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.
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.