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.
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.
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.