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.