CAT scan or testing the impact on patient recovery with prayer. Of course it never works the opposite way. If religion had evidence it was true you would never stop hearing about it, since it doesn’t it declares that it doesn’t need it. Isn’t that freaken convenient?
Secondly your example of one day, in tens of billions of years, humanity won’t be able to study somethings is not here or there. Yes, as far as I know it will be true but a limit on what we can know is not the same as a capacity to know. If I flip a coin and don’t tell you the results, you don’t know the results but you can certainly comprehend the result.
The supernatural claims of religion are beyond our capacity to understand since they break what we know to be true.
Religion makes testable claims and those claims are broken often.
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.
You know it just doesn’t work. Psychology, psychiatric medicine, sociology, law, game theory. Religion lost the monopoly on how the universe operates and claims to know how humans should operate. The more we learn the less it got correct.
We know that some people are medically better off presenting as a different gender than what they were born with. We know that some people prefer the same sex and that this is common among animals that are like us. We know that the fear of hell doesn’t motivate people to be more empathetic, just look at crime statistics in religious areas vs non-religious areas. We know a society that doesn’t charge interest on loans has no credit system that works. We know that physically beating a child that misbehaves does not correct the behavior. We know that the wealth level of a society depends almost completely with the degree that women can work.
And to a degree none of this should be surprising. Religion is a selfish meme. It doesn’t exist for our benefit it exists for its own. So of course religious societies do worse, their parasite is thriving.
people have to put their faith in something. science itself can serve as a personal religion
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?
The constants of the universe do not require an intelligent designer. Additionally religion depends on the supposed non-consistent behavior of existence. E.g. miracles.
Really can’t have it both ways. Does the universe appear governed by laws? That means it has an intelligent creator. Does it appear governed by chance? Well that also requires an intelligent creator. The assertion can’t be tested and as such isn’t worth worrying about.
So where did gravity come from? Where did the laws of thermodynamics come from? What about the laws of motion? If you can’t definitively explain its origin, objectively why is God not a plausible answer?
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.
It’s embarrassing that he even got that far.
Mixed feelings, on one hand it’s good he is out, on the other hand it is shameful they let him get to such an incredibly high level of authority and left him there for so long.
How did that numpty ever end up in the Academy of Science in the first place?
wow, that headline is a whole journey
