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.
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.
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.