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.
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.
I think you make an interesting point and got me thinking, didn’t want to come of as standoffish or something.
I just think science pointing at faith loses the nuance between the assumption that a working theory is currently correct and the deep belief in dogma. Technically you could call both faith, but they are very different.
As you pointed out science deals with unknowns and sometimes there’s not even a theory. Faith has historically been one of the primary ways to deal with any kinds of unknowns, of course, but it’s not the only one.
I agree that being a scientist and being faithful isn’t a contradiction. I feel like science is a very broad term and certain disciplines might be more or less inclined to be religious though.
It’s just one of those things in terms of logic of the system giving rise outside of itself. Like I said, dogma and religion are two very different things. I just find a lot of beauty in the fact that science can predict literal apotheosis by our own definition; it’s inherent in the system. If someone chooses to see that and assign intent, I can’t argue.
There’s just something amazing about a system which defines the conditions which are outside it’s grasp. It’s like how banach-tarski shows 1+0=2. Practical? Not really, but none the less… under certain conditions…
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.