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
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    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
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      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.