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.

  • SpezBroughtMeHere@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Well, I believe in a Creator directly because of science. We aren’t a result of chaos that just happened to line up at precisely the right time. Let’s take the rules that govern the universe. Gravity is a constant. Science proves that. It didn’t magically happen. The laws of thermodynamics. The math is always correct and it was occurring well before anyone could articulate it. Same with biology. It takes 3500 calories to change one pound of weight, so many grams of protein to maintain muscle mass. I can keep going but the point is, God said it was created and science proves its not a happy random accident. So if that points to plausibility, what other things in the Bible can be plausible, even pointing to truth?

    • JCreazy@midwest.social
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      9 months ago

      This sounds like a whole lot of mental gymnastics to me to justify the logic. While I can’t explain how everything came to be, it also can’t be explained how God came to exist and until either one is proven, it makes far more sense that things have adapted over a billion of years instead of a single entity that there isn’t a single shred of evidence to exist. Religion just doesn’t seem logical to me.

      • SpezBroughtMeHere@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I could try to explain it better for you to understand if you’d like. There’s no mental gymnastics. Can you explain why if there’s no definitive source, what makes God not a plausible explanation? Given the scientific method of observation, what rules that out as a possibility?

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          We don’t have to rule it out, it is up to the person asserting it to provide evidence of it being true. I don’t have to disprove unicorns, I can demand that unicorn believers show me the data. You are reversing the burden of proof.

          In any case the problem of evil pretty much rules out any god you would actually want to follow. So while there might be some diest god out there it isn’t like it gives us anything. You are not going to pray to a being that isn’t listening and wouldn’t care if it heard.

    • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      The constants of the universe do not require an intelligent designer. Additionally religion depends on the supposed non-consistent behavior of existence. E.g. miracles.

      Really can’t have it both ways. Does the universe appear governed by laws? That means it has an intelligent creator. Does it appear governed by chance? Well that also requires an intelligent creator. The assertion can’t be tested and as such isn’t worth worrying about.

      • SpezBroughtMeHere@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        So where did gravity come from? Where did the laws of thermodynamics come from? What about the laws of motion? If you can’t definitively explain its origin, objectively why is God not a plausible answer?

        • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Really can’t have it both ways. Does the universe appear governed by laws? That means it has an intelligent creator. Does it appear governed by chance? Well that also requires an intelligent creator. The assertion can’t be tested and as such isn’t worth worrying about.

          You must have forgotten to read this part. I know because you decided to ignore it.

    • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      If the chaos had lined up a bit later, or a bit earlier, we might not exist. Everything might be a bit different, almost as if this slightly different universe was perfectly designed for the slightly different creatures living in it. Magic.

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        If we didn’t exist we wouldn’t be here to wonder why we didn’t. The miracle isn’t that we fit the universe we live in, the muscle would be a universe that we don’t fit in and yet here we are.

        • eatthecake@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Yes. My point was that if the universe were a little different then we’d also be a little different. It’s all a weird crazy miracle though. Anything existing at all, or nothing existing, all incomprehensible, like magic.