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.
You’re really desperate to find an argument I’m not making. Again, people can be religious. Scientists can be religious. However, if a scientist is religious they need to make very sure that their religion - that they believe in spite of no data, and is thus nothing more than an opinion - does not affect their science, which is required to be based on measurable data alone.
What this man did was make a scientific presentation based on his beliefs - his opinions - which were not based on measurements, and were thus unscientific. That was what crossed the line. I will always be wary of a religious scientist because I cannot determine whether their measurements are unaffected by the biases their religion gives them, but I can never truly dismiss their measurements, because I cannot be sure they are not legitimate. But when someone openly announces that they believe sin has caused a god to directly influence human genetics, and their claim is not based on any collected data, it shows that they absolutely have allowed their biases to affect the legitimacy of their work. In that instance, any past or present data that that person has collected will need to be re-measured by someone who has not shown to have allowed their biases to influence their work.
Something immeasurable is the antithesis to science, which is the act of measuring. If that thing later becomes measurable, it stops being the antithesis to science, because that immeasurability is no longer present. Insofar that we cannot know whether or not religion exists, it will continue to be something immeasurable, and will be antithetical to science. If someone wants to support both, they need to make absolutely sure that they are entirely compartmentalized, so that if the day comes that religion is either confirmed or denounced, it will not affect their work.
Ok, so considering that my original point, to which you answered, was that you don’t need to compartmentalize to be able to experiment science and religion at the same time, what is your point ?
My point is that religious scientists are required to walk a very fine line to do both, because every interaction a human has with the world is a form of measurement.
Looking at a blue sky is a measurement, watching a child grow up is a measurement, smelling a flower is a measurement; these things are science, and for a religious scientist to be unbiased, they cannot allow any question of why or how they exist to be answered with “God.” So, the question becomes: “What’s left for a religious scientist to truly believe in, and not measure?” and the answer is that only the immeasurable can be left up to faith - the idea of an afterlife, the idea of a creator who kicked off the phenomenon of “reality” itself, and other such immeasurable things can be left up to faith, but nothing else.
Anything that can be answered by looking closer at existence itself cannot - in any way - be answered scientifically with anything other than real data. What this man did was show that he had allowed the measurable to be defined by the immeasurable in his work, and thus lost his legitimacy as a scientist.
Oh, I agree for the scientist in OP, dude lost his marbles or is coping hard on his cognitive dissonance, but my point was answering to the much simpler subject of “Scientists can’t be religious or they’re not proper scientists”.
As to the very fine line religious scientists must walk, if we’re honest, it’s true of many things that make the life of a scientist, because it is measurable and can be approached scientifically, doesn’t mean they will approach and measure it that way, humans are fallible, and they often do fail, but that’s another subject.
You’re absolutely right - ultimately, true scientific method is impossible for humans, since we all have biases, but striving for perfection is how we get as close as we can to it.
As you mentioned, scientific progress can be made even with biased data from people who have let religion and science intermingle, but as others have shown in this thread, it often leads to a slow process of chipping away at society’s default answer of “God did it” little by little over time, which has significantly delayed scientific progress.
Even just 100 years ago this man likely wouldn’t have lost his job for making a claim without data that sin has directly impacted human health, and I see the fact that it’s now an unacceptable claim to be an indication that science as a whole is becoming less biased, in part due to its further separation from religion.
I do agree that they aren’t many, the ones who are actually careful about not mixing up their beliefs with science, sadly.
I see we do agree in the end, it was an interesting talk, thank you for that.
I do wonder if science really would have been quicker without religion tho. (Putting apart the time science treated religion as being heretic of course. I mean this in the “wouldn’t human find something else to be biased about/get their meaning lost in anyway” way)
It’s possible that something else would’ve gotten in the way if religion hadn’t, but I guess we can leave that immeasurable thing up to faith as well. I’m glad we came to an agreement in the end.