The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser

Tag: Science Denial

  • My Evolving Understanding of Our Place in the Universe

    preaching about evolution

    I spent the first fifty years of my life in the Evangelical church. I was taught and later preached as a pastor young earth creationism. Parents, preachers, Sunday school teachers, and Bible college professors taught me the universe was 6,000 years old, created out of nothing by the triune God of the Bible in six literal 24 hour days. Most importantly, I was taught that the earth and its human inhabitants are the pinnacle of God’s creative work. In other words, we are s-p-e-c-i-a-l. Not the other animals on earth, just us. Further, I was taught that we humans had dominion and control of the earth.God is the owner of the earth and we are its caretakers.

    Sadly tens of millions of Americans believe the creation myths — yes, plural — recorded in Genesis 1-3. The blame for this rests solely on the shoulders on Evangelicals. and now, through subversive programs such as Lifewise Academy, public school students are being taught young earth creationism, including trips to the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter — Ken Ham’s monuments of ignorance.

    After I deconverted in 2008, it became clear to me that I didn’t know much of anything about science. My entire understanding of science was based on what I learned in high school biology and a college biology class without a lab or a qualified teacher. As a pastor, I believed that only science book I needed was the King James Bible. This led to me saying all sorts of absurd things about science — embarrassingly so. Fortunately, my congregant were as ignorant as I was about science, so we all shouted AMEN together when I mentioned the creative acts of God.

    I have spent the last twenty years educating myself not only about science, but also about logic and philosophy. Over time, reason, skepticism, and common sense delivered me from some of my ignorance, but I will admit that I still have a lot to learn.

    Science has taught me that the Evangelical worldview is false. The earth and its human dwellers are not the center of universe, nor are they unique. Special, we are not. We are itty-bitty people with itty-bitty brains on an itty-bitty planet in a vast, mostly unexplored universe. In other words, we are a planet of nobodies; people who will live and die, never to be remembered again. A harsh reality, to be sure — and why so many stay irrationally attached to religious faith — but knowing and understanding this can and does help us focus on the here and now. No Heaven. No Hell. No Purgatory. No afterlife. No second chances. This is it. What will we do with this life of ours? I, for one, want to live every day to its fullest. I suspect you do too. When I look at Voyager One’s pale blue dot, I am reminded of how lucky I am to be alive in this corner of the Milky Way.

    pale blue dot

    Dr. Carl Sagan said at the time,

    “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives… Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. (Google)

    I continue to be amazed as I observe the skies and biological world. What a wonderful, yet dangerous, world we live in. Beautiful, to be sure, but the universe will kill us if we aren’t careful. And even it we are careful, the universe will someday likely kill off the human race. Death and extinction await, not Heaven and the sweet-by-and-by. Again, a somber thought, but also a reminder that we only have one life and it will soon be past.

    Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

    Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

    You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

  • AI Critiques Dr. David Tee’s “Science”

    dr david tee

    I recently asked an AI engine to critique a recent science article by world renowned Evangelical scientist, Dr. David Tee. Here’s what it had to say. enjoy! 😉 (This, by the way, could be a critique of many creationist arguments.)

    Critique of Science and the Bible

    The article you provided, titled “Science & the Bible” from Theology & Archaeology, argues that science is a fallible, human-driven endeavor that should be secondary to the “inerrant” word of the Bible.

    While the article is written from a theological perspective, a scientific critique focuses on its representation of the scientific method, epistemology (how we know what we know), and its use of concordism (the attempt to find modern science in ancient texts).

    1. Misunderstanding of “Theory” and “Fallibility”

    The article argues that because science is “fallible” and changes over time, it is less reliable than religious text.

    • Scientific Critique: This characterizes a core strength of science as a weakness. Science is self-correcting. The fact that theories are updated when new evidence emerges (e.g., moving from Newtonian physics to Relativity) does not mean the previous science was “wrong” in a vacuum; it means it was an incomplete model that became more precise.
    • The Error: The article implies that “change” equals “unreliability,” whereas in science, the refusal to change in the face of evidence is what constitutes unreliability.

    2. False Equivalence of Evidence

    The author suggests that a “Biblical worldview” and a “Secular worldview” are simply two different but equal ways of looking at the same data.

    • Scientific Critique: Science relies on methodological naturalism. It requires hypotheses to be testable, falsifiable, and predictable.
    • The Error: A “Biblical worldview” as described in the article starts with a conclusion (the Bible is true) and filters data to fit it. Science starts with data and builds a conclusion. By treating “revealed truth” as a data point equal to empirical observation, the article departs from the scientific method entirely.

    3. Retroactive “Scientific Foreknowledge” (Concordism)

    The article claims the Bible contains “scientific facts” that were ahead of their time, such as the water cycle or the earth being a sphere.

    • Scientific Critique: This is often a result of exegesis bias. Many of the verses cited (like Job 26:7 or Isaiah 40:22) use poetic language that can be interpreted in multiple ways.
    • The Error: If these texts were truly “scientific,” they would provide predictive power (e.g., explaining the mechanics of evaporation rather than just mentioning clouds). Identifying “science” in the Bible after the science has already been discovered by secular means is a form of hindsight bias, not a validation of the text as a scientific document.

    4. Categorical Misclassification

    The article states, “The Bible is not a scientific book, but it does reference a variety of scientific facts.”

    • Scientific Critique: This is a rhetorical “have your cake and eat it too” strategy. By saying it’s not a science book, the author protects it from scientific scrutiny when it is demonstrably inaccurate (e.g., the order of creation in Genesis), but by claiming it contains “scientific facts,” they attempt to borrow the authority of science to bolster the text’s credibility.
    • The Error: From a scientific standpoint, an observation is only a “fact” if it can be verified independently of the source. The article asks the reader to verify the source (the Bible) using the facts, and then verify the facts using the source—a circular logic.

    Summary

    The article’s “science” is actually apologetics. It uses the language of science to argue for the supremacy of a specific religious interpretation. Scientifically, the article fails because it rejects falsifiability—the author explicitly states that the Bible cannot be wrong, which means no amount of evidence could ever change the conclusion. In science, if a theory cannot be proven wrong, it cannot be used to claim truth.

    Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

    Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

    You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.

  • Our Love Affair with Confident Ignorance and Stupidity Has Reached Awful New Heights

    climate science trump

    By David DeWitt, Ohio Capital Journal, Used with Permission

    Five years ago, I wrote about how the politics of stupidity and crankery in America was degrading us as a society and human beings.

    That was January 2020.

    Within months, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the U.S. It’s only gotten so much worse.

    For the remainder of 2020, we dealt with 385,676 deaths from the disease while then-President Trump lived in denial and misled the American people every day. He lied about its danger, how long it would last, treatments and prevention. He would bring in medical experts to speak during White House press conferences and then make stuff up himself out of nowhere and undermine everything that they said.

    It was horrifying. People were dying and losing loved ones and the president was spewing an endless stream of strange nonsense, drivel, and dangerous misinformation. Many millions of people believed everything he said without question.

    Then Trump lost the 2020 Election. He began lying about that too. Millions believed him again. Coward politicians rolled over for him. His lies exploded in the historic Jan. 6 attack on our nation’s Capitol.

    As the COVID-19 vaccine was rolled out to the public at-large in 2021, the anti-vaxxer movement went into overdrive. Currently vaccine hesitancy is near record highs, so the anti-vaxxer movement really made out, a grisly and telling cultural consequence of a pandemic that’s taken 1.2 million American lives.

    Regardless, objectively, the covid vaccine was a man-made miracle. Plagues throughout history have lasted up to 20 years or more. We had a vaccine in 11 months thanks to the brilliance of scientific research and modern medicine. It was incredible. It was a tremendous accomplishment of humankind by every historical standard, and people threw the most outrageous temper tantrums over it.

    It’s easy to get lost in modern comfort, but I wish more people would just take a few seconds sometimes to recognize that we live in extraordinary times. The fact that we get to take hot showers every day is a monumental luxury compared to the rest of human history.

    That we can communicate across the globe instantaneously is anthropologically astounding, if you compare the last 30 years of human history to the 300,000 years before it.

    Look around you right now, wherever you are: desks, tables, electronics, electricity, light bulbs, appliances, glassware, furniture, knick-knacks, artwork, paint, carpeting, buildings. All of those things require science, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, physics, logistics, expertise. Experts. Smart people. Smart people gave us all of this.

    Intelligence gave us every amazing thing that we see around us and take for granted. The collective education of humankind over millennia has brought us here.

    A whole galaxy of humans and human know-how has come together to give us these wild luxuries of daily existence that make the vast majority of us wealthier in health and technology and everyday human comfort than the richest kings and queens and emperors of history.

    And yet. We sneer at experts. We spit epithets like “academic elites” at professors dedicating their lives to pursuing discovery that benefits humankind. And we worship flashy internet hucksters selling lifestyle scams.

    We mock intelligence and glorify egomania and materialism. We crave spectacle and are voyeurs for anger, confrontation, and violence.

    We live in fantasy worlds where what we want to believe is true regardless of whether it is true, because what we want comes first no matter what, certainly no matter any facts, this decadence of mind and body only afforded to us by modernity’s remarkable luxury and technology.

    It is in these ways that I regard a very great many adults as simply overgrown children.

    Speaking of which, five years later, Donald Trump is president again. He has pardoned the 1,500 rioters who sacked the United States Congress to try to overthrow the last election for him.

    Trump also launched a broadside this week against America’s scientific, academic, and medical research efforts, pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization and hitting the National Institutes for Health with with “devastating” freezes on meetings, travel, communications.

    Trump’s cancellation of NIH grant review panels, as Forbes reports, includes the $7.1 billion annual budget for the National Cancer Institute: “of which more than $3 billion a year is allocated directly towards research for the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of cancer, which causes over 600,000 deaths in the U.S. every year.” The NCI supports 72 different cancer centers.

    Freezing national funding for cancer research is sadistic.

    It could also be devastating to America’s institutions of higher education.

    In Ohio, Republican politicians are piling on. This week they reintroduced a proposal to overhaul education at our colleges and universities.

    They seek to install a culture of fear and paranoia over subject matter among Ohio faculty, threatening their livelihoods and banning their ability to strike. They also seek to ban any diversity efforts on campuses as well as any diversity courses.

    The clear intent of the bill is to have a chilling effect on freedom of speech and expression, both explicit and implicit, which is an atrocious insult to the entire purpose of education and all of the ideas behind open inquiry in the pursuit of knowledge.

    Ohio higher education currently ranks No. 39 in America. Apparently that’s not bad enough for them.

    America’s love affair with swaggering ignorance and confident stupidity continues to reach awful new heights. The bill will come due. The piper will need to be paid. The damage will be extensive.

    Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.

    Your comments are welcome and appreciated. All first-time comments are moderated. Please read the commenting rules before commenting.

    You can email Bruce via the Contact Form.