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.
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.
https://sciencereligiondialogue.org/resources/what-do-scientists-believe-religion-among-scientists-and-implications-for-public-perceptions/
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.
He’s one of the profiteers, in my opinion.
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.
Planet names, days of the week, months, which year is zero - even that we have 7 days in the week - All of these are direct religious references that we’re fine with.
Months are actually numbers and politics. For instance, August is named for Augustus Caesar and December basically means ‘tenth month.’
January is named for Janus, February for a religious feast, March for Mars and June for Juno (Jupiter’s wife). April may also be a goddess Apru but the connection is still not agreed upon.
I think the BCE/CE thing is dumb because it’s just a religious calendar under a different name. It doesn’t change what Year 1 represents anymore than changing the spelling of a word changes its etymology. If we want a secular calendar we should do something like add a few thousand years to count from the founding of the first cities, or have it start in 1945 with the founding of the UN, or even 1970 when Unix time begins. As I see it, calling it the ‘common era’ does absolutely nothing to divorce the calendar from the birth of Jesus.
Make it 1969 for the moon landing. It would just be slightly off unix time which will annoy low level programmers forever.
Humans are fantastic at compartmentalization
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.
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.
Humans are fallible, yes, and we do have biases that inevitably worm their way into our data and corrupt it. It’s one of the greatest reasons why we’ll never have real truth - only an approximation of it. However, that is not a reason to accept biases as an integral part of the scientific process. They are something we need to incessantly strive to minimize, specifically to keep the cycle you showed to a minimum; it’s a cycle of the failures of science, not the inherent process of it.
I wish I shared your optimism, my friend. Biases are increasing in the post-truth era, even in academia. That is a measurable fact.
All the more reason to never treat them as inevitable. It’s not a bad thing to both accept that we’ll never fully overcome them, but to try our hardest anyway - that’s what keeps them to a minimum. If we were to stop trying to avoid them, the scientific process would degrade even more.
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.
I do when they are making unsubstantiated claims about “truth” in their field of study. If a geneticist claims that people lived longer because of peer review evidence shows their genetic makeup up allows for it would be one thing. But to make that claim when he should know better means he can’t be trusted and is already abusing his position
Soooooo, you’re saying every religious scientists make those kind of claims ? Because what you answered to wasn’t about that anymore.
I don’t remember saying “every” in my post. I do recall being specific on the conditions when it is a problem.
And yet, what you answered wasn’t about that case, thanks for your contribution.
I understand it just fine, it’s called cognitive dissonance. And you’re correct, I doubt their ability to do their job as a scientist.
From wikipedia:
Religious scientists do not experience cognitive dissonance if they don’t view religion and science as incompatible, and apparently many of them don’t. Cognitive dissonance is not the same as hypocrisy. Some of those scientists may have experienced cognitive dissonance in the past but they have long since found a way of reconciling the scientific method with a belief in god.
Very scientific answer, nice.
I’m sure you think you dunked on me or something, but… Ehhhh
Stop proving that you aren’t here to discuss, but to “win” debates and start ignoring me, thank you
It’s not that they accept that it can exist, it’s that they accept that it does exist. We have no reason to believe anything exists after death, or that any particular being created us, and to go even further, we have no reason to believe that one religion’s specific version of heaven exists after death, or one specific religion’s specific vision of god created us. Maybe something exists after death, but it’s just a huge everlasting game of dodge ball. Unlikely, but just as unlikely as heaven existing. Maybe a creature created us, but it’s a huge centipede. Again, unlikely, but just as unlikely as a human-shaped god creating us in his image.
There are virtually no universally-held consistencies even among all of the the relatively few currently-practiced religions, because none of them are based on anything but human imagination even if God does exist, since we’ve likely never had a real interaction with God even in that instance. Religion can exist, but not only is it highly unlikely, even in the event that it’s true, the likelihood that we randomly guessed the exact correct circumstances in which it does exist are nearly impossible.
The scientific approach to religion is to make no opinion on its existence, because to make a hypothesis about something that cannot be tested isn’t just worthless, it’s biased, which is even worse to a scientist.
If you were scientific, you’d know you’re taking a shortcut, ironically not being scientific.
The likeliness of it doesn’t matter, it can’t be proved either way, for now. There are a lot of consistencies between religions.
Because you can’t conceive faith existing with logic doesn’t mean it’s impossible, and that it discredites people you don’t know as a result, is a logic flaw.
Bud, I literally just wrote out multiple paragraphs about how it isn’t impossible. If the only thing you can think of to argue my point is to imagine I said something else, that should tell you something. Religion could be real, it could be fake. The only correct conclusion to draw is that we don’t know. Have no faith in the existence of a god, have no faith in the lack of a god - have only faith in what you can measure. That’s science.
If you don’t mind me asking: why should you have faith in what you can measure? Is there an experiment to prove that empiricism is the best means of knowledge? Such an experiment would also be circular reasoning.
Obviously we’re plaqued on all sides by a deficiency of our organic senses, yet we seek to understand beyond the range of our senses. Philosophers have wrestled with this conundrum for a while.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/
Which you ended by"The scientific approach to religion is to make no opinion on its existence,", which is one of the fallacy in your reasoning, you’re reducing it to opinion, implying it can’t be treated scientifically.
Inferring from that, at best you could say that it should be left alone until scientists could even apply the scientific approach. As in, we don’t know, as you said. And that doesn’t preclude faith, which isn’t mutually exclusive with being scientific.
To be clear, what I read a lot in this thread, is being scientific should automatically infer you can’t be religious, because you can’t prove it’s real. But it omits that you can’t prove it isn’t.
Granted, the mistake might from where it started, IE this post where the scientist was being very unscientific.
Yes. And it’s just as likely that super-god created God to do exactly that.
But that’s not the point. The scientific mind requires evidence and repeatability. To believe in God without evidence or repeatability means they’ve compartmentalized that part of their thinking.
You’re claiming a fact out of one of your assumption.
That thread is delightful in irony today, lots of self proclaimed unbiased and scientific, acting very biased and unscientific.
He who smelt it, dealt it
Can you prove that the scientific mind requires evidence and repeatability? That sounds like circular reasoning.
I have a hypothesis, I collect evidence, record the results and see if it supports the hypotheses.
The experiment is repetable.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
Yes, of course. And we all love the results of this methodology.
It’s just that using the scientific method to prove the validity of the scientific method is circular reasoning. At some point, we have to think philosophically about the means of knowledge.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning
We can think practically about knowledge too.
I put my hand on a hot stove, it burns, I remove my hand and the burning stops. Isn’t that knowledge?
Yes, of course, but it’s not the extent of knowledge.
Nor is it universal knowledge. What burns your hand isn’t going to burn other materials, or even other organisms.
There’s always a limit to what can be perceived with the organic senses. That’s the axiomatic flaw of empiricism.
What do you think? What is knowledge?
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.
You’re moving the goalposts now. This in not what the comment above said.
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.
While it is true it doesn’t mean it isn’t weird.