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.
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.
The only way the scientific approach could be used to measure the existence of a deity would be to measure the deity itself, at which point the measurement would only be a formality - its existence would already be verified. That’s why it’s the opposite of science. You can learn of a black hole before ever observing one by simply understanding the basic fundamentals of physics, but a deity would exist even outside of that. No amount of measuring nature would be able to prove or disprove something that exists outside of that. You still haven’t made a single argument against that cornerstone of my argument. You can call it a fallacy all you want, but ultimately that’s just a word you’re using in place of actually arguing against my point. Faith is the belief that something is true without needing data. Science is the act of gathering data to form a belief. They are opposites.