300 Creationist Lies

Creationists are liars. Here is a 16 part list containing over 300 such lies, along with a good sampling of distortion and sleight of hand, as exemplified by self-styled creationism evangelist, Kent Hovind. Hovind claims that "his fact-filled creation seminars are exciting and informative, causing even the most devout evolutionist to sit up and take notice!"

I sat up and took notice because Kent Hovind's most informative trait is that he is a pathological liar. The difficulty of refuting so many lies is why Hovind seems to be (at least in his own warped mind) successful in his public debates.

This creationist creates so much dust while pretending to arrange the planks of his platform, that his debate opponent cannot possibly clean it all up in the time allotted. Lies that are not addressed leave the impression that they are not lies. This is a tried and tested creationist stratagem. In this manner, creationism seems to have a solid oak floor. However, when we remove the rotted planks from Hovind's creationist vision, we can see there is nothing left, not even a dust mote.

I am not a scholar or a scientist, but I have challenged Kent Hovind to a debate on the Internet on several occasions. I have offered him choice of venue, even his own web site, and choice of topic. Hovind has refused. The reason is that his material is worthless when someone has the opportunity to really scrutinize it. On stage, no one ever gets this chance. I think I have proven conclusively that he dare not debate with someone who has the time to check out his lies and research a response, so I claim the debate by default.

All Hovind has ever done in response to my challenges is insult my intelligence - not a very Christian attitude. At the start of his debates, he distributes a flier warning his supporters in the audience to be aware of ad hominem attacks - that is, attacking the person rather than their material. This cheap and spineless hypocrite must be warning them of his own behavior. I have, therefore, no hesitation whatsoever in indulging in ad hominem ad lib, and calling him what he is.

He recently became obsessed with learning my identity no doubt so that fundies could locate me and begin a campaign of harassment. He has refused to trade any more emails until I tell him who I am and where I live! I will not let him dictate terms to me, and now that he sees he cannot control the situation, nor engage me as a clown in his circus of live debate, he has become a spoiled brat, sulking and refusing to play. I plan on sending copies of the present posting series to his email address to see if he is interested in attempting a rebuttal.

Now I offer a summary of Hovind's lies to everyone. They are not just his lies. Creationists plagiarize each other to a chronic and incestuous degree. They almost never offer references, and never check their so-called 'facts'. In my one-sided Internet 'debate' with Hovind from June '98 through January this year, I used material from his 1995 seminar (available via his web site at www.drdino.com) to represent his position. It is from this material that all these lies are taken.

Hovind opens his introduction with the claim that "He travels around the country speaking on creation, evolution, and dinosaurs over 700 times a year." I am not officially counting his introductory material in my list, but I suspect this is a lie. He cannot possibly speak on this topic almost twice a day, every day, every year.

Hovind's claim to be "one of the foremost authorities on Science and the Bible." is definitely a lie, which I have demonstrated in my previous postings. He does not know the Bible any better than he knows science, and his grasp of English grammar and spelling is appalling for anyone, let alone someone who pretends to a PhD. He claims that his seminars are 'fact-filled'. This is also a lie, unless you count the demonstrable fact that he is lying.

While researching for the later parts of the present series I discovered a FAQ located at:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-meritt/age.html#sun (written by Jim Meritt)

that I wish I had found last June! It is a devastating attack on creationism and would have helped me considerably in writing my own material. Please do read it. Note that all web site references quoted in the present series were valid as of 14/3/99.

Hovind claims the Bible is infallible, but this is clearly not the case. Proof of this can be found in many places. Here are a few pages that deal with Biblical contradiction and error:

http://www.webster.sk.ca/greenwich/bible-a.htm
http://www.infidels.org/org/ffrf/lfif/ [written by an ordained minister turned atheist]
http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/donald_morgan/

This covers Hovind's brief introduction, and we move on to chapter one. By the way, when I quote Hovind, I copy the quotes direct from his seminar, complete with all his errors, uncorrected. Occasionally I shall comment on these. He opens with four questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going when this life is finished? If the answer to the first question is not patently obvious, then you need serious medical attention. As is usual with creationists, the other three questions presuppose an answer that involves god.

Hovind: "Who am I? Well, if you believe in evolution, you are nothing important. You are just a bit of protoplasm that washed upon the beach a couple of million years ago."

Lie #1. In so cavalierly dismissing the case for evolution, Hovind doesn't even get his facts right. Evolution talks in scales of hundreds of millions of years, not 'a couple of million'. Hovind's sloppiness, poor scholarship, and inattention to detail would make the bulk of another posting series, so I will only touch on it from time to time. Let me just say this about Hovind's position: here he is claiming evolution turns us into unimportant animals, yet his very own religion insists that either we are slaves of god, or we will burn for eternity. This is somehow supposed to be respectful? I don't think so.

Biological evolution is a change in the gene pool of a population over time, and that's it! Any creationist who says differently is a liar, but creationists like to extend evolution into cosmology and other areas where it does not belong. They are sadly forced into caricaturing or otherwise misrepresenting those aspects of science with which they disagree, because they do not have the wherewithal to take them on honestly. Hovind is very active in this regard. This is why he stubbornly defines evolution as speciation, even though no evolutionist does so. Speciation is a byproduct of evolution and usually takes many generations to make itself known. Evolution of the gene pool, on the other hand, happens all the time.

Hovind: "Evolution is a religion. It is not science."

Lie #2. This is demonstrably wrong, but Hovind keeps on claiming it. Why? Let him explain himself:

Hovind: "Adolph Hitler said, If you tell a lie long enough, loud enough, and often enough, the people will believe it. The secret to get someone to believe a lie is constant repetition. Just tell it over, and over, and over again."

I guess Hovind thinks that if he keeps repeating over and over again that evolution is a religion, maybe someone will believe him. I seriously think the Hitler quote is another lie, but since Hovind offers no reference for his claim, I have no way to verify it short of reading everything ever written about Hitler.

Hovind: "Is the earth four and one half billion years old? No, it is not"

Lie #3, as evidenced by the best measures we have for dating the Earth and its subsequent development. These measures consist of, among other things, the geological record, deposition and erosion rates, plate tectonics, cosmology, and radiometric dating. They show consistently that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.

So is the moon. Every argument the creationists advance regarding distortions in dating methods caused by atmospheric radiocarbon variation (the moon has no atmosphere) and magnetic change (the moon has no magnetic field) is a lie. To the best of science's ability to measure, the dates of the Earth, Moon, and Sun all match, and none of them is suggestive of a 6,000 year age.

Hovind: "The First Law of Thermodynamics tells us that matter cannot be created or destroyed."

Lie #4. What the first law observes is that the total energy content of a closed system (the sum of kinetic, potential, and thermal energy) is constant. Hovind obviously derives his claim from this, but to state it so baldly is to be deceitful.

The problems with whining about these laws, as creationists incessantly do, are manifold. First of all, if science is so bad that it cannot be relied upon to apply the scientific method to the study of evolution, how on Earth can creationists rely on a law from another branch of science which uses that very same scientific method? Surely if evolution is suspect, then so is this law? If they are going to rely on this law, then how can they doubt evolution?

Hovind: "Since the world is here, there are only two choices. Somebody made it, or it made itself. If you can think of another, one please let me know."

Lie #5. There is another option, and the absent-minded Hovind mentions it in his appendix to this very series - perhaps the universe was always here in some form or another.

For Hovind to categorically state that there are only two options is a false dichotomy. We cannot know what happened way back when (not yet, anyway). All we can do - all science has ever done - is to look at the available evidence, test it, and say, "Well from all this it looks like this happened...." Why do creationists have such a problem with this?

Kent Hovind's seminars have to be the most monotonous creations ever devised by humankind. I am sure that on the retarded level he operates, the stories he tells are real humdingers, but for intelligent people with an ounce of imagination, staring at dust motes in a shaft of sunlight would be far more engrossing than Hovind at his best.

In chapter one, he tells trite and numbing folk tales. One of these turns around meeting a Berkeley professor on an airplane flight. We never learn who this professor is, or what their subject was. For all we know they could have been a professor of medieval Arabic, yet Hovind somehow thinks that if he asks questions about cosmology, this professor ought to have all the answers.

If Hovind wanted to ask cosmology questions, then why not pick on a professor of cosmology? Hovind is too chicken, that's why. He is bullying people out of school, people who are not able to properly defend themselves. Just like a school bully, when he meets someone who is not afraid of him and ready to take him on, he runs away crying.

Why Hovind adopted this professor as an example is clear: he gets to use a poor grasp of cosmology and substitute it for the truth. In this way it is much more easy for him to attack it than to take on what cosmology actually does say. I intend to use what Hovind claims the professor said as Hovind's actual beliefs. Let me take this opportunity to publicly challenge Hovind to reveal who this professor was so that I may contact them and get their side of the story.

Hovind: "...about 20 billion years ago all the dust in space started drawing together into this little bitty dot, and it was spinning real fast. Finally, it exploded out into space"

Lie #6. (Though there is more than one lie here). Hovind gets his age of the universe from an old school text book, because, first of all, modern high school textbooks are a stretch for him. He certainly cannot understand anything more advanced. He conveniently forgets that textbooks are not absolute law, and by their very nature are out of date. Good teachers will always update their students on the latest thinking, using the textbooks only as a lesson plan and guide. Secondly, Hovind collects old textbooks for the sole purpose of using their outdated material.

Current scientific thinking, based on the best available evidence, is that the universe is around 15 billion years old. Having said that, the real lie is in the description of how the 'Big Bang' began. Cosmology can not (at least at this time) make any solid comment on what existed - if anything - before the so-called Big Bang. From the best available evidence, the universe is expanding, suggesting that at one point, it must have been infinitesimally small. The science of this period, about one second after the Big Bang until the present, is quite well understood and makes sense, although, just as with evolutionary biology, there is still debate about details.

No one knows what happened prior to the Big Bang. Science has the honesty to say, "We don't know!" Hovind and the creationists do not. Instead, they say, "Science doesn't know, therefore god did it," as though the failure of the one automatically proves the other. Science is a work in progress (probably always will be!) and readily admits its limits. For the creationists to expect science to have all the answers now, is unrealistic and an example of creationism's childish mind set.

The 'godidit' explanation is real big with creationists even though throughout the history of scientific investigation of natural phenomena, it has been proven wrong time and time again. If we go solely on actual experience, 'godidit' will never be the explanation.

Hovind: "I teach physics. I know about the invert square law, particle attraction acceleration due to gravity"

Lie #7. _Invert_ square law? If he had not crowed, "I teach physics" immediately before it, I would have let this go, but any real physics teacher with an ounce of working gray matter would have called it the 'inverse square law'.

Hovind: "Who made the laws that govern this universe? Gravity, centrifugal force, inertia, all these laws that are governing these particles, who made the law?"

Hovind presupposes that someone made the laws just like the US congress makes laws. Natural laws, which apply to energy and matter (matter is really "frozen" energy) all came into effect when the universe arose. They are an integral part of the universe, indivisible from it. They came from the fabric of the universe which came from the 'Big Bang'. It is a common creationist ploy to ask leading questions, presupposing an answer in their favor. They ask 'who made it?' as opposed to 'how did it happen?' This is an example of their dishonest approach to science.

Hovind: "This is call the Conservation of Angular Momentum. One of the laws says in a frictionless environment, if pieces fly off a spinning object they tend to spin the same direction, because the outer part is already spinning faster than the inner part."

Lie #8. The law of conservation of angular moment merely observes that in a closed system of bodies, the sum of moments is constant. Hovind is trying to make the point that if the infinitesimal speck of the Big Bang were spinning (something he has presupposed), then everything we see in the universe now ought to be spinning in that same direction. This is, of course, what scientists call 'bullshit'.

First of all, at that time, the entire universe was ruled by quantum effects, not our present laws, so you cannot apply them back there.

Secondly, the universe has been evolving for fifteen billion years. For Hovind to pretend nothing ever occurred to affect whatever angular momentum bodies initially might have had is nonsense.

Thirdly, in those first few moments there were no atoms! There were only subatomic particles, and every one in the entire universe was confined in such a small space that it could not help but smash into every other particle thereby imparting motion that would completely obliterate any momentum it may have had previously.

Fourthly, subatomic particles have an innate 'spin' of their own, which is not going to be overcome by angular momentum.

Fifthly, unless you know the precise details of how a piece broke off a spinning object, you cannot possibly know what momentum it had when it actually flew free.

Sixthly, those particles on the edge of Hovind's so-called spinning universe were literally at the edge - there was nothing beyond them and no space for them to fly off into - how could they possibly fly free and carry angular momentum in the way Hovind pretends?

Seventhly, whatever spin a body has now is ultimately a result of its descent from gas clouds, explosions of stars, and interaction with other bodies. It is highly unlikely to reflect anything which happened at the very start.

Hovind: "The second law of thermodynamics says: everything tends toward disorder"

Lie #9. The law observes that the overall entropy of an isolated system never decreases. Entropy is effectively a measure of how near a system is to equilibrium.

If you run a bath of water and leave it alone, it will eventually become completely calm and flat. The water is in equilibrium - no part of it is more energetic than any other part. The bathtub is not an isolated system, however, and as soon as you get in there, two things will happen. First, you will shriek because the water is now cooled and will be trying to equalize its temperature with yours. Second, your kinetic energy will be added, setting the water in motion again.

In a way, the tendency of the universe toward complete equilibrium is far more in line with the eastern religious philosophy of nirvana than any western religion. Perhaps the ultimate increase in entropy is actually the greatest organization of all.

Creationists, in their tunnel-vision blind-rush to make a point, completely forget a few important things. First, Earth is not a closed system - it gets energy input from the sun. Second, there are things which do spontaneously go from the disordered to the complex - the occurrence of snowflakes, crystal growth, atomic fusion in the Sun, etc. If this is the case and does not seem to violate any laws, how can they pretend that evolution does?

Continued in part B

Budikka

From budikka@aol.com Mon
Mar 15 05:12:02 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part B 22K

Hovind: "For 30 or 40 years now our public school textbooks have been teaching our kids nothing other than that they are an animal"

Lie #10. It's sad that I even have to account for this sordid piece of dishonest creationist 'argument from the panic-button'. The truth is that evolution has been saying the precise opposite of what Hovind claims. We are human - we have evolved away from animals and become something unique.

Creationists are passionately fond of accusing evolutionary teaching of evil intent because it has promulgated communism, racism, abortion, Nazism, socialism, gay rights, women's liberation, environmentalism in the extreme, euthanasia, pornography, humanism, and the new age movement (I am not making this up - all of this is direct from Hovind's seminar).

What people choose to do with knowledge is entirely outside the control of that knowledge basis. Just as there are evil people who misuse Christianity, so there are those who misuse science. This is not the fault of science.

On the other hand, there is nothing more 'racist' than a religion which insists on a small group of chosen ones, and the rest of the planet can rot in hell. Who was more communist and socialist than Jesus? The Bible says nothing about abortion or slavery being wrong - why not? Was it not god who ordered us to take care of the planet? What is this if not environmentalism? The Bible is full of pornography, and nobody, not even Hitler, has 'euthanized' more people than god and his followers.

Hovind: "Our textbooks will tell you that we started off as an ameba, and we have progressed up through fish, amphibian, reptile, and finally up to modern man."

Lie #11. No evolutionist ever said this. Nothing that is alive today is any ancestor of ours, and for creationists to pretend otherwise is not only dishonest, it also reveals just how stupid they are. Everything that is alive today is just as much at the forefront of evolution as we are. What evolutionists have consistently said ever since Darwin himself, is that we have common ancestors with other living things. That's it!

Hovind: "The majority is frequently wrong. Do you know for many years they thought that the earth was in the middle of the solar system and that everything went around the earth?...For many years, they taught that heavy objects fall faster than lighter objects. Gallileo proved that teaching wrong"

This is not so much a lie as complete hypocrisy. It was Copernicus who put forward the truth, and he was reviled for it by the church. Gallilei also espoused that the Earth moved, and was placed under house arrest by the church for daring to dispute their view of the Bible. Instead of being sanctioned, he ought to have been sanctified. Evolutionary scientists are in this precise position today vis-a-vis the fundamentalists. The pathetic irony is that Hovind is too stupid to see it, and here he is, labeling evolutionists as heretics for disputing the Bible!

Hovind: "People always ask, Where did Cain get his wife? He married his sister. Calm down! In the first place, there was no other choice."

Lie #12. This is where Hovind shows his ignorance of the Bible and actually contradicts things he says elsewhere in this seminar. The Bible does not say there were no other people. The Bible actually has two creation stories, distinct and independent, according to Biblical scholars, but they say similar things. They are contained in Gen 1 and 2.

Gen 2 is the only story that mentions one man and one woman. The previous story in Gen 1 (and if we are to trust Bible chronology, this one must have taken place first), specifically says in verse 27: "So god created man in his own image...male and female created he them."

According to Isaac Asimov's Guide to the Bible, the Hebrew word used in this description is 'adam' - a word akin to our word, 'mankind'. The Hebrew word for man in the singular was 'ish.' This story is therefore about the creation of 'humans', not 'a man'. Clearly if god had created humans prior to creating 'Adam,' then Adam's children had no need whatsoever to follow Hovind's sick scheme of marrying their sisters.

Hovind: "In the second place, there would not be a problem. There was no genetic load, and you wouldnt have deformed children, because both genetic gene pools were pure"

This is not so much a lie as a complete misdirection. There was no such thing as 'both' genetic gene pools - Eve was supposedly created from Adam and was, therefore a clone. Adam married himself! If Cain did marry his sister, he was also marrying Adam, genetically speaking. See what kind of knots creationism will tie you up in?

If Hovind is right, and god created all of this perfectly, and there is no 'evolution', where did the genetic variation come from that we see in humans today? To suggest that we all descended, in a mere 6,000 years, from one single genome calls for a rate of evolutionary mutation that is far in excess of anything an evolutionist would dare theorize about.

Hovind: "It wasnt so bad to marry his own sister...I could agree with that for one or two generations. It happens in the animal world all of the time with very little consequences"

Lie #13. Unless Hovind can cite quality sources for this claim in genetically complex animals, then I have to nail this down as a lie. I am unaware of any such widespread behavior in animals that are anywhere near akin to humans. It certainly is not the case in chimpanzees, which are undeniably our closest living genetic relatives.

Just where does Hovind imagine incest taboos came from if not because we evolved from animals which have them? According to Hovind's warped and sick mind, it was just fine to marry your sister, so there ought to be no such taboos anywhere in the world! How would they begin to develop in only 6,000 years if they were never there to begin with? They were apparently not in place around 4,000 years ago either, judged by the story of Lot. Hovind is so very fond of citing atheism and evolution as the source of all the world's evils, yet here he is with his Bible, espousing incest!

Hovind: "About 4,400 years ago there was a flood that destroyed the world, and eight people survived. Starting from eight people, you could easily generate a population of 6 billion in 4,400 years."

Lie #14. Sure you could - if you completely ignore the death tolls that we know of in recorded history, and nobody did anything but have sex and raise perfectly healthy babies. How do you suppose the legend of the four horsemen of the apocalypse ever began if people were not already familiar with the war, plague and famine they represent?

According to Carl Sagan. the world population around the time of Jesus was 250 million. Just how did that arise in 1600 years from a tiny gene pool of only eight people, and leave the diverse genetic evidence we see today? Once again, even the creationists own explanations demand genetic evolution!

Hovind: "The sun is burning! How many of you knew that already? As the sun burns, the sun is shrinking. Boyle Observatory in England has been keeping careful records of the suns diameter for 300 years. It oscillates a little bit, but the general trend is that the sun is shrinking 5 feet every hour."

Lie #15. The sun is in no way, shape, or form 'burning'. It is undergoing nuclear fusion.

I wrote to David Hathaway, a scientist who works for NASA. He said that if the sun had been shrinking at the rate Hovind claims, ancient reports of solar eclipses would not have described them the way they did. The sun would have been significantly larger and descriptions of the eclipse would have made this obvious.

I wrote Tim Brown, an authority on solar activity at the High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado. He had never heard of Boyle Observatory (neither have I, neither has the Internet), but he guessed that Hovind was referring to the solar transit measurements made at the Royal Greenwich Observatory between 1836 and 1953 (so Hovind is only 170 years out).

They thought that the Sun was shrinking at a rate of about 2 arc seconds per century, which works out to about 5.5 feet per hour. In the usual scientific fashion, others spent some considerable time investigating this, and by the early 1980s, nobody believed that the Sun was shrinking, certainly not at the rate claimed, and possibly not at all. The best of the modern measurements, although conducted over a time span that did not allow great precision, showed the same thing. Hovind has precisely the same access to this information that I do. Why did he dishonestly withhold it?

Hovind: "Astronomers guess that comets only last about 10,000 years and then they break apart. Now, that brings up a very good question. Why do we still have comets? They should all be gone!"

Lie #16. It does indeed bring up a very good question! Why is Hovind so intent on accepting the astronomer's 'guess' here, but will not accept their proven facts when such facts disagree with his philosophy? Can you say, "Inconsistency"?

Has Hovind never heard of the Oort Cloud? Whether he believes it exists or not is immaterial. Academic honesty if he had any, would compel him to reveal it. Jan Hendrik Oort was a Dutch astronomer who discovered that the Milky Way rotates. It was he who proposed in 1950 that a cloud of comet material surrounds the solar system. This is where comets come from. Yes, they do die out, but new ones are dropping in on us all the time.

Hovind: "All of the ancient astronomers said that Sirius was a red star. Today it is a white dwarf."

Lie #17. I shall ignore the fact of Hovind's ignorance that white dwarfs actually do come from red stars and get Sirius. Sirius (from the Greek word Seirios, which means 'scorching'), also known as the Dog Star, is the brightest star in the night sky. It is almost nine light years away and is found in the constellation Canis Major (the dog chasing the rabbit under Orion's feet).

It is a binary star, a very common combination, where two stars orbit each other. Sirius A is a class A star about twice as hot on the surface as the sun, with an absolute magnitude of +1.42, Sirius B is a white dwarf with an absolute magnitude of +11.2. The higher values of magnitude are actually dimmer, and Sirius B is about 200 times dimmer than Sirius A. Rest assured that is not as dim as Kent Hovind, but it is why the ancients thought there was only one bright star and no dwarf - they couldn't see it in the glare from Sirius A.

Hovind (in an attempt to claim the planets ought to be cooler if they are as old as cosmology would have them): "If we walked into a room and found a cup of coffee on the table that was boiling hot, I would say, Dont touch that...Its so hot, yet it has been sitting there for 4,000 years. Dont you think that is a little far fetched? The planets are not billions of years old."

Lie #18. I know he can lie better than this! Apparently he's suggesting that planets cool by evaporation and cannot be old or they would also be cold. Well, I have news for Hovind - a planet is not a cup of coffee, and it is a whole lot bigger.

The mechanics of planetary heating and cooling are not a simple matter and I do not pretend to be an expert, but I do know that the heat inside this planet is not generated from the fact that the Earth was made from boiling water. For Hovind to present this example after calling himself a science teacher and proudly sporting his bargain-basement PhD is truly pathetic.

The Earth has, in its interior, an iron-nickel core turning in somewhat molten rock/metal (sounds musical doesn't it?). As I understand it, it is this loose association which generates and is responsible for changes in Earth's magnetic field. It is hot because there is radioactive decay in the Earth's interior (and perhaps not a little friction!) which generates heat and has prevented the Earth from cooling as fast as it would have if there were no heat source. When that radiation is dissipated, rest assured the Earth will cool.

Hovind: "Saturns rings are still expanding, and they are not billions of years old. They are still separating the particles by the Pointing Robertson Effect. They are not billions of years old."

Lie #19. This 'effect' is called Poynting-Robertson, and all it refers to is the fact that the very smallest motes of dust in Saturn's rings are disturbed by sunlight. Because they are so small, this sunlight can have the effect of slowing the particles down sufficiently that they can no longer stay in orbit, and they fall onto Saturn. How Hovind imagines this betrays claims of a great age for Saturn is beyond me, especially since it occurs to me that sunlight may just as well hit particles on their leading edge, thereby slowing them, as it may on their trailing edge, thereby speeding them up.

Hovind: "We are slowly losing the moon a couple of inches a year...A couple of thousand years ago that wouldnt make a big difference...If you bring the moon back in a couple of million years ago, the tides would have been so high that it would have drowned everything on earth twice a day."

Lie #20. The actual figure is 3.8cm per year, or something less than 1.5 inches, so let's say the moon is moving one foot every eight years. Now Hovind is talking about 'a couple of million years' ago. Does he mean two, or 1.5? We don't know since he is so sloppy with his 'couples'. Let's call it ten million, to be safe.

Ten million years ago, the moon, assuming its departure rate is constant, would have been closer to the Earth by 10 million feet divided by eight, or 1.25 million feet. There are 5,280 feet in a mile, so divide these up and we find that the moon would have been 237 miles closer, ten million years ago.

Does Hovind have any idea whatsoever as to how far away the moon is now? It is almost 239,000 miles away, thus 237 miles is less than a tenth of one percent. I will leave it to Hovind to demonstrate scientifically how it is that such a tiny percentage change in proximity would destroy all life on Earth.

Hovind: "In 1954, Isaac Asimov calculated that there would be at least 54 feet of dust on the moon because the moon is billions of years old. They calculated the accumulation rate to be 1 inch of dust every 10,000 years"

Lie #21. Why is Hovind using information from a science writer in 1954? Why isn't he using the more recent, corrected information which was available long before Armstrong stepped onto the moon? In "Creation/Evolution," Issue XIV, published in 1984 by the National Center for Science Education Steven Shore says:

"In 1965, a conference was held on the nature of the lunar surface. The basic conclusion of this conference was that both from the optical properties of the scattering of sunlight observed from the Earth, and from the early Ranger photographs, there was no evidence for an extensive dust layer [on the moon]."

You cannot get a better defense against creationist lies than Dave Matson's material (except for mine, of course!). It is from this that I took this quote. Matson's material is requisite reading, and can be found in the talk.origins archives at www.talkorigins.org.

The 54 feet of lunar dust was quoted by creationist Henry Morris through a deliberate misinterpretation of a study published in 1960. The study was not able to determine precisely how much dust accumulates, but gave a figure of 15 million tons per year as an upper limit. Naturally, the creationists deceitfully pounced on this maximum estimate.

Hovind: "They dont know the age of the moon by carbon dating it, or by potassium argon dating."

Lie #22 This is actually two lies. Radiocarbon dating, when properly understood and expertly used is very accurate and independently verifiable. To suggest otherwise is simply a lie. The second lie is one Hovind frequently uses - his suggestion that scientists use radiocarbon dating to determine the age of non-organic or very ancient material. Radiocarbon dating is no good for materials over the age of around 50,000 years (or younger than about 500 years for that matter), and is really no good for dating materials at all unless they were once part of a living thing. Obviously nothing on the moon was ever part of a living thing, and since the moon is as old as the Earth, no real scientist would ever pretend they could date it with carbon dating techniques.

Hovind: "Most people do not realize that every two and one half years we leap a second, because the earth is slowing down... If the earth is slowing down...that means that it used to be going faster...The winds were 5,000 mph from the Coriolis Effect...The days and nights were about 20 minutes each."

Lie #23. According to William Thwaites and Awbrey Frank (as quoted by Dave Matson, from Creation/Evolution, Issue IX - 1982), the earth's rotation is slowing down 0.005 seconds per year per year (it is a deceleration, remember), so not only is Hovind completely adrift with the actual figure, he is also wrong to assume the figure is not changing, and therefore not make it clear that this is a deceleration.

Matson demonstrates that 370 million years ago, this figure would give us a day slightly less than 23 hours long. He also reveals that a study of rugose corals from the Devonian (370 million years ago), by John Wells of Cornell University in 1963, indicated that the year then had 400 days of about 22 hours each. In other words, the figure we have for the slowing rate of the Earth's rotation, and scientific evidence from corals thought to have lived 370 million years ago are in close agreement as to the length of the day back then.

Hovind: "The continents are eroding into the sea...At the present erosion rate, they will be gone in 14 million years"

Lie #24. The lie is in the fact that continents are not static, unchanging things - as Hovind should realize given that he is arguing that very point right here. As well as eroding down, they are being raised up by plate collisions (part of plate tectonics) and the movement of magma beneath the Earth's crust. Even assuming the erosion rate is fixed (a very foolish assumption), it means nothing without considering elevation rates.

Hovind: "The Mississippi River is dropping sediments at the rate of 80,000 tons per hour into the New Orleans Delta....If the world is millions of years old, why isnt the whole Gulf of New Mexico filled in with mud by now? It should be all full of mud."

Lie #25. According to Dave Matson, Hovind stole this, as well as his previous argument, from creationist Stewart Nevins. I do not intend to go into detail about this. Instead, I refer you to Matson's chock full o' detail FAQ on the talk.origins web site. Deposits in the Mississippi Delta measure 7 miles thick - deeper than Hovind's flood!

Once again, all Hovind demonstrates here is his complete, total, utter, absolute, and all-around inability to actually think. Yes, science says the Earth is several billion years old, but I challenge Hovind (or any creationist) to show me where science has said that the Mississippi river has been flowing its present course throughout the whole 4.5 billion years of earth's existence! Has he forgotten that just 10,000 years ago, virtually the whole of North America was buried under ice? Does he imagine that science claims that the Mississippi ran its course, totally unaffected by this? Science has never said any such thing.

Hovind: "About 4,400 years ago there was a flood. In that flood, many plants, animals, and people drowned. They were buried under the mud and rocks. After the rocks, the mud got 3 or 4, and sometimes maybe even 10 thousand feet thick on top of them."

Lie #26. Hovind is lying about his own material here! If you argue that this worldwide flood must have been 30,000 feet deep to cover Everest, he weasels out of it by claiming if the Earth were smooth, the seas would cover everything to a depth of 8,000 feet deep. He claims Everest has only risen to its present height because it was forced up there by the weight of retreating water pressing on the ocean beds.

Here, he defeats his own argument by claiming that this 8,000 foot flood left mud piles 10,000 feet high! I challenge him or any creationist to create a detailed flood scenario with the science to back it up, and testable predictions. I am particularly interested in learning of the precise mechanism by which an 8,000 foot flood, spread evenly on a smooth Earth, suddenly slipped away into deep oceans, raising mountains in the process. I challenge him, or any creationist to build an ark according to Biblical direction and try to survive afloat on it for over a year. I challenge him, in light of his childish hydrologic sorting argument, to explain how it was that very dense rocks landed on top of less dense living things, burying them.

Hovind: "About 4,400 years ago there was a flood that destroyed the world. Therefore, to find a tree that is 4,300 years old fits fine with my theory"

Lie #27. Is it just coincident that Hovind lies about the age of the tree to make it come in just under his flood date? According to the Guinness Book of Records, the oldest known tree was a Bristlecone Pine found on the northeast face of Wheeler Ridge on the Sierra Nevada in California, and dated to 4,900 years old. Besides, who ever said that trees can survive indefinitely?

Hovind: "...Niagara Falls causes rocks to break off the edge and it moves back...At 5 feet a year, you can move about 12 miles in about 10,000 years...If the world is millions of years old, why hasnt Niagara Falls eroded all the way back up into Lake Erie...?"

Lie #28. Only Hovind and his ilk from ICR believe that science claims all large rivers have been flowing continuously for close to 4.5 billion years. The Niagara falls began after the last ice age; they have only been retreating for 10,000 years! Hovind glosses over his real problem here which is that, if the river has been retreating for 10,000 years, what happened to his 6,000 year old Earth? What happened to his 4,400 year old flood?

Continued in part C

Budikka

From budikka@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:12:37 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part C 16K

Hovind: "In the first chapter, scientific evidence was presented that proves this world is not billions of years old."

Lie #29. Lies are not proof and I have already listed 28 of them. These were not matters of opinion, but serious matters: out and out lies about things which a so-called PhD and science teacher should know the truth about, or could readily find out, as I did.

Hovind: "There are those that would like every child to believe that this world is billions of years old -- and it is not."

Lie #30.

Hovind: "They want children to believe that dinosaurs lived millions of year ago -- and they did not."

Lie #31.

Hovind: "On the back of my business card, there is a long-standing offer of $10,000 for anyone that can present scientific evidence proving evolution."

Lie #32. He won't pay - he cannot. When I challenged him, all he did was come up with excuses, not refutations of my material. I suspect Hovind's evolutionary descent was from a weasel. His stance is that no one has ever taken up his offer because evolution is not a science and cannot be proven. Not only is this a lie, his offer is a lie. He is the judge and jury over whether your evidence proves evolution. Naturally, in his eyes, it never will. That's why his money is safe and he can crow that no one has ever claimed it. The offer is a fraud.

I pursued this offer not to get $10,000 (I knew for a fact that he was never going to pay), but to demonstrate that creationists are the exception to evolution - they have never evolved beyond the level of snakes. The arrangement was that Hovind would submit my evidence to a panel of independent judges of his choosing. I requested that he tell me of whom this panel consisted, so I could verify their qualifications. I am still waiting, several months later.

I have heard nothing from any supposed panel member, and am forced to conclude that even this offer was a lie. Only one person responded other than Hovind. He (I assume it was male) refused to properly address the material and offered no evidence of his qualifications. All he did was insist on preaching, thereby proving that this was one of Hovind's cronies and not an independent judge. After I hit him up with a bunch of Kent Hovind's lies, this respondent has never written me again. This makes twice that this same thing has happened with Hovind's supporters.

Hovind: "Evolution is a religion: nothing more, nothing less! Evolution is just something people prefer to believe because of their life style."

Lie #33. No, that's religion! With his lie, Hovind insults millions, worldwide, who happen to hold beliefs different from him. He insults thousands of Christians who, regardless of whether one accepts their belief system or not, lead basically good lives. What Hovind is trying to do here is set everyone up for later chapters in his seminar material, where he will equate acceptance of evolution with an open door for evil.

Hovind: "Dinosaurs were nothing more than giant lizards in the garden of Eden. Dinosaurs lived with Adam and Eve."

Lie #34. There is no evidence whatsoever in the fossil record for dinosaurs alive a mere 4,000 years ago, or for dinosaurs cohabiting with humans, the majority of mammals or the majority of birds at any time in history. Dinosaurs are a specific group of (once-) living things. To call them lizards is to misrepresent them.

Hovind: "Did Noah have dinosaurs on the ark? Certainly! You ask, Dinosaurs on the ark? The Bible says that he had seven of every clean kind, two of every common kind."

Lie #35. As I and many others have demonstrated conclusively, there was no such thing as Noah's ark, at least when defined as something that could carry representatives of every species together with specialized food and fresh water for all of them, for over a year in a worldwide flood. There is no way eight people could begin to provide the necessary care for these animals, even if they could have caught them in the first place. I publicly challenge Hovind, personally, here and now (or any creationist), to:

1. Define 'kind'. No creationist has ever dared, because they know that they will be destroyed by the cladists and taxonomists when they do.

2. Explain and demonstrate scientifically, what mechanism it is that enables myriad variation within a 'kind', but stops that mechanism dead, unable to go further, when it runs up against the 'kind' barrier. There is no mechanism, and they know it.

3. Explain, scientifically, if chimpanzees do not share a common ancestor with humans, but animals can vary within a kind, how it is that we humans are closer to chimpanzees genetically, than rats are to mice, than the Indian elephant is to the African elephant, than the red vireo bird is to the white vireo bird.

4. Explain, in scientific detail how all the animals managed to get to the ark - and then away from it in a period of 4,000 years since the flood, to the places they now occupy.

5. Explain, in scientific detail, how it was that a worldwide raging flood managed to neatly sort out all animal species, without a single exception, into differing rock strata such that not a single animal thought by science to be many millions of years old and extinct, was mixed in with modern animals and vice versa. Explain how the most primitive animals are always in the lowest layers and how hydrologic sorting failed to grade the animals by density.

6. Given their psychotic obsession with the rarity of evolutionary mutation, explain in scientific detail how it was that these few 'kinds' on the ark managed to mutate at an evolutionary rate far in excess of anything any true evolutionist would dare postulate. Explain just how these few 'kinds' managed to populate the world with literally hundreds of thousands of distinct species in 4,000 years. When they have done that, they need to explain by what mechanism this fantastical rate of evolution suddenly halted in modern times that we do not see wholesale evolutionary changes with such dramatic rapidity nowadays.

If Hovind explains this to my satisfaction, I'll pay _him_ $10,000. (In other words, I'll let him keep the $10,000 he owes me).

Hovind: "The ark was pretty big."

Not as big as Hovind's mouth, I'll warrant.

Hovind: "Americas leading systematic taxonomists list the number of species to be 3,500 mammals"

Lie #36. There are 4,600 so far discovered.

Hovind: "8,600 birds"

Lie #37. There are over 10,000 species of birds (including those known to have become extinct since humans started molesting the planet).

Hovind: "5,500 reptiles and amphibians"

Lie #38. There are 2,500 species of snake, 2,500 species of lizard, nearly 250 species of turtle, 22 species of crocodilian, and two species of tuatara. In addition to this are 4,400 amphibians. That seems to total out well in excess of 9,000.

Hovind: "and 25,500 worms"

Lie #39. Since when are worms insects? Notice how he carefully excludes insects! There are over 875,000 species of arthropods (insects, crustaceans and spiders), and those are just the ones so far discovered. Actually, almost a third of these are beetles. Any worms are numbered in addition to this figure. If you want to be a creationist, then you need to abandon humanity as the reason for the universe. Nematode worms, in terms of biomass, are undoubtedly the chosen ones.

Clearly Hovind's total of 43,100 is an outrageous lie. Obviously, he has to lie, because it is the only way to pretend that there was a worldwide flood and an ark which carried samples of everything to safety. Note that neither his nor my figures include any of the countless species that have become extinct since life began, all of which had to have been represented on the ark.

Hovind: "The overall average size of the animals was about the size of a sheep. They would easily fit into 150 box cars; so you see, they had plenty of room.

Ahem. Need I say it? Okay, Lie #40. By what method did he determine that everything can be treated like a sheep? I know it is standard Christian practice, but there are practical limits. How did Hovind decide that everything averages out to sheep size? By what authority does he determine that no animal needs better treatment or special consideration? Does he imagine animals could thrive for a year in a dark, dank, smelly, unstable and confined space with no room to exercise?

Hovind has obviously never acquainted himself with the history of zoos, where a simple study will reveal the appalling death rates of animals, even today (just check back in the news to find out how many animals perished when Disney, which made its fortune on cute animals, began its latest wild kingdom - and they had experts to take care of them). Animals, taken from their natural home, die early and often ugly deaths. With few exceptions, they are not 'designed' to be kept in captivity, whether they were designed by a god or by evolution. They die - especially the young ones. Hovind is a liar to even pretend you could treat all animals like sheep and keep them penned up in a dark, unstable, confined space for over a year. The carnage would have been appalling, not to mention the smell.

Hovind: "Twelve miles from Mt. Ararat, in another one of the mountains of Ararat, is a strange boat-shaped structure. The Bible says that the ark landed on the mountains of Ararat (plural) so it might be on a different mountain or valley. There is a strange boat-shaped structure pictured in a book by Ron Wyatt. Mr. Wyatt says that the boat-shaped object is Noahs ark. It is 515 feet long"

Lie #41. That is no boat, it is a natural rock feature. Hovind gives the length, which is completely different from the Biblical length in the inerrant Bible - so why even mention this? Does he want that to be the ark, thereby 'proving' (so he believes) his flood story and disproving the inerrancy of the Bible, or does he want the Bible to be exact, and that feature to be simply a rock formation? While he is at it, he might explain how it is that after a year afloat on a raging sea, Noah managed to land his unsteerable ark just a few miles from where he left....

Hovind: "Dinosaurs lived with man all along."

Lie #42. If this is the case, why is there not one - not one single instance - of human bones found with dinosaur bones? Why is there no evidence whatsoever of any dinosaur having been killed by humans?

Hovind: "After the flood, the climate changed which caused the dinosaurs to not grow as big and to not live as long."

Lie #43. Where is Hovind's climactic and geological evidence for this? This was only 4,000 years ago - evidence of it should be abundant. Let him show where the trend to smaller dinosaurs is, in the fossil record of 4,000 years ago. Let him do the science to show why it was, and how it was, that dinosaurs grew smaller, if there is no beneficial mutation and no evolution.

Hovind: "In 1572, an Italian scientist, Ulysses Aldravondus, documented the entire account of the killing of a dinosaur. He even had the dead body mounted for a museum....It was apparently a small tanystropheus dinosaur."

I publicly challenge Hovind to produce his evidence or references for this. Until then I shall call it Lie #44, and write it off as a creationist exaggeration of some perfectly ordinary creature that creationists like to pretend was a dinosaur in order to further their agenda.

Hovind: "Columbus had a hard time getting a crew because they were afraid of sea monsters."

Lie #45. Hovind offers no evidence, because he has none. From my reading, the only thing the crew were afraid of was that Columbus' stupidity would get them killed. They were reluctant to sign on only until a local patron, Martin Pinzon, signed up to captain one of the ships, then there was no problem at all getting crew.

Hovind: "The winds and currents are contrary and the seaweed in the Sargasso Sea is too thick. They just avoid those areas and sail around them."

Lie #46. Hovind has bought into the myth of the Sargasso Sea. Yes, it is a calmed area (which gives the lie to his claim of winds!), and there is a lot of seaweed, but it is not a living thing, waiting to devour unwary sailors, and no problem at all to powered boats.

Hovind: "In 1848, Captain Peter MQuhae of the H.M.S. Deadalus, and his crew, watched a sixty-foot sea monster swim directly under their boat. The sailors on board said, Captain, please dont say anything about this. Dont write it in the log book for sure because we are going to get laughed at for the rest of our lives. If we go back to port and tell them that we saw a dinosaur, they are going to laugh at us."

Lie #47. The word, 'dinosaur' was coined by Sir Richard Owen in 1842, to describe a specific type of prehistoric reptile. Prehistoric marine reptiles are not dinosaurs, neither are the airborne variety. It is highly unlikely, in my opinion, that a mere six years after Owen coined the word, uneducated sailors would be fretting over what was obviously some kind of large fish or whale, and calling it a dinosaur. Besides, if they were so insistent that the captain tell no one - how do we know it happened?

Hovind: "However, there are lots of stories of giant critters in the sea. There are stories of octopus pulling ships under water. There are many stories like that."

Lie #48. And it will stay a lie until and unless Hovind, or any creationist, offers some documentation for these "many stories."

Hovind: "You say, Wait a minute! The Guinness Book of World Records states that the largest octopus in the world was 36 feet, which was caught off the coast of Kodiak, Alaska. I have also read Guinness, but they did not perform their research very well this time. There have been bigger octopuses. The one shown in figure 2-10 washed up on the beach in St. Augustine, Florida in 1896. It was 200 feet across and weighed five tons."

Lie #49. The 1986 Guinness Book of Records (published ten years before Hovind's seminar) states clearly that that the octopus from Puget sound was 23 feet across and it weighed 118 pounds. Contrary to Hovind's second lie here, Guinness also mentions the creature from St. Augustine, and says that the creature is thought to have been a large fish or whale.

Hovind: "You see, whales like to eat octopus. Thats one of their most favorite things to eat."

Lie #50. Baleen whales do not eat octopus or any other large creature. They eat krill. Toothed whales eat squid, but in neither reference I checked, could I find reference to octopus except for Baird's beaked whale, where it was mentioned among other food items.

Hovind: "Did it ever occur to you that nothing ever occurred to God? Think on that one for a while. Stuff occurs to me all the time. I say, Wow, I never thought of that before. God never has that experience...He already knows. He knows it all."

Lie #51. God does not know it all. He had no idea where Adam and Eve were hiding in the Garden after eating of the tree - he had to yell at them to come out. God doesn't know it all He had to come down from heaven to see what the builders of the Tower of Babel were up to. He doesn't know as much as you or me. We know what it is like to give in to temptation. Not just to be tempted, but to actually succumb. If god doesn't know this, he isn't as knowledgeable as we are, or if he does know this, he is no more righteous than we are. You cannot have it both ways.

Hovind: "I believe behemoth was a brontosaurus."

Lie #52. It was not. Hovind's weasely comment about it moving its tail like a cedar, implying that the tail was huge, is nonsense. My opinion is that this reference relates to the tail swaying like a cedar, not being as big as a cedar. I challenge Hovind to prove me wrong.

Hovind: "Behemoth lived under the trees in the swamp.'

Yep, it was a hippo.

Hovind: "If you feel your fingers, you will find that you have different bones in there called flanges.

Lie #53. These bones are called phalanges. There are fourteen in each hand and foot. A real science teacher would know this name. Any PhD who didn't earn his PhD from a diploma-mill would know this name. Hovind is too stupid to know, too lazy to check.

Continued in part D

Budikka

From budikka@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:13:09 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part D 18K

Hovind: "In 1880, Belgium took over the Congo in Africa, which included this big swamp, known as the Belgium Congo."

Lie #54. It was in 1908 that Belgium annexed Congo Free State in response to slave abuses and it became known as the Belgian Congo. Congo Free State was instituted in 1884, so Hovind is wrong on both counts. There was no swamp called the 'Belgium Congo'.

Hovind: "...in 1980, Dr. Roy Mackal, a very famous micro biologist at the University of Chicago and a strong believer in evolution, decided that he was going to go and check it out."

If microbiologist (one word) means someone who studies microscopic life forms, is a micro biologist (two words) a really small biologist? Either way, Hovind sets up Mackal as a strong believer in evolution and tries to pretend that, somehow, even if dinosaurs were found in deepest, darkest Africa, it would totally destroy the theory of evolution. Hovind is wrong yet again.

Hovind: "He calculated that the mosquitoes landed on them at the rate of about a 1,000 per hour the whole time that they were there. It was a relentless attack of blood-thirsty mosquitoes. In spite of all the difficulties, they stayed there for six weeks."

And yet they still had blood left. I'm going to call this a pathetic exaggeration, rather than an out-and-out lie, but it is a close call.

Hovind: "The flood formed all of the fossils. The reason there are layers to them is due to hydrologic sorting."

Lie #55. This is definitely a lie until and unless Hovind and his ilk can demonstrate scientifically, that this kind of sorting is not only possible, but the norm, and show evidence that it actually happened.

Hovind: "Animals with similar density are buried together. Birds are frequently found on top not because birds evolved last, but because birds were the last ones to drown in the flood."

Lie #56. Animals of similar density are found widely dispersed throughout the fossil record and animals of different densities are found together.. Not a single pterosaur has ever been found up there with the birds. Why is this? I'll tell you why. Hovind is lying.

Hovind: "Loch Ness is about twenty-four to twenty-five miles long, and about one mile wide. It is a long skinny lake in the mountains of Scotland, and because it is in the mountains, it is a very deep lake. Its in between two mountain ranges and is up to 1,000 feet deep in some places."

Lie #57. The greatest depth of Loch Ness is 754 feet.

In 1933, they cut a groove along the side of the mountain to put in a road....Before the roadway was put in, if you wanted to see Lock Ness, you had to travel up the river seven miles, and then go into Loch Ness, and then twenty-five miles by boat."

Lie #58. 'Lock' Ness? Well it does have a quay.... There was already a road on the south side that had existed for years. My reference? Myself - I've been there.

Hovind: "Now look! If 11,000 people claim that they have seen something, I would say that there is something to what they are seeing."

Is this from the same hypocritical moron who claimed that majority opinion doesn't prove anything? Here are his exact words from chapter one of this very seminar: "In the first place, everybody doesnt believe that. In the second place, even if they did, it wouldnt make it right. Majority does not make it right! The majority is frequently wrong."

Hovind: "...an underwater picture was shown of the flipper of the animal. It was estimated that the flipper was six feet long."

Lie #59. The so-called flipper picture is always shown 'computer enhanced'. The actual original version of the picture shows nothing even remotely like a flipper.

Hovind: "That six-foot flipper (figure 2-25) was attached to something pretty big. Here is a picture (figure 2-26) with its mouth open."

If that's the one I am thinking of, it looks exactly like...a log.

Hovind: "A Japanese fishing boat caught one in 1977. They caught a dinosaur? Figure 2-27 is a picture of a rotting plesiosaurus carcass."

Lie #60. This was a whale carcass. All carcasses of rotting sea monsters are actually whale carcasses - at least the ones that have been investigated are, but hey, who knows? I guess all the real rotting dinosaur carcasses simply are not got to in time! It's just like all the real witnesses of Nessie never have a camera, or never remember to get a picture, or get a picture that is blurred, or shows the water just after the monster dived, or shows something that looks precisely like a log in the water. Same with ghost pictures. Same with UFOs. Sad, isn't it?

Hovind: "There are several swamps in Africa that are still reporting creatures like pterodactyls....They are not as big as they used to be. The fifty footers couldnt fly in todays atmosphere. The air is too thin."

Lie #61. Actually, this is not so much a lie as complete and utter brainless bullshit. The air is too thin? Too thin? I would love to see his science for that one. Oh, I forgot - he doesn't have any. All he has is his opinion. If he is so solidly convinced that dinosaurs and pterosaurs exist today in Africa, why are he and his creationist cronies not financing expeditions to catch them and prove their case instead of spending their money on new air-conditioning systems? I know why - they have no faith in their faith, that's why.

Well this completes chapter 2 of Hovind's hilarious seminar, and the mistake tally is over 60. So far he is averaging 30 lies per chapter - a lie per printed page! This does not include his grammatical and spelling errors and his brain dead stupidity and gullibility.

In chapter 3 he continues his monotonous story of Job. It is an example of Hovind's sick obsession that he spends so much time on the story of Job, since that particular book is one of the least Jewish stories in the Bible!

According to Lloyd Graham in "Deceptions and Myths of the Bible" (Bell Publishing, 1975), "Theistically, it is not Hebrew at all, but Arabic and maybe Babylonian." The Talmud tells us "Job was not created but is an allegory."

Isaac Asimov (Asimov's Guide to the Bible) says that there is a form of this story existing in Babylonian literature, and equates Behemoth (which is in the plural, not the singular, which would be Behemah) to a mythical bull in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Remember that Behemoth eats grass according to the Bible. I don't know of any really large dinosaur that ate grass, but cows and bulls most certainly do. We already know that the flood story was stolen bodily from this epic, so it is not a stretch to see the story of Job stolen from Babylonian myth, too.

Asimov likewise likens Leviathan to a Babylonian legend about the god Marduk slaying Tiamat - some kind of sea monster, or maybe even the raging sea itself - from the remains of which he then created the universe. It is interesting, Asimov points out, that in the Genesis creation story, the Hebrew word for 'the deep' is tehom, which is somewhat similar to Tiamat. I can add to this that the Hebrew for sea is 'yam' and for rain is 'matar.' Maybe it is too much of a stretch to combine them as te-yam-matar or tehom-matar. Maybe it isn't - at the very least, my invention makes more sense than Hovind's. I think we can conclude that Hovind's claims of Biblical dinosaurs are nothing but lies.

It ought to be obvious, from the very fact that the story begins so simplistically, with no begats or any attempt to link it to anything else in the Bible, that Job is nothing but a fairy tale - one that was well known in Biblical times and therefore needed no introduction. Yet here is Hovind pretending the story is the absolute truth from start to finish. Hovind, the one who insists that science come up with definitive proof of every single step of evolution, is here extolling a tale as gospel truth which has not one shred of proof and all the hallmarks of ancient fiction! What a hypocrite he is!

Hovind: "I believe that Leviathan is a Tyrannosaurus Rex."

Lie #62. Until and unless Hovind can show definitive proof that dinosaurs existed contemporarily with humankind (for which there is none in the fossil record), any purported reference to dinosaurs in the Bible has to be mistaken.

Hovind gives away his own lie: "God said to Job, Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook, or his tongue with a string which you let down?"

Why would a reference to a Tyrannosaurus talk as though these were creatures you go fishing for? T. Rex is not associated with water. Crocodiles and whales are. Wouldn't it make more sense to use Occam's Razor here and assume, in the total absence of any evidence at all for contemporary dinosaurs, that the writer of this tale was either talking about a mythical creature or about the very well-known crocodiles, which no one in their right mind would try fishing for? A crocodile, whose tail is gnarly like a cedar?

I leave the following in because it is not a lie - it is merely a tragic demonstration of the kind of sick, twisted and vicious sociopath that Hovind is:

"I took one of my kids to the dentist one time when he was about six or seven years old...He tried to sit still, but when the doctor pulled out that giant needle about twelve feet long, and poured in about eighteen gallons of Novocain, and said, Okay kid, open up, he freaked...He lost it. He was screaming and hollering and yelling...Finally, after a few minutes the doctor gave up and said, I cant work on this kid...I said, Doc, let me take him outside and talk to him for a few minutes."

Read on and find out how Kent Hovind defines 'talk to him'.

Hovind: "We went out to the parking lot, got in the old Chevy van and sat in the back seat. I said, Son, listen carefully. You know that I love you."

Get ready for Kent Hovind's definition of love.

Hovind: "He said, I know daddy. I said, Now son, I told you to sit still. You did not sit still. What happens when you disobey daddy? He said, Sniff, sniff... I get a spanking? I said, Correct, bend over. Boy, did I give him a spanking, and it was a doozy. A few minutes later, smoke was rising off his hind end, tears were coming out of his eyes, and pearls were coming out of his nostrils"

That's Kent Hovind, evangelist, who will later try to tell you he loves you and wants to show you the love of god. This man is sick, cruel, and dangerous.

Here's a continuing demonstration of Hovind's idea of love. Hovind: "We are going to go back into the dentist office, and you are going to sit in that chair. If you wiggle one time, Im not going to yell at you and Im not going to scream at you. Im going to calmly take you back out here to the van, and Im going to give you two spankings just like the one you just received. Then, we are going to go back into the dentist office, and you are going to sit in the chair. If you wiggle, we are going to come back out to the van, and you are going to get three spankings just like the one you just got. Son, we are going to go back and forth all day long until I get tired, and I have played tennis for years. I have a wonderful forehand smash. I dont believe Ill get tired for a long time, son."

You want psychotic thugs like this running your country? Just go right ahead and throw science out of school, let fundamentalists (with the emphasis on mental) in, and this is what you'll get. I know this for a fact because it has happened before - throughout history, whenever fundamentalism has reigned, people have suffered, been tortured, and died horribly. Hovind doesn't believe in Jesus' dictum "suffer little children to come unto me." Hovind believes in his own dictum: let little children come unto me and suffer.

Hovind revels in his child abuse: "The doctor then said,...I dont know what you said to that kid while you were outside, but I would like for you to work for me. I said, No sir, you dont want me to work for you, the Child Welfare would have me in jail in a flash...The second time that we were in the dentists office, the kid was still scared of the dentist; no question about it. He was scared, but he was more scared of me than anything else in the world at that time."

That's how much Hovind loves your children. He loves them so much he is prepared to beat the snot out of them to show his love. You know it does not say, in the Bible, "spare the rod and spoil the child"? That phrase comes from "The Irish Schoolmaster" by Thomas Hood ("He never spoils the child and spares the rod, but spoils the rod and never spares the child."). It is deriding corporal punishment, not encouraging it.

The Bible is much more authoritative: "He that spareth his rod, hateth his son" (Prov 13:24). In other words, Hovind is only slavishly doing what his savage god tells him to - abuse your children or you do not love them. Many Christians take this Biblical injunction deeply to heart. Children have died because of it. There is worse in the Bible:

Psalms, 2:9: Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel.

or how about this? This is probably Hovind's life story, right here:

Revelation, 2:27: And he shall rule them with a rod of iron; as the vessels of a potter shall they be broken to shivers: even as I received of my Father.

Well we should try to be understanding - at least Hovind (as far as we know) didn't try to burn his child on an altar. Any fundamentalist who pretends that he loves you does not love you at all. Nobody who loved you would threaten you with hell. Nobody who loved you would beat the snot out of you.

Hovind: "Before you become excited, let me tell you the four reasons that I believe in fire-breathing dragons. My first reason why I believe in fire-breathing dragons is that the Bible plainly states it as fact."

Lie #63. Hovind assumes as fact what the Bible writers meant as allegory.

Hovind: "It says that Leviathan could breathe fire. There is no way around reading that passage. Thats what it says! You can try to misinterpret it, but the obvious interpretation is -- the animal could breathe fire."

Lie #64. There is no animal that can, or has ever been able to, according to the best available evidence, breathe fire, although whales do blow what (from a distance) might look like a blast of smoke. There is no need for proof when you have faith, but if any creationist is going try to replace evolution with this, they need to come up with the evidence, and with a scientific explanation as to how this is possible.

Hovind: "My second reason is because of all the historical evidence. There are so many stories from countries around the world of animals breathing fire."

There are many countries around the world that have animals that live in caves, and also have volcanoes (a kind of cave) from which fire spits out. Isn't this a simpler, and therefore better explanation for dragon myths than Hovind's ridiculous and unsubstantiated claim that there really were fire-breathing dragons? This argument is from the same guy who claims the majority if often wrong?

Hovind: "My third reason for believing in fire-breathing dragons is: it is possible to blow fire. You say, WHAT? Yep! Its possible. There is an insect that lives in South Florida and in Central America that is called the Bombardier Beetle."

Lie #65. There is no animal that can blow fire. The Bombardier beetle spouts hot chemicals under pressure. This is not fire by any definition.

Hovind: "The Bombardier Beetle has two chemicals in storage compartments in his rear end. The chemicals are hydrogen peroxide and hydroquinone. When these two chemicals are mixed together, they explode. BOOM! Its called an exothermic reaction."

Lie #66. Once again the creationist has to simplify things to get their ill-educated audience to understand it, and in the process, they turn the explanation into a lie. Here is what:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/bombardier.html

says:

"Secretory cells produce hydroquinones and hydrogen peroxide (and perhaps other chemicals, depending on the species), which collect in a reservoir. The reservoir opens through a muscle-controlled valve onto a thick-walled reaction chamber. This chamber is lined with cells that secrete catalases and peroxidases. When the contents of the reservoir are forced into the reaction chamber, the catalases and peroxidases rapidly break down the hydrogen peroxide and catalyze the oxidation of the hydroquinones into p-quinones. These reactions release free oxygen and generate enough heat to bring the mixture to the boiling point and vaporize about a fifth of it. Under pressure of the released gasses, the valve is forced closed, and the chemicals are expelled explosively through openings at the tip of the abdomen."

Hovind: "When they explode, they instantly give off an enormous amount of heat."

Lie #67. It is the other way around - the heat is what generates the pressure that forces the chemicals out. There is no explosion in any meaningful sense. Perhaps explosive decompression might be a more accurate term.

Hovind: "He has a third chemical that is mixed in there with them. The third chemical is called the inhibitor...He has a fourth chemical. The fourth chemical is in the outer chamber. He squirts it in at the very last possible second. The fourth chemical is the neutralizer. The neutralizer eliminates the inhibitor so the first two chemicals can explode. Is this too complicated?"

Lie #68. Yes it is, as the talk.origins explanation makes clear. The actual mechanism is much simpler than Hovind pretends. The talk.origins FAQ goes into much more detail than I can here about how this mechanism could have evolved.

Hovind: "So, my third reason for believing in fire-breathing dragons is: it is possible for them to produce fire."

Lie #69. Hovind thinks he has demonstrated that because the Bombardier beetle can squirt hot chemicals, this is somehow equivalent to a dragon breathing smoke and fire and therefore proves they exist(ed). He has demonstrated nothing but how stupid and clueless he is.

Continued in part E

Budikka

From budikka@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:13:46 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part E 22K

Hovind: "I have a fourth reason for believing in fire-breathing dragons. Some of these dinosaurs had weird, hollow, bony things on the back of their heads; for example, the Parasaurolophus, the Lambiosaur and the Headrosaur."

Lie #70. Try Lambeosaur and Hadrosaur. Hovind gets the most complicated one right, then screws up the other two. If he cannot even spell the names right, how can we trust anything he says about these creatures? Unless he has fossil evidence that these chambers were used for belching smoke and fire, he has nothing but an inane creationist claim for which there is no foundation either historically or now.

Hovind offers the best explanation for these growths: "One textbook states, It is possible that the air passages magnified the voices of the dinosaurs like the curved tubes of a trumpet. Loud voices might be very useful for calling other dinosaurs or scaring predators away. Oh yea! Thats what they had them for, so they could call louder, Come home for dinner honey!"

These growths have been tested and do in fact, amplify sounds. There are contemporary animals that use body organs to amplify sound. Which is the more likely explanation? Hovind's 'belief' that they were fire-breathing dragons, or the scientific demonstration that some dinosaurs were capable of making loud calls?

Hovind: "This could be true but I believe since many of the dinosaur heads had these cavities (even the head of the Tyrannosaurus Rex was largely hollow), they could have stored chemicals in these cavities. The entire January 1993 issue of Discovery Magazine was devoted to the Air-Headed Dinosaur. The head of the Tyrannosaurs Rex was largely hollow and was connected to air passages"

Has Hovind ever considered that the skulls of these huge creatures had hollows in them so that they were lighter? Most animal skulls have hollows for various purposes. None of these hollows, in living things, are used to store chemicals that belch fire and smoke. (Hovind needs to demonstrate what these chemicals are, and how they were stored in the dinosaur's head). Of course, Hovind, unlike real scientists, does not have to consider every possible, reasonable explanation. The only one he has to consider is the one that fits his belief system. Real science isn't that easy.

Hovind: "There are many legends that validate this theory. These animals were probably one of the first to become extinct after the flood because those who figured out how to kill one probably became a hero."

Does Hovind ever reread what he writes? This fire-breathing dragon fantasy of his is validated by legend? Is this the kind of 'science' you want creationists to teach your children in place of the fact-based science that is currently taught in school?

Hovind: "... I believe that the critter could go on land or water. There are many species of animals that can stay on land or water, whichever they choose. If you were fifty-foot long, had a head a little smaller than a Volkswagen, had teeth six to nine inches long, had scales that nobody could poke through with a spear, weighed nearly thirty tons, and on top of that you could breath fire, you could go wherever you wanted to go"

Lie #71. If a pig had wings, it could fly. Not true, but people say that a lot. So are we going to teach this as hard science in school - just because people say it? Are we going to throw out 200 years of hard science because Hovind has a bug (or more precisely, a Bombardier beetle) up his butt?

Hovind finishes up chapter 3 with the most monotonous and appallingly tedious lecture about pride. This is the least humble creationist I know trying to teach us something about pride being a sin. I shall also skip his tedious introduction to chapter 4.

Hovind: "Before the 1800s, almost everybody believed that the world was only six or seven thousand years old. They held to the creationist or the Christian world view of history."

Lie #72. Almost everybody believed it was six or seven thousand years old just as the Bible says? Has Hovind never heard of Hinduism or Buddhism? What a provincial moron he is - he thinks the only country in the world is the USA, even though he is too proud of his relationship with god to admit to citizenship (and therefore the need to pay taxes). He thinks the only religion in the world is Christianity. Belief in a religion requires a degree of arrogance and pride (that you are right and the rest of the world is wrong and will perish because of that), but Hovind is an extremist even in this regard. Well, not only does Hovind have to defeat science, he also has to prove that his religion is right and all others wrong.

So everyone held to the Christian world view of history? Let's assume that was true, but just for this country. Why does Hovind suppose it changed? The world was then perfect according to his philosophy - everyone lived in sheer terror of Hovind's god, just as Hovind's son lived in sheer terror of Hovind.

This state of affairs continued since creation 6,000 years ago. So why, in the last 200 years, has it all changed? Is it because a satan suddenly decided to start working against god? Or is it perhaps because science has helped us to understand so much more about the universe in the last 200 years than we ever did before? We now understand that you need not invoke a god to explain every little detail about how things work. Perhaps long ago and far away, way back down the time line, there was some sort of being who initiated all of this, but there is not any evidence these days of this 'god' continuing to work it on a microscopic daily basis.

Hovind: "One of the first scoffers in the past couple of hundred years was a guy named James Hutton. James Hutton was one of the first men to really propose that the earth was more than six or seven thousand years old."

Lie #73. Hutton and Lyell pretty much began the modern science of geology, but it is important to remember that they did not produce it out of thin air. They were by no means the earliest people to claim antiquity for the Earth. The Greeks: Aristotle, Democritus, Thales, and Theophrastus for example, all had things to say about geology.

Hovind: "Along came Hutton, an amateur geologist, and he said, You know, I think the world is millions of years old."

Lie #74. First of all, everyone was an amateur geologist back then since there was no profession of geology. To specifically categorize Hutton as an amateur is to misrepresent the situation. Hutton was a physician and, unlike Hovind, had a real degree. Although he never practiced medicine, Hutton did have schooling, and if Hovind is going to categorize Hutton thus, then let me describe Hovind as an amateur geologist, an amateur biologist, an amateur cosmologist and a professional liar, since that is how he makes his living.

Hovind: "Charles Lyell, a lawyer from Scotland, was also an amateur geologist. He did not like the Bible. He didnt like the absolute authority of Scripture...Charles Lyell didnt like the Bible, and in 1830 he wrote a book, Principles of Geology."

Lie #75. Here is a quote from the concluding remarks to "Principles of Geology" by Sir Charles Lyell (1830). The full text of these remarks is available at :

http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/lyellcon.html:

"We are prepared, therefore, to find that in time also the confines of the universe lie beyond the reach of mortal ken. But in whatever direction we pursue our researches, whether in time or space, we discover every where the clear proofs of a Creative Intelligence, and of His foresight, wisdom, and power."

Does this sound like an enemy of god? Here is Lyell, in spite of his acceptance of the antiquity of the Earth, still praising the magnificence of the universe to the work of god. Also in that same book, Lyell, defending Hutton from an accusation of atheism by Richard Kirwan, has this to say: "...charges of infidelity and atheism must always be odious...." Hovind needs to read some of the material he so flatulently spouts about.

Hovind: "The geologic column has different layers known as the Cenozoid, Mesozoid, Paleozoid, and the Archeozoid."

Lie #76. These time periods are, from oldest to youngest, Archaeozoic, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic. I guess we should forgive Hovind, for he knows not what he does. Not only is he an amateur geologist, he is also an amateur thinker.

Hovind: "First of all, the geologic column can only be found in one place in the world."

It is true that, laid out in perfect sequence, complete from top to bottom, everything present and accounted for, the geological column does exist only in textbooks. What Hovind dishonestly conceals from you here is that, in actual fact, in nature, there are very many places where the geological column exists in substantial depths, everything present and accounted for, and that these substantial columns have a habit of overlapping with other columns in other places.

Now if somebody printed out half a dozen strips of paper with exactly the same text on each of them, and then tore them randomly, and mixed them up, how would you go about piecing them together and finding out what that text was? You would have to compare one strip with another. There would inevitably be places where one strip overlapped another. Such instances would give you a clue as to what to look for in each strip, and where the strips go, relative to each other. The geological column is no different. It is actually easier in some ways - because it is like working with different colors of paper. Not only are the layers identified by their differing composition, not only are they identified by the specific sequence of layering, but many of them have very distinctive fossils that are only found in specific layers.

Hovind: "Everything must be interpreted in light of the geologic column. For example, the Jurassic layer contains dinosaur bones. Therefore, if you find a dinosaur bone, its automatically classified as Jurassic layer"

Lie #77. So?!! In his pathetic attempts to blindfold you, Hovind once again simplifies something until it is nothing but a lie. The Jurassic period (named for the Jura mountains which sit between France and Switzerland) is not the only period where dinosaurs exist. They are in the Cretaceous, and the Triassic, too, along with the Therapsids. It was as the Triassic edged into the Jurassic that the dinosaurs (a specific class of creatures - not just 'any large lizard') began to really come into their own. So it is not sufficient to say, "Oh, dinosaur - Jurassic" as Hovind likes to pretend. Science is never as simple as Hovind or any of the other creationists would like you to believe, and scientists are, rest assured, nowhere near as simplistic and gullible as the creationists are.

Hovind goes on to simplify a story about a tour of a museum in Rapid City SD. I can only recommend you read it because his pride and arrogance are at their height here. Once again he picks on someone he knows will not be able to answer a detailed question, and then pretends that this person's opinion stands for the scientific view. He simplifies the position into this: "You know, they date the fossils by the layers, and then they turn right around and date the layers by the fossils."

I am going to call this Lie #78. Hovind does not point out to you that this is not what science says. Neither does he point out to you that Hovind himself uses this same circular reasoning after this fashion: we know that the Bible must be absolutely 100% true because it was inspired by god. We know god exists, because the Bible says he does, and the Bible is 100% true.

How is that argument any better than the stratum/bone argument? The answer is that it is no better at all. Unfortunately for Hovind, while science can offer a lot more evidence regarding the age of layers and bones, Hovind cannot offer a single thing to substantiate his circular argument about god and the Bible.

Hovind: "Pictured in figure 4-3 is a fossil of a shoe print where a man stepped on two trilobites. The guy had a shoe on, a heel and everything. Many geologists refuse to look at the fossil....Those that look at it say that there are two possible ways to explain it....They said, It could be that aliens visited the planet 500 million years ago."

Lie #79. Unless Hovind comes up with something better than this folk tale, he needs to quit whining. If he has the proof, then he needs to submit it for scientific testing, period. If he does not so submit it, then it is a lie, not evidence, period. I claim his claim as a lie by default, mainly because I cannot imagine any competent and respectable geologist ever coming up with such an unscientific and patently ridiculous explanation for this fossil. Perhaps Hovind would like to explain how this guy in shoes was walking on the bottom of the sea in order to be able to step on two trilobites....

I haven't seen this fossil, but I am willing to bet Hovind's $10,000 that it is not real. It may well be a natural rock formation containing trilobites that has eroded to resemble a shoe print. For all we know, it is a plaster cast of a shoe imprint and some trilobites! I am most inclined to wonder, however, if this is another example of Hovind's complete incompetence. Knowing how sloppy and stupid he is, I am wondering if he is referring not to trilobite, but ammonite - a spiral shaped shellfish. These creatures often have the central portion of their spiral at a lower elevation than the outside portion. If two of them, of different sizes were buried very close together, fossilized, then exposed and weathered, I can well see how the result might look like the impression of a shoe on top of two 'trilobites' - if you are as stupid as Hovind is.

Creationists never seem to have their material available for examination, do they? It is always in possession of 'some guy who told me about it' (it's always a guy, isn't it? - never a woman!), or it got lost, or it is not available for testing. If a lab tests it and proves it to be false, then the creationists say the lab lied or falsified the results because of satan's vast atheist, communist, liberal, anti-creationist socialist, women's liberation, gay pride single-mom conspiracy!

Hovind: "This petrified tree is standing straight up running through many layers of strata."

I guess the PhD doesn't understand that strata is already in the plural.

Hovind: "Now, hold on just a minute! If that bottom layer is 600 million years old and the top layer is only 5 million years old, there are only two choices:..."

Can you say, 'false dichotomy' again?

Hovind: "...either that tree stood there 500 million years and didnt rot, or that tree grew through seventy-five feet of solid rock looking for sunlight."

Lie #80. Hovind first presents completely fictitious ages for the rock strata, and then offers what he considers are the only two options available to explain them. Well he is wrong, as usual. There is a web page:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate.html

which goes into detail about so-called polystrate fossils, so I am not going to do so here. The references examined by Andrew MacRae and others, who wrote this FAQ, are as readily available to the creationists as they were to the scientists. These issues were dealt with last century - that's how out of date the creationists are. The bottom line is that Hovind carefully avoids mentioning the third option.

From the talk.origins FAQ: "Are 'polystrate' fossils a problem for conventional geology?...Well, they were not a problem to explain in the 19th century, and are still not a problem now. John William Dawson (1868) described a classic Carboniferous-age locality at Joggins, Nova Scotia, where there are upright giant lycopod trees up to a few metres tall preserved mainly in river-deposited sandstones."

River-deposited sandstone. This is how the polystrate fossils occurred - trees in river flood plains being slowly buried over several flood seasons. There is nothing miraculous here, nothing outside the bounds of everyday science. Nothing to suggest a worldwide flood. The creationists know this, yet they continue to lie about such occurrences. Hovind is desperately passionate about the idea of a worldwide flood burying trees in layers of sediment, but somehow he just cannot get his tiny mind around the fact that the trees were slowly buried in layers of sediment due to successive river floods over a relatively short time period.

Hovind: "You can get a jar of dirt , put water in it, and shake it up. It will automatically settle out into layers for you. Its called hydrologic sorting."

Yes, but the layers always have the heaviest dirt on the bottom, the lightest on top. This is not what we find with fossil bones. I challenge Hovind, or any creationist, to get a very large container, fill it full of soil, water, and an assortment of fossil bones all of about the same weight and size, but from very different eras (as defined by evolutionary theory). Once they have done this, go right ahead and shake it up, and see if this wonderful, magical "hydrologic sorting" can sort them out into separate strata and keep them as individual as the fossil record has done, with no dinosaurs mixed in with modern mammals, no ancient fish in with modern birds, no bones sitting between two inappropriate strata, etc. I dare him. I double dare him. This would be what scientists call "doing hard science." Of course, the creationists never do any such thing. All they do is whine incessantly about what a tough time they have getting their theories taken seriously. Well I wonder why?

Hovind: "As Darwin read the book about the principles of geology, his faith in Scripture was destroyed. Darwin came back a doubter, a septic, a scoffer."

Lie #81. Here is what Darwin himself says in "Origin of Species," written years after he returned from his voyage on the Beagle. He is writing about speciation, and could well be talking directly to creationists:

"He who believes that each equine species was independently created, will, I presume, assert that each species has been created with a tendency to vary, both under nature and under domestication, in this particular manner, so as often to become striped like the other species of the genus; and that each has been created with a strong tendency, when crossed with species inhabiting distant quarters of the world, to produce hybrids resembling in their stripes, not their own parents, but other species of the genus. To admit this view is, as it seems to me, to reject a real for an unreal, or at least for an unknown, cause. It makes the works of God a mere mockery and deception..."

Darwin came back a doubter? A "sceptic" (I think Hovind means skeptic), a scoffer? He published "Origin" in 1859, almost a quarter century after he returned from his voyage on the Beagle. For Hovind to pretend Darwin came back working for the devil, and intent on destroying belief in god is the worst kind of deceit and dishonesty. Remember what I said about ad hominem? Does Hovind indulge in it liberally or does he not?

Hovind: "Darwin was greatly influenced by Charles Lyell."

Hovind is being dishonest about this, but I will not register this as an official lie. The biggest influences on Darwin were his father, his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, two people he met in college: Adam Sedgwick, a geologist, and John Henslow, a naturalist, and economist Thomas Malthus who wrote "An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), which is what really focused Darwin's ideas on how evolution works. Here is what Microsoft's Encarta has to say about Darwin's view of Lyell: "Beyond that, however, he realized that some of his own observations of fossils and living plants and animals cast doubt on the Lyell-supported view that species were specially created."

In one fell swoop, Encarta destroys both of Hovind's contentions - one that Darwin was seduced by Lyell, and two, that Lyell was basically anti-god and did not accept creation!

Hovind: "Lyell kept pushing Darwin to publish a book. Finally about thirty years later, Darwin published his book"

Lie #82. It is as easy to get this right as it is to distort it, so I am calling this one. The Beagle voyage ended in 1836. "Origin" was published in 1859. Now I am not great at math, but that looks closer to 23 years than it does to 30. Actually Darwin had the theory sketched out by late 1838 when he read Malthus' book . Some believe that he might not have published at all, had not Alfred Wallace come up with basically the same theory, which he and Darwin announced jointly in 1858. By the way, it was Wallace who gave up on evolution and went back to creationism later in life, not Darwin, and he did it through the same disability that Hovind suffers - lack of imagination and scientific expertise.

Hovind: "When [Darwin] got to the Galapagos, he made notes of many different varieties of finches...Some had a heavy beak, and some had a skinny beak....Darwin said, You know, Ill bet all of these finches have a common ancestor. Well, thats brilliant Charlie! I bet they do too, and I bet the ancestor was a finch of some kind."

Brilliant! That's precisely what Darwin said.

Hovind: "Charlie then said, You know, if these finches all have a common ancestor, then maybe these finches have the same common ancestor as does the pine tree."

Lie #83. It took Darwin two years after the voyage to come up with his theory in any kind of workable form, so there is no way it is even remotely honest to portray Darwin on Galapagos concluding that we are related to a pine tree because a few birds have different beaks. Yes, we are related to pine trees! If Hovind disagrees, let him publish his scientific theory about how it is that, since we are made from the same 20 amino acids, and the same four DNA bases, that we are not related genetically to any other living thing on this planet.

Continued in part F

Budikka

From budikka@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:14:28 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part F 21K

Hovind: "That is the difference between what we call simple variation, and what other people call macro evolution. Some refer to the term simple variation as micro evolution; I prefer the term simple variation."

Of course he does! God forbid Hovind should ever have to say that dirty 'E'-word - although that is precisely what this weasel is doing when he talks about his miraculous variation which can create any kind of creature within a kind, but somehow magically halts dead at the invisible 'species barrier'.

Hovind: "Its true that all of the finches probably had a common ancestor, and it was a finch. The Bible does not say that they shall bring forth after their species. The Bible says that they shall bring forth after their kind."

And what is a kind if not a species? The creationists do not dare define kind, because they know that when they do, zoologists will hammer them. Kind is nothing more than the Biblical word for species. Period. Let Hovind try to prove otherwise, since he is making this distinction.

Hovind: "If you stand ten feet back from it and look at it, it is still the same kind of animal."

Lie #84. This is a deliberate distortion, aimed at focusing you on anatomy. Evolution does not take place at the anatomical level, but at the genetic level - anatomy has nothing to do with it. Anatomy is merely a consequence of embryological development which in turn is a consequence of genetics. It is unfortunate that we only lately came to learn of genes and their function, because what this has meant is that we have been forced to focus on anatomy though out history, but it is chronically misleading. Many animals and plants that look physically very similar are quite different in the details of their genetic patterning and vice-versa.

Creationists love to talk anatomy rather than genetics. It is really easy to show you a finch and a tree and pretend that if they look dissimilar, they must be dissimilar, but on a cellular level, plants are all very similar, as are animals on their cellular level. Animal and plant cells are not as similar when compared to each other as they are within their own groupings, but there are living things that sit between animals and plants with equal claim to either group. How is this possible if everything is an individual "kind"? Besides, if you go below cellular level to genetic level, the same four base chemicals make up both. Never doubt it, and never ever let the creationists pull the wool over your eyes - they are con artists, pranksters, masters of sleight of hand.

Hovind: "You could scramble up the chromosomes and get something strange once in a while. For example, take the word Christmas. By rearranging the letters you can develop thousands of words....There are numerous words that you can form, but you are never going to get, Xerox, or queen. The letters are not there."

I am glad Hovind finally admitted to evolution. Yes, you cannot get Xerox from Christmas, because the letters are not there, but evolution does not take place on 'Christmas'. It does not need that many letters. You know how many letters it needs? Just four: A, C, G and T. Those four letters account for all of evolution. Those four letters exist in every living thing. I am glad Kent Hovind finally simplified it enough so that even he can understand it, and finally agreed that evolution is entirely possible. It is made possible through the four bases upon which DNA is built: adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine. Mix these with sugar and phosphate and you get DNA. It's that simple.

Besides, how many DNA chains are as short as "Christmas"? None. How many DNA chains are as short as the 26 letters of the alphabet? Even a virus has more 'letters' in its 'word' than this, yet those 26 letters make up every word in the English language. How many more words (or species) can nature make from such a large 'alphabet'?

Hovind: "Rearranging the known information in the chromosomes is not going to produce anything new...Mutations only rearrange the material that is already there."

Lie #85. Until and Unless Hovind proves his assertion. Scientists have studied genes in detail. Mutations do not automatically produce a monster. Mutations are very small things and many of them occur to parts of your DNA chain that is not in use. Yes! A good portion of your DNA is nonsense information that has accumulated through mutation over the history of living things. It is not possible to explain this if you believe that a god created everything from nothing only 6,000 years ago.

No evolutionist pretends that all that happens is that the same genes shuffle back and forth. Genetics is much more complicated than this. Oops - sorry! I gave it away. The creationists didn't want you to know that.

Fortunately, your DNA chain ignores these mutations since they are marked and turned off, as it were. It is only when the switch is flipped and one gets turned back on that it becomes of concern. It is only when a critical mutation hits the wrong place at the wrong time that they cause problems. Most of the mutations in your own genes leave you completely unaware that they are there, but mutation takes place all the time, adding, removing, and changing information in your genes. This is a fact. Occasionally, the right set of mutations combine and switch on, and something changes. The white swamp buffalo and the river buffalo can interbreed and produce viable offspring even though they have differing numbers of chromosomes (source: Discover magazine, April 1999). So much for Hovind's brain dead challenge.

Hovind: "Mutations are harmful or fatal."

Lie #86. Except when Hovind needs them to explain how a few "kinds" evolved in the minuscule time period since they got off the ark, of course.

There are two varieties of peppered moth in England - dark and light. The dark version is actually the standard version - the light is a mutation. This is an example of a mutation which was not harmful - not of itself. It was actually beneficial, because due to lichen infestation, many trees were light colored. The mutated light variation did better than the dark variation on these trees. At least it was that way until the industrial revolution began polluting the atmosphere and the lichen on the trees began darkening. Now the normal version had the advantage of camouflage and the lighter variety began to die out. When England began cleaning up its atmosphere, the lighter version made a comeback. This is not an example of speciation, but it is an observed and documented example of evolution in action in our own time. Hovind is a liar to claim mutations are harmful without some serious clarification.

Is there anyone who would deny that cancer is a mutation in a cell? Cancer is harmful to humans, although medical science, now it has new roots in evolutionary theory, is helping a lot more humans overcome it than prayer is. The thing is that humans are nothing more than a conglomeration of single cells. Which cell is the more successful - the normal body cell, or the mutated cancer cell? If mutations are always harmful, how come cancer cells do so well? If these cells lived independently, instead of as part of a human, then which cell would do better in the wild, the 'normal' cell, or the mutated cell?

Hovind rambles on about fruit fly experiments and concludes: "After raising eighty-thousand generations of flies, somebody wrote a report and said, Ladies and gentlemen, weve raised eighty-thousand generations of flies. We have seen millions of mutations, but we have never seen a beneficial mutation."

I am not going to call this one, although I bet it is a lie, but there are two deceptions here. The first is that Hovind's purpose is to force your mind off the fact that no one ever raised fruit flies to prove evolution. Fruit fly experiments were and are done to understand genetics. This is one of the reasons we know so much about how genes work.. This work was done to benefit those of us who do have harmful mutations to live with. It is only because evolutionary theory has shown us the way that we can do these kinds of experiments. If we had followed Hovind's dumb ass ideas about creationism, no one would ever have learned about DNA or genes, and we would not now be seeing genetic treatments and some cures coming to light because of these fruit fly and other experiments. For Hovind to cheapen this work to further his ungodly cause is pathetic and a measure of the kind of snake he is.

The second deception is that Hovind is trying to force you to believe that evolution is supposed to take place in a laboratory over one or two human lifetimes. It does not and no evolutionist ever said that it did. It takes place over millions of years in the natural world. It cannot be replicated in a few decades with a few fruit flies under laboratory conditions designed to do anything but prove evolution. The best we can do in the laboratory is to try and understand the mechanisms of evolution. Genetic experiments on fruit flies have contributed to this knowledge, but they do not represent this knowledge.

Hovind: "He continued to say in the report, Therefore, we must conclude that flies have evolved as far as they can go."

Lie #87. I am calling this because this sounds to me to be another creationist fairy tale. I cannot imagine any real scientist stating that evolution has gone as far as it can go. Until and unless Hovind comes up with a reference to this report so that I can read it myself, I am claiming this as a lie by default.

Hovind finally catches up with me on the peppered moth: "Thats not evolution. They started off as a peppered moth and they ended up as a peppered moth."

Lie #88. No, that's not _speciation_. It _is_ evolution.

Hovind: "Actually, I think because there are two varieties of the same species, dark and light, that this provides good evidence of an intelligent creator."

Lie #89. Brilliant - he finally gets it! But how does this provide good evidence of an intelligent creator? Surely an intelligent creator would never put his creations into the situation we have here with life on earth - which is definitely a lottery - unless he wanted to test the principles of evolution!!

How does Hovind imagine that there became two varieties of peppered moth? Did Noah have both of these on the ark? I doubt it - by Hovind's own admission, Noah supposedly took only a pair of each kind (with some exceptions). This means that he can have had only two moths - male and female of a generic kind, on the ark - from which every single extant (and all extinct) species of moth have evolved. Even creationism requires evolution (which they have to call 'variation' so they do not use that nasty 'E'-word).

There are 11,000 species of butterflies and moths in North America, 148,000 worldwide. I don't know whether Hovind considers these to be two separate kinds - the creationists have no scientific basis for their "kinds." Let's count them together. They are more similar than some of the varieties Hovind listed as being in the same dog "kind," for example, although this is purely a subjective view. On the other hand, subjective is the only 'kind' of view creationism has, since there is no science there.

What this all means is that those two things from the ark - let's call them motherflies - in addition to not dying out, had to generate over 30 new species per year in the 4,400 years since the flood. That's almost three new species every single month, every single year since Noah. Why do we not see this rate of 'variation' today? How come it has never been seen? Remember that this does not include any extinct species.

Creationists are going nuts and frothing at the moth - sorry - mouth because they claim science cannot show evolution going on today. Next time they mention this, ask them where is this super-rate evolution going on today - the evolution of Hovind's two generic motherflies into 148,000 distinct, non-interbreeding species? If they say it has stopped, ask them when, and how and why. Ask them how this myriad variation came about - was it through mutation? How is this possible if, as they claim, mutation is consistently harmful.

Hovind: "They ought to be learning real science while they are there and forget all of this stupidity about evolution. It has nothing to do with science. Its a waist of time and a waist of textbook space."

Sorry, this isn't a lie so much as a testament to Hovind's poor scholarship and rank stupidity. I agree - it was unhip to use it. It was a 'waist' of your time. I just thought it might get a belly laugh.

Hovind: "Evolutionists will say: Boys and girls, dinosaurs slowly turned into birds....Hold on a second! There are a few differences between a dinosaur and a bird."

Not in the fossil record, where either birds built like dinosaurs, or dinosaurs with feathers and wings are found in many places.

Hovind: "Bt the way, in the movie Jurassic Park, the whole plot was dinosaurs turning into birds."

Lie #90. The plot of that movie was nothing of the sort.

Hovind: "There are a few differences between a reptile and a bird. Reptiles are covered with scales, and birds are covered with feathers."

Lie #91. Some 'reptiles' in the fossil record have feathers, and birds have scales on their legs. How is this a difference? Birds also have hair when they are chicks and fine, feathery hairs on the bottom of their feathers. Both reptiles and birds (and some mammals) lay eggs, even though one group is endothermic and one is exothermic. Where are the distinct kinds here?

Hovind: "Evolutionists may say, Yeah, but they are both made out of carotene."

Lie #92. Actually this is not so much a lie as a demonstration of Hovind's complete and utter ignorance. Carotene is a substance that your body converts into vitamin A. What Hovind meant to refer to here is keratin, which is a protein that makes up most of the material in the cells forming the beaks, feathers, hair, hooves, horns, nails, scales and skin of animals.

In other words, no matter how different the 'kind' of animal, no matter what its needs are, apparently Hovind's creationist god was so limited in his abilities that he had to use and reuse the same substance over and over, and over again. He couldn't even once come up with a new substance, better designed to suit the animal's lifestyle! That's why your tender skin and a lion's nasty claws, a horse's strong hooves and a bird's delicate feathers, a cow's horn and a husky dog's warm fur are all basically the same thing. And there is no evolution?

Hovind: "Reptiles have a sack-type lung, and they breathe in and out. Birds have a tubular-type lung, and they breathe through their lungs, not in and out of their lungs."

Lie #93. Look it up in a good book that was not written by a creationist. The evolutionary paths to both styles of lungs are not so far apart as Hovind would like you to believe. Both types 'breathe in and out' - they have to.

Hovind: "Evolutionists would say, Some of the dinosaurs had hollow bones. Okay, maybe so, for structural reasons, but not so they could fly"

This from the same two-faced moron who claims the T. Rex has hollows in its head not for structural reasons, but so that it could blow smoke and fire from its nostrils? See Lie #70.

Hovind on archaeopteryx: "Only six of them have been found...All of them come from the same place in Germany. There is also a very strong indication that all six of them are deliberate frauds. It is possible that they are super-imposed fossils."

Lie #94. Rest assured they are not in the same class as Hovind when it comes to fraud. If Hovind has any evidence they are frauds, then he needs to put up or shut up lying. What is his strong indication of fraud? One of these so-called frauds was not even recognized as archaeopteryx until relatively recently, when John Ostrom identified it.

Hovind's claim is probably stolen from Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, (an astronomer and a mathematician -not biologists, zoologists, anatomists, or paleontologists), who for some unknown reason decided to believe the archaeopteryxes were a fraud. Let Hovind try to find an evolutionary biologist (with a real degree) who thinks they are a fraud. When called as a witness for the creationists during the Louisiana Balanced Treatment Act 590 trial in 1981, Wickramasinghe stated that no rational scientist would believe that the Earth was less than a million years old or that the world's geology could be explained by a worldwide flood.

Hovind: "What is a archaeopteryx? Its a bird about twelve inches long or about the size of a pigeon."

Lie #95. If Hovind is here stating that the archaeopteryx is a bird, where does he get off whining that the feathered impressions in the rocks are fraudulent? The truth of the matter is that archaeopteryx is hard to place precisely because it has characteristics of both a bird and a reptile.

Hovind: "Evolutionists say: We can prove that dinosaurs turned to birds because of the archaeopteryx. Well, whats the proof? Dont you see, he has claws on his wings right there by his elbows."

Lie #96. By his elbows? Hovind is so pathetically ignorant that he believes that, because the claws are halfway along the wing, they must be coming from the elbow!

Hovind: "It is true that most birds do not have claws, but some do. An ostrich has claws; the hoatzin has claws; and the South American archaeopteryx has claws."

Lie #97. The south American archaeopteryx? This from the guy who just got through saying there are only six specimens and they all come from the same place in Germany?

Hovind: "Going from having claws to not having claws is an example of loosing something and not gaining something. Is that how evolution works."

Lie #98. I am counting this because it is another lie about what evolution says. There is no aspect of evolutionary theory that claims that to evolve, a living thing always has to gain a body part. It is quite possible to "loose" things, too as Hovind so ignorantly puts it.

Now there were unquestionably flying 'lizards' - these were technically not dinosaurs but are included as such in popular thinking.. The pteranodon, dimorphodon, rhamphoryncus and pterodactyl had wings and flew. This is not a matter of faith or of opinion, but of fact. If one group of primitive reptiles could grow wings and fly, why could not another grow wings and feathers? If Hovind is going to say no, then he needs to come up with scientific proof of the mechanism which prevents such genetic changes from occurring.

Hovind: "No, man never had a tail. This business of the missing link is just plain crazy."

Lie #99. I am glad he agrees there is no missing link, but humans do have tails. They have a coccyx - a tail bone, which is not one bone but a fusion of several and has no real purpose - it is a remnant of when we had a tail. We can see evidence of this in embryology. The human embryo begins to develop a tail and then effectively reabsorbs it. This is a fact.

Hovind: "Actually, missing links have never been found. Zero, none! No missing links have been found because the whole chain is missing."

Lie #100. Let's see what Darwin said in "Origin": "the chance of discovering in a formation in any one country all the early stages of transition between any two forms, is small, for the successive changes are supposed to have been local or confined to some one spot"

Even back then, Darwin was smarter than any modern creationist. He knew that the fossil record is imperfect and could not begin to show a complete record of every transition, but to pretend, as the creationists do, that there are no transitional forms is nonsense. To claim, as the creationists do, that the lack of a complete set of all transitional forms means there are none and that this in turn disproves evolution is a lie, plain and simple. This quote, by the way, is also evidence that Darwin anticipated the proponents of punctuated equilibrium by 140 years.

According to this web page of the talk.origins archives:

http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/feb98.html

far from there being no transitional forms, there have been found actually more transitional forms in the fossil record than we had any right to hope for! At this page:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html

Kathleen Hunt lists transitional forms galore. Here are a few: Transitional from mammal to primate: Cantius, Palaechthon, Pelycodus, Purgatorius, Transitional from reptile to mammal: Biarmosuchia, Haptodus, Procynosuchus, Varanops. Transitional from reptile to bird: Coelophysis, Compsognathus, Deinonychus, Oviraptor. Transitional from amphibian to reptile: Hylonomus, Limnoscelis, Paleothyris, Proterogyrinus. Transitional from fish to amphibian: Cheirolepis, Eusthenopteron, Osteolepis, Sterropterygion

Here is an ABC news web page with information about a newly discovered transitional form:

http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/fishfossil0312.html

Continued in part G

Budikka

From budikka@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:15:04 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part G 22K

Hovind: "Because they cannot find a missing link, many evolutionists have gone to a new theory. The new theory is called punctuated equilibrium..Stephen Gould...along with Niles Eldridge...is a big promoter of punctuated equilibrium...What is punctuated equilibrium? The evolutionists are saying: Maybe a reptile laid an egg and a bird hatched out, and that is why we cannot find any transitional fossils. Evolution happened in jumps."

Lying 101. Let's look at what Darwin said in "Origin": "On the other hand, I do believe that natural selection will always act very slowly, often only at long intervals of time, and generally on only a very few of the inhabitants of the same region at the same time."

Darwin said it before anyone - and this is precisely what Eldredge (note spelling - Hovind didn't) and Gould have said - in other words, their "new theory" as the creationists try to pretend, is nothing more than Darwin said. Evolution seems, according to the fossil record, to happen most quickly when groups of animals are isolated. It occurs much more slowly in large populations.

Hovind: "The textbooks state that one of the evidences is homology structures. Homology structures, what does that mean?"

It doesn't mean anything because it is lousy grammar, and if Hovind really was an honest PhD, he would know this. What he means is 'homologous' structures. Such structures exhibit homology.

Hovind: "That means that different types of animals have the same body pattern to perform different things. For instance, the human has two bones in their wrist, the radius and the ulna."

Lie #102. These two bones are in the forearm. The wrist actually has 8 bones, known as the carpals. Hovind is an idiot.

Hovind: "The bat has two bones in his leg, and they are called the radius and the ulna."

Lie #103. These specific bones in the leg, regardless of what quadruped they are in, are called the tibia and the fibula. The radius and the ulna in a bat are in its wing.

Hovind: "For instance; they show in the textbooks that the human baby has gill slits. Do you remember being taught that when you went to school? A human baby has gill slits?"

Lie #104. Nope - embryos, regardless of whether they are human, have gill arches. These are not the same as actual gill slits. From Microsoft Encarta:

"In a blastocyst less than two weeks old...the microscope reveals the amnion (a sac surrounding the embryo), chorion (a membrane that develops around the amnion and lines the uterine wall), yolk sac, and distinct germ layers...At the beginning of its fourth week the embryo, now about 4 to 5 mm (about 0.16 to 0.2 in) long, has the rudiments of eyes and ears, and each side of the neck shows four gill clefts. A tail is also present."

A yolk sac? A tail? Gill clefts? If god designed adam as an entirely independent, perfectly created creature literally from the ground up, where do humans get off having gill clefts? Why do they have a tail? Why on Earth do we need a yolk sac? These features only make sense within the theory of evolution. They make no sense whatsoever from a creationist point of view.

Nobody ever said the gill clefts are gills, or that the baby ever breathes through them. These are not gills and do not function in humans as gills; however, this same feature - the gill cleft, is precisely what develops to cover the gills in a fish. It is from the same origin, but used for a different purpose. If it is not for the purpose of developing gills, why do fish have it? If it is for the purpose of developing gills, why do humans have it, together with aortic arches and a two-chambered heart at that stage?

Hovind: "The woman that started Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger...is a strong believer in abortion. Most folks dont realize that she was also a racist. She wanted to wipe out the Spanish, the Blacks, and the Jews. She hated them. That was the total purpose for Planned Parenthood, and any taxpayer dollars going to Planned Parenthood ought to be against the law."

Lie #105. Can you say 'ad hominem'? Unless Hovind can show evidence for his display of hatred, then I have no problem calling him a liar and a psycho. He is doing nothing but trashing the reputation of a woman whose only effort to prevent birth was in the education of people, particularly poor people (the majority of which always seem to be non-whites) as to contraception and to venereal diseases. Obviously Hovind would rather have no contraception. This sadistic swine would rather have people catch all manner of venereal diseases by withholding education from them, and bring multitudes of unwanted children into a life of misery. What would be more in keeping with the traditional view of Satan's purpose on Earth than that?

I have noticed that it is a trait of Hovind's to pretend that people he does not like are racists. He does this because of his own brand of racism. Hovind thinks that non-whites are so dumb that he can seduce them into joining his cause if he can only label his opponents as racists. He forgets that non-whites have brains and can think just as well as whites. This is a tactic of all creationists, since not a single thing Hovind says or publishes on creationism is original with him. He steals everything he preaches from other creationists without offering them a shred of credit. It just proves there is no honor among thieves.

Hovind: "One of the evidences that they will state in the textbooks as proof of evolution...is: Boys and girls, we come from simple life forms."

Lie #106. I don't know of any evolutionist who uses this ridiculous creationist argument - we come from simple life forms therefore we must have come from simple life forms? Hovind is an imbecile.

Hovind: "There is no such thing as a simple life form."

Lie #107. Does Hovind know what the definition of algae is? "A group of structurally simple organisms that carry out oxygen-evolving photosynthesis." How about anaerobic life? "All anaerobes are simple organisms, such as yeast and bacteria." I'll bet he hasn't heard of Chytrids: "A common name for small, simple life forms that make up the phylum Chytridiomycota in the fungi kingdom." Heard of hydra? "A number of small, aquatic, free-living animals characterized by a simple, two-layered, cylindrical body." Need I go on? Okay, how about a virus? Is it a life form? Is in non-living? Or is it precisely between the two - a form that Hovind and his lying brethren claim does not exist?

Hovind: "One paramecium is more complex than the space shuttle"

But just like the space shuttle, it is made up of very simple parts, some of which bear a strong resemblance to even more primitive life forms than the paramecium.

It is rather unfortunate for Hovind that he chose the paramecium for his example. The paramecium will occasionally reproduce by endomixis, a process involving total nuclear reorganization of individual organisms - something Hovind pretends does not exist, because it is proof of evolution!

The paramecium is a protozoan, which, as a member of the protista, is actually part of an entire kingdom of living things. This kingdom includes slime molds, which are single-celled organisms that are known to congregate at times of stress into a multi-cellular life form and carry on their sporing business in that fashion. The simple spontaneously generating the complex. Doesn't this fly in the face of the laws of thermodynamics, according to Hovind?!!!

At the level of protista, there is another kingdom called monera. The monera are prokaryotes, unlike the paramecium which is a eukaryote. The protista exhibit a nuclear envelope, mitochondria, and, in some forms, chloroplasts. The eukaryotes exhibit none of these, although some types do have photosynthetic membranes in place of the chloroplasts. In other words, there is evidence of evolution here! At some point in the past, something akin to a eukaryote ingested a bacterium which it could not then expel or digest. This bacterium enjoyed its environment so much that it thrived. This is apparently how the eukaryotes got their mitochondria and chloroplasts.

What Hovind (indeed every creationist) is too stupid to understand is that the ancestors were all in the past (duh - that's what ancestry means). Creationists are fond of picking an organism alive today and saying that it didn't evolve into something else alive today. Well it is so nice to hear them agreeing with the evolutionists! Of course present living organisms didn't evolve into present living organisms. No evolutionist ever said they did. What evolutionists say is that living things today had common ancestors. This is why you have to look into the past to find ancestors - you cannot look in the present, except as a rough guide to what to look for in the past.

Hovind: "The DNA found in you body is also extremely complex. Because it is smaller does not mean it is simpler."

Lie #108. Four bases, sugar, phosphate; how much simpler can it be? If god made DNA from scratch, perfectly, how come there is so much duplication and junk in it? Evolution explains this completely - it's precisely what you would expect to find if we evolved. The creationist camp can only explain it by their god's incompetence.

Hovind: "Maybe you work with computers in your line of work. Imagine this, take those forty Grand Canyons full of books, and condense them into software, and when you are done the software must fit into two tablespoons. Ah, God did it, and it reproduces itself! Do you know what the odds are of that happening by random chance? The odds are 1 x 10119,000. That is a big number, since there are only 1041 electrons in the known universe.

Lie #109. There are 10^41 (10 raised to the power of 41 - i.e. a 1 followed by 41 zeroes) atoms in all the living things on Earth. Obviously Hovind stole this figure from some other creationist and completely misunderstood it. There are 10^80 electrons, protons and neutrons in the universe (obviously no one counted these - it's a kind of guesstimate), so Hovind is way, way, way out on this one. So much for his repeated claims of being a science teacher. For all his hatred of the scientific method, he sure likes to steal scientists' work whenever he can, doesn't he? If this figure of 10^41 had been quoted as something in favor of evolution, he would have called it a lie and tried to destroy it, but because it doesn't say that - it says something he can use to pump up his position, then he swallows it whole. The man makes a science out of rank stupidity.

Hovind: "Neither will you get DNA to arrive by random chance. It just did not happen."

No it didn't - there was nothing random about it. Chemicals do not intermix and form compounds randomly - they adhere to strict rules. If it were not so, water could turn into wine randomly, and Hovind's god would be robbed of another miracle.

Hovind: "Another argument that the evolutionists give that I just love is: Boys and girls, we can prove evolution because we can arrange these animals in order and prove their common ancestors. "

Lie #110. What evolution says, is that according to the evidence, these animals evolved from earlier, similar animals.

Finding a series of them in ever younger rock strata does not absolutely prove anything, but if these animals are found in a series of strata, and have similar, but changing anatomies, then what is more likely? Is it most likely that they evolved from one another by means of accumulating small and ultimately beneficial changes over a period of many years? Or is it more likely that they were created all at once, over a period of a few days, and then a worldwide flood, which is scientifically impossible and which left no evidence, managed to magically sort millions of different and unrelated animals and plants into layers in such a way that it gives every reasonable appearance of them all having evolved from earlier forms, in a pattern which matches almost precisely the genetic information we are gathering from animals living today? Your call.

Hovind: "Just because they can be arranged in some predetermined order does not prove that is the way that it happened."

I could say this about the books of the Bible! So what Hovind is saying is that the English word 'procrastination', which is usually understood to mean the act of putting off something until tomorrow, has no relationship whatsoever with the Latin word 'cras', which means, 'tomorrow'? Is Hovind saying that the sun has no relationship whatsoever to the heat we feel on a warm summer's day - it is just coincidence that the sun happens to be out when it's hot? The rain we feel when a cold front comes through has nothing whatsoever to do with the water evaporating from the ocean downwind of us - the proximity of the two are a mere coincidence?

Hovind: "If I die, and I am buried on top of a hamster, does that prove thats my grandpa?"

No - try a snake. Hamsters are much too nice to have given rise to Kent Hovind.

Hovind: "Take, for instance, the horse theory. They have taken critters from all over the world, South America, Europe, and Asia, and put them all together in a predetermined idea. They have already decided to start off with the smallest to the largest animals. That is not the way they are found. They find them in all kinds of different layers...The eohippus is nothing more than the hyrax running around South America today....God created the horses." . Lie #111. Hovind again admits to evolution! Actually the correct name for eohippus is...hyracotherium - which is no doubt why this numb skull Hovind made the mistake of thinking it is pretty much a hyrax. The hyrax looks somewhat like a groundhog. It is about the size of a rabbit, but seems to be related according to internal anatomy to both elephants and...horses!.

Hyraxes have virtually no tail, but have toes on their feet (the same number in the same place as hyracotherium!) which are very well adapted to climbing steep rocks and trees. 'Eohippus' was about the size of a medium dog, and adapted to running. If Hovind can admit that eohippus can, over the course of 4,000 years, have evolved into something looking like a rodent that feeds on insects, lizards, eggs, berries and other plant material, then why cannot something akin to a chimpanzee evolve into a human? The chimpanzee, after all, shares with humans 99.6% of our active DNA. I would love to know what scientifically proven mechanism it was that allowed the former but prohibited the latter.

As to the order of discovery, yes, the horse fossils were not found (i.e. discovered) in the order they are arrayed to show evolution - but they _are_ arrayed in the order of their appearance in the fossil record. For Hovind to weasel his way around this by his inaccurate portrayal is deceitful at best, but it is the only way he can cast doubt on this.

The chain of horse evolution is an example. No one is claiming that every single specimen in this lineage gave rise to every subsequent specimen, but in terms of development, the animals grew larger (this is not a guaranteed facet of evolution, by the way), and their toes dwindled from four on the floor, to three and a splint, to three and a tiny splint, to one and two splints, to one and two tiny splints which is what today's horses have. Either this is a sequence of evolution, or god just absolutely could not get those critters perfect, could he?

By the way - the hyrax is not found in South America, but in the Middle East. It is what is referred to in the Bible as a coney. So if Hovind is right, not only did eohippus have to shrink to rabbit size in 4,000 years, it had to run all the way across the Atlantic in the process....

Hovind: "I was in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, Rush Limbaughs home town..."

Nothing to boast about....

Hovind: "...I do a lot of debates. I win every time I believe..."

There's nothing like a humble man...and Hovind is nothing like a humble man.

Hovind: "...These university professors' entire argument was this: Boys and girls, we can prove evolution because of amino acid sequencing inside cytochrome C."

Once again it does not, in and of itself, prove evolution, but it is very hard to explain, if you think some god, in six days, created 60 kinds just 6,000 years ago...wait a minute - six, six, six...hmm - could satan have written Genesis just to turn people away from god's plan to have us learn the details of our creation by evolution?!!

Seriously now, it is hard to understand how it came to be that animals long understood to be related (from the fossil record and comparative anatomy) have similar DNA and amino acid sequences unless those very sequences give rise to varying anatomies and species. Why did god do this? From the evolutionist point of view, there is nothing to explain - it is a natural and perfectly reasonable (and even predictable) consequence of genetic evolution.

Let's look at the cytochrome C evidence, shall we? Cytochromes play an essential role in transporting chemical energy in both plant and animal cells. Interesting that we all have them, if there is no evolution, isn't it? Cytochrome C consists of about 100 amino acids. Here is a sequence comparison of how many of that hundred differ (in other species) from humans:

Organism # different from humans Rhesus monkey 1 Dog 11 Rattlesnake 14 Bullfrog 18 Tuna 21 Silkworm 31 Wheat 43 Yeast 45

So, this sequencing, which Hovind does not dare reproduce in his seminar material, shows that the further away we get from humans (in terms of when we diverged from various ancestors), the more differences there are in the sequence of amino acids in cytochrome C. To make a creationist dichotomy out of it: either Hovind's six day creationist god decided, for the sole purpose of confusing modern scientists, to make the sequences look for all the world like animals evolved, or...animals evolved.

Hovind: "Did you know that you can look at the chart and the only difference between a man and a duck is 11 percent in the amino acid sequencing. We only missed being a duck by 11 percent. Thats close man! We only missed being a rattlesnake by 14 percent."

Once again, (apart from seemingly confusing a duck and a dog) Hovind is misleading you. This is one amino acid sequence. If all you were is one amino acid sequence, then Hovind might have a point, but there is much more to an organism and its relatedness (or non-relatedness) to others than the sequence of one set of amino acids. This is a deceitful thing creationists are expert at - remove one piece from the framework and pretend that it, in isolation, equals evolution. Destroy it with lies, and you have overturned evolution. Well, it doesn't work that way and this is why creationism stands whining hopelessly at the door of science like a hungry dog instead of hammering down that door with published scientific papers refuting evolution.

Hovind: "Evolution is a religion. It is not a science."

This is lie #2 revisited, so I won't count it again, but if this is the case, then I want Hovind and all the other morons who chant this mantra to detail what the religious traits are. Where is the hierarchy of clergy? Where are the churches? Where are the evangelical evolutionists touring the country at their flock's expense, preaching evolution and trying to get it into the churches? Where is the unprovable mythology? What are the holy scriptures of evolution? Where are the religious relics? Where do people meet to worship? To which god do they pray?

Hovind: "How many things have to be wrong on the car to make it not run? Any one of thousands, like not having your keys, or not having any gas, or not having any oil or letting your wife drive it first. A lot of things will cause your car not to run...If I gave you one tire, a running board, a frame, a steering wheel, and a windshield wiper, and said, Okay, take off. Head for Dallas. Youre not going to make it. Its just too complex. Im sorry you had better start over."

Yet another pathetic attempt to equate the supposed complexity of living things, for which there is no evidence of intelligence design whatsoever, with an obviously human artifact. Well let's run with it! Way, way back in the, say, eighteenth century, did someone suddenly make a car out of nothing? No - it didn't happen. Did they say, let's make a car, but we'll work up to it with a tire, a running board, a frame, a steering wheel, and a windshield wiper? No - it didn't happen, so where is the logic to this comparison? The way a car arrived, was via a wheel, a carriage, a steam engine, a simple gas engine and eventually, a modern vehicle. In other words, it evolved!

Did any of these stages prove worthless in and of itself? What was the use of a wheel without an interstate highway? What was the point of a carriage? How on Earth did it get from place to place without a motor? What was the use of a (steam) motor with no gasoline to run it? Did they give up on it because it had no gas engine, no roof, no rubber tires, no windshield? No, they built the modern car in steady stages, each appropriate to the time and place, and eventually, with demonstrably little far-sighted planning, arrived at the thing we have today.

Why is it that creationists ignore this comparison when talking about evolution? Why is it that creationists can so readily ask what use is half a wing, but never ask what use is a two wheeled vehicle? Obviously because they are liars and they do not want you to know they are liars, so they ask you not to think beyond their simple, kindergarten comparisons. In fact, if you are going to follow their religion, do not think at all - just join the flock.

Continued in part H

Budikka

From budikka@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:15:41 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part H 20K  

Hovind: "In spite of the obstacles, Charles Darwin wrote a book after much pushing and coaching from Charles Lyell."

Lie #112 (you thought I had quit numbering, didn't you?). As I mentioned earlier, it was not Lyell, but Malthus who set Darwin going, but the final push came from Alfred Wallace.

Hovind: " The Origin Of Species By Means Of Natural Selection Or The Preservation Of Favored Races In The Struggle For Life. Favored races? Ugh, Oh! Charlie, thats not politically correct. You see, Charles Darwins book came out in 1859. We still had slavery in this country."

But not in England where Darwin lived and where "Origin" was published. Hovind's mention of the word 'races' in a pathetic attempt to once again label someone as a racist when he cannot defeat their argument is very revealing. Here he is, red-handed, yet again attacking Darwin by calling him a racist, since he cannot prove scientifically that there is no such thing as genetic change. Sad, isn't it?

Hovind: "It was a great pseudo scientific way to justify racism."

And being a fanatical part of a religion which insists on a chosen people who will be saved and the rest of the world who will rot for eternity in hell is what, if not the worst form of discrimination?

Hovind: "Charles Darwin was a racist to the extreme."

Lie #113. From Darwin's "Descent of Man" published in 1871, a dozen years after "Origin":

"But the most weighty of all the arguments against treating the races of man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their having intercrossed. Man has been studied more carefully than any other animal, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four (Kant), five (Blumenbach), six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight (Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory de St-Vincent), sixteen (Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawfurd), or as sixty-three, according to Burke. This diversity of judgment does not prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shews that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to discover clear distinctive characters between them."

Does this sound to you like the thoughts of 'a racist to the extreme'? Hovind is nothing but a liar to the extreme. If you still doubt it, read this, from Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle":

"On the 19th of August we finally left the shores of Brazil. I thank God, I shall never again visit a slave-country...Near Rio de Janeiro I lived opposite to an old lady, who kept screws to crush the fingers of her female slaves...I have seen a little boy, six or seven years old, struck thrice with a horse-whip (before I could interfere) on his naked head, for having handed me a glass of water not quite clean;...I was present when a kind-hearted man was on the point of separating forever the men, women, and little children of a large number of families who had long lived together. I will not even allude to the many heart-sickening atrocities which I authentically heard of...It is often attempted to palliate slavery by comparing the state of slaves with our poorer countrymen:...as well might the use of the thumb-screw be defended in one land, by showing that men in another land suffered from some dreadful disease...picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children...being torn from you and sold like beasts to the first bidder!...It makes one's blood boil, yet heart tremble, to think that we Englishmen and our American descendants, with their boastful cry of liberty, have been and are so guilty...."

Hovind is lying scum of the worst possible kind.

Hovind: "A philosophy of life that says, There is no God. We got here by blind chance. There is no one that you must account to when you die. This theory will destroy you."

Lie #114. This has nothing whatsoever to do with evolution, and is nothing more than ad hominem argument from Hovind the Divine. The theory of evolution says nothing whatsoever about god. Science cannot comment on the supernatural unless aspects of it lend themselves to scientific testing.

Hovind: "Thats what destroyed Charles Darwin, his own theory of evolution. It was his own undoing. Darwin thought that women were inferior. He said, A married man would be a poor slave, worse than a Negro."

Lie #115. That's why Darwin married, I guess.... I have no idea where Hovind digs up these monstrous lies since he never offers any references, but again, Darwin himself refutes Hovind. Here is another excerpt from "Descent":

"With women, marriage at too early an age is highly injurious; for it has been found in France that, "Twice as many wives under twenty die in the year, as died out of the same number of the unmarried." The mortality, also, of husbands under twenty is "excessively high," but what the cause of this may be, seems doubtful. Lastly, if the men who prudently delay marrying until they can bring up their families in comfort, were to select, as they often do, women in the prime of life, the rate of increase in the better class would be only slightly lessened."

How about this one: "The advancement of the welfare of mankind is a most intricate problem: all ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children."?

Hovind: "What effect has evolution had? If you teach a child that he is an animal, what can you expect?"

Lie #116. Well what did Darwin have to say on the subject? This, again, from "Descent of Man":

"The feeling of religious devotion is a highly complex one, consisting of love, complete submission to an exalted and mysterious superior, a strong sense of dependence, fear, reverence, gratitude, hope for the future, and perhaps other elements. No being could experience so complex an emotion until advanced in his intellectual and moral faculties to at least a moderately high level."

And later: "The ennobling belief in God is not universal with man; and the belief in spiritual agencies naturally follows from other mental powers.

Does that sound to you like the work of a devout atheist, dedicated to overthrowing god and religion?

Hovind: "There is a great magazine that you ought to subscribe to called Creation Magazine, published in Australia. One of the articles, from March to May of 1992, tells about the racism propagated toward the Aborigines in Australia."

But not by Darwin. Here is something he says in "Descent":

"The same remark holds good with equal or greater force with respect to the numerous points of mental similarity between the most distinct races of man. The American aborigines, Negroes and Europeans are as different from each other in mind as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly struck, whilst living with the Feugians on board the Beagle, with the many little traits of character, shewing how similar their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded negro with whom I happened once to be intimate."

Is this the work of a racist? Is this the work of someone who would see the Australians treated as inferior? Hovind is a liar.

Hovind: "Matter of fact, they went down to Tasmania and shot Tasmanian Aborigines off the coast of Australia... Hundreds and hundreds, and even thousands were killed...It was the philosophy of evolution that drove them."

I am willing to bet that these figures are a lie, too, but I won't count this, because I know that all over the world, atrocities were committed against native peoples by the white invaders. This has nothing to do with Darwin or evolution. Does Hovind seriously think that all of these criminal white people were atheist evolutionists? No - every last one of them - at that period in history, believed firmly in a white man's god, I guarantee it.

Hovind: "The philosophy of evolutionism and humanism is what drove Karl Marx...He said later in life, My objective in life is to dethrone God, and destroy capitalism"

I am not going to call this one, either, since I cannot check on it, but I can assure you that the Communist Manifesto, authored by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, makes no mention of god. It's only concern is about the difficulty of poor people making a decent living. The sins of the old Soviet empire cannot be blamed on Marx or Engels - all they wanted was a decent lot for everyone. How is that any different from what religion claims to offer?

Hovind: "You see; we would not have communism today if it had not been for evolution succeeding in the middle 1800s.'

Lie #117. I am willing to go out on a limb and call this one. I think I would have an easier time proving my side than Hovind would his. "Origin" was not published until 1859, "Descent" later yet, and in that time, evolution had a hard time gathering adherents.

Hovind: "Evolution was John D. Rockefellers philosophy of life. John D. Rockefeller, and many of the industrialists back in the 1800s, like Andrew Carnegie, believed in evolution."

So now the communists and capitalists are pulling together? Next time you see Hovind, ask him: did Rockefeller and Carnegie pay their taxes, or did they try to get out of paying by pretending they were a citizen of god? Hovind will know what I am talking about.

Hovind: "You see, evolution teaches that only the strongest survive"

Lie #118. Evolution is concerned with adaptation to the environment, not strength. Strength and wealth have nothing whatsoever, in any way, shape, or form, to do with it. What was it Jesus supposedly taught? If someone compels you to go a mile, go two? If someone takes your coat, give him your shirt? Turn the other cheek? What is that, if not adaptation to the environment? Jesus was an evolutionist!

Hovind: "Evolution was Theodore Roosevelts problem...Have you ever wandered why we broke all the treaties with the Indians?"

Wandered? Have I ever wandered why we broke the treaties? No, but I have wondered, and what I wondered was why the massive religious majority in this country, enjoying their religious freedom from Europe, unfettered by the 'evils' of evolution and atheism, did nothing to stop the slaughter.

Hovind: "In 1871, Congress scrapped all treaties with the Indians and moved them out to the worst property that they could find."

Lie #119. The Cherokees, at one point, lost a goodly portion of their land for no other reason than that they sided with the south in the Civil War, and of course, paid the price for being on the losing side.

Hovind makes a big issue out of the 'Trail of Tears'. Regardless of what he says, here is what happened. This is the chronology of the 'Nunadautsunt' or 'the trail where we cried' - now known to us, in that peculiarly American penchant for the sound bite, as The Trail of Tears:

1802: Indian eviction to the west of the Mississippi suggested by Thomas Jefferson - the All-American hero.

1825: Indian eviction to the west of the Mississippi recommended by departing president James Monroe in his final address to Congress. Another American hero.

1829: Indian Removal Act introduced in Congress, with complete approval of President Andrew Jackson, a Christian who joined the Presbyterian church when his presidential office came to term.

1839: Removal of the Cherokees begins. Start of the Nunadautsunt.

1859: Publication of Darwin's "Origin" which according to Hovind (whose native American name must be something like "He Who Tells Big Ones"), precipitated all this racist, atheist, communist, evil, evolutionist hatred towards the same Native Americans who had been killing each other and stealing each other's land long before the white man ever set foot in this country. The white folks were just much more efficient at it, is all.

Hovind: "Evolution is largely responsible for what happened to the Indians."

Lie #120. "Origin" was published a full 20 years after the Nunadautsunt. That's pretty good that Darwin managed to force something to happen 20 years before the book which caused it was published....

Hovind: "There would not be communism in Russia today if had not been for Charles Darwins book on evolution.

Lie #121. I am not even going to dignify this with a longer response.

Hovind: "Benito Mussolini was a dictator in Italy during World War II. He was an outspoken evolutionist. He thought that the Italians were a superior species. The Italian troops slaughtered the Ethiopian troops, after all the Ethiopians were just black. They were inferior."

And then he signed a pact with the Japanese to go attack the white folk up north.. Yeah - makes a lot of sense. Is this the same Mussolini who was jailed for opposing his nation's war in Libya? Is this the same Mussolini who advocated Italy's joining the allied side in World War 1? Is this the same Mussolini who founded the Fasci di Combattimento in March 1919, a nationalistic, antiliberal, and antisocialist movement - all causes espoused by Hovind in his seminar? Is this the same Mussolini who advocated capitalism and expanded social services?

Unfortunately, he turned out to be a complete moron. He invaded Ethiopia not because they were black (why go that far when there were other black nations closer?), but because it was (in his sight) easy. Besides, why does Hovind pretend to care about a nation that is 45% Muslim? These people do not recognize the deity of Jesus. Aren't they enemies of Hovind's belief system? I would love to hear his opinion on this.

Hovind: "The fellow on the right is Adolf Schicklgruber. Have you ever heard of him? He couldnt spell Schicklgruber in kindergarten, so he changed his name to Hitler."

Lie #122. Schicklgruber was never Adolf Hitler's name. Hitler's father had used that name, but his son was born Adolf Hitler. Hitler was never a house painter (he did paint, but not houses) or a paper hanger.

Hovind: "He wrote the book Mein Kampf. You ought to read Mein Kampf and see how many times Hitler refers to racial crossing, superior races, or higher races. The major theme of the book is Germans are a superior race."

You ought to read it. For once, take Hovind's advice and do please read Mein Kampf. In it, you will see that Hitler believed he was doing God's work in destroying the Jews. It had nothing to do with evolution. The Catholic Church, even at the height of the atrocities, never excommunicated Hitler, nor spoke out against his activities.

In reading Mein Kampf, you will see how much Hovind and Hitler have in common as to their views on Marxism, and their views on a race of chosen people - Hitler thought it was the Aryans, Hovind thinks it is people who believe precisely what he does. A least Hitler was willing to allow some variation in thought!

Another similarity between Hitler and Hovind is that the latter's methods are the same routines that the Nazis used to abuse Jews, gypsies, gays and other 'undesirables' in the 1930's and 40's. Dehumanize them, fabricate stories about them, hide the truth, and they're easy pickings. It is shameful, but very revealing that Hovind and the creationazis have adopted such a methodology.

Hovind: "Whenever I have free time, I enjoy going to the library and reading books. Keene State has an entire section devoted to Adolf Hitler and the holocaust...I spent forty dollars photocopying pages."

Too cheap to buy the books, and ignorant of copyright laws.

Adolf Hovind: "That was Margaret Sangers philosophy of life as well: Wipe out the inferior."

Lie #123. Sanger was a trained nurse who chose to work among the poor, spread information about birth control early this century, when very few cared about the poor - including a wealthy and powerful church.. For Hovind to cheapen her work and memory is despicable. Is there nothing this slug will not slime? Is there no depth to which he will not sink, in enforcing his insane vision?

Hovind: "There are still those who believe in the Aryan supremacy."

And they are no better than those who believe in religious supremacy. Period.

Hovind: 'If you think that I leave my family 60 percent of the year...because I dont want to be with my gorgeous wife, youre mistaken. I would much rather be at home, but there is a war going on. Somebody must warn the troops."

Lie #124. I'm calling this piece of self-serving bullshit. For someone who pontificates endlessly against pride and arrogance to offer up this proud and arrogant trash is nauseating. For someone to spout, in this very seminar about the evils of people taking pride in their appearance, and then spout about his gorgeous wife is pathetic. Oh how self-sacrificing of him!

This is why (he claims) he will not have an Internet debate with me - no time! One worldwide Internet debate would settle so many of these issues and reach more people in one night than he could possibly reach in a year of traveling. He could even be home with his wife while debating me, yet Hovind has such an ego to feed that he needs to travel and be there in person so he can soak up the adoration of his limp-brained audiences. If he had any real material to offer, he would do it professionally, and effectively, not self-servingly. What a dirt bag and a lowlife he is.

Hovind: "God is not in favor of racism."

Lie #125. This is why god made the Jews the chosen race, of course. This is why god repeatedly helped his chosen ones to kill all and sundry in the lust for land, depicted clearly, repeatedly, and graphically in the old testament. No one's hands are free of blood - just as Hitler slaughtered Jews horribly, so the Bible depicts carnage inflicted upon others by the Jews themselves. No one is above anyone else - no one can stand up and paint others black. We are all responsible and all in this together. Obviously Hovind cannot see the other side of the coins he tosses so casually.

Hovind: "If you will give money to send a missionary across the ocean to win a black man to Christ, and you will not go across the street to win a black man to Christ, or invite a black man to your church, you are a HYPOCRITE!"

And what about black women - are they supposed to go to hell?

Hovind: "Did you know that Russian teachers come to America to study education because the American educational system is considered the best in the world for teaching students these three principals. This prepares them to be good communists and to doubt the word of God."

Lie #125. Again I am not going to dignify this trash with a long comment.

Hovind: "Thats right boys and girls this is the way that we are going to take over this world. We are going to strike and take a country, and then we are going to back up and say, Weve changed; were nice now. Send us your aid. Then, we are going to strike and take another one, and back up and say, Hey, weve changed. Send us more money please."

Lie #126. Obviously Hovind's gift of prophecy is not as great as his gifts of profits.

Hovind: "American capitalism has helped finance the communist take over of the world. Somebody is going to answer to God for this.

Hovind can kiss my assets.

Hovind: "Although it is true that people are starving in Russia, nothing has changed. When you feel that we should be sending them aid, ask yourself why they are producing six times more military hardware now than they were ten years ago? Six times!"

Lie #127. I am not even going to look this up. Hovind needs to come up with hard facts to back up his wild assertions. Who knows, perhaps he is right and the Russians are producing and selling arms because it is the only way they have to make money. Let Hovind prove it, if it isn't a lie.

Hovind: "One solution would be to tell your congressman or senator that the next time Russia says they need aid to offer to buy all of their tanks, helicopters, and nuclear submarines for ten cents on the dollar."

So much for turn the other cheek and give them your shirt....

Continued in part I

Budikka

From budikka@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:19:45 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part I 21K

Hovind: "When communism took over in China, ten thousand Christians a month were executed; yet, surprisingly, Christianity flourished. It is estimated that there are 55 million Christians in China today."

5% - Wow! I am tempted to call him on the 10,000/month slaughter rate, but since I have made some close calls lately, I won't count this officially. It would be nice if he would even once back up one of his bizarre claims, though.

Hovind: "When Pol Poc, the leader of the Kimer Rooge, took over Cambodia"

Lie #128. It was Pol Pot, and the Khmer Rouge. And let's not forget the other side of this coin, either - the oppressive regime of Norodom Sihanouk, who, while not as bloodthirsty as the Khmer Rouge turned out to be, effectively triggered their reign of terror by his own policies, just as the victors of World War 1 set the stage for World War 2 by their oppressive treatment of Germany after 1918.

Hovind: "When America pulled out of South Vietnam, a slaughter took place."

But it wasn't as big as the slaughter taking place beforehand, and now Vietnam turns out not to be the evil country we were all told to believe.

Here is Hovind's list of communist guidelines for revolution. Let's compare it with the activities of fundamentalist evangelicals, shall we?

1. Corrupt the young. Overall, the youth of our nation are losing regard for established values and integrity.

And the church, with the bloodlust of the old testament and the intolerance of the new is going to offer family values?

2. Break down the old moral virtues.

And replace them with ambiguous Biblical injunctions which, throughout history, anyone has been able to interpret in any way they chose.

3. Encourage civil disorder. Civil disorder is rampant.

And the talk of Armageddon just around he corner is, of course, not stirring up anyone.

4. Divide the people into hostile groups...

Such as religious denominations?

..and political persuasions

Such as communists vs. Hovind?

...many other hot issues, such as abortion, have stirred and divided the country.

Given that the Bible has nothing to say about abortion, and the Jewish religion (upon which Christianity is firmly based, although most Christians would rather forget this) has traditionally not considered a fetus a living thing until it is born and draws the first breath, where is the religious right's moral authority in this? The abortion issue has been entirely one-sided, fomented and stirred up by religious fundamentalists. If life is precious, why are they not lobbying against the death penalty? Why are they not lobbying to save the 40,000 children under 5 years old who die every day from starvation, neglect, and disease? Why is it just cute, young, American and white that is worth preserving?

5. Get the peoples minds off their government by focusing their attention on athletics.

Get feeble minds to quit even a pretense of thinking by presenting mindless platitudes about religion, and overwhelming them with evangelical creationist lies.

6. Gain control of all the media.

Religion is doing a fine job of this, and now creationists want to get into the schools to go after your children.

7. Destroy peoples faith in their leaders.

By telling them that their historical heroes were all racist evolutionists who slaughtered their so-called inferiors, as Hovind has just got through doing in this very chapter of his seminar? By telling them their sports heroes and role models are idiots, as Hovind does in this very list? By trashing the names of decent people like Margaret Sanger, who, like the good Samaritan, helped the downtrodden?

8. Cause the registration of all firearms. Do you know this is one of the communist plans to take control of the country? Register all firearms...Thats what Lenin called for, to disarm the people. Thats what Adolf Hitler wanted...Joseph Stalin wanted registration of all firearms...David Koresh was a gun collector and a tax evader.

There is a difference between tax evasion (which is illegal) and tax avoidance (which is legal). Hovind ought to know this - he is an expert on not paying taxes. Hovind doesn't need firearm registration - he is so busy firing off his mouth that what he needs is mouth registration. When he explains how firearm registration constitutes disarming the most violent nation on Earth, I'll listen.

Hovind: "Gun control is stupid! The solution is criminal control. Child control? Yes, but not gun control. School control, politician control? Yes!"

I'll let this idiocy stand uncommented, along with this next, which I shall call Lie #129:

Hovind: "The New World Order is going to have an army and we are already training them. A lot of policeman and servicemen are going to be in it, and they are going to have black uniforms, black helicopters, and black tanks."

I saw that movie - "Men in Black" - great comedy....

Hovind: "Our Constitution is being gradually whittled away from under us"

By the fundamentalists who want to overthrow the establishment clause and force their brand of religion down everyone's throat.

Hovind: "I am not for gun control. We ought to execute criminals for certain crimes."

And forget about that little commandment that says, "Thou shalt not kill." Whatever happened to Hovind's faith? What happened to prayer? Is Hovind so lacking confidence in his god that he needs a _gun_?

Hovind: "In 1776, a man by the name of Adam Weishaupt started a group called the Illuminati, the enlightened ones. Their symbol is on the back of our dollar bill...They say, Once we get the New World Order in place, and institute the all-seeing-eye on top which represents Lucifer, the light bearer will be in charge. Yes, the all-seeing-eye on your dollar bill represents Lucifer. They know that, and they fully intend for Lucifer to rule this world."

Lie #130. Lucifer does not in any way, shape, or form represent satan, as Hovind tries to imply here. The name 'Lucifer' appears only in Isaiah 14:12, where it makes it explicitly clear that the reference is to the morning star, since it specifically says, 'morning star'. Duhh! The Hebrew word for this is Helel, and the Greek word is Phosphoros. They all refer to the planet Venus. Oddly, there is another reference to 'morning star' in the Bible - it refers to Jesus, so if Lucifer could just as easily be the so-called son of god.

Hovind: "I believe that the builders of the Great Pyramids were either Noah and Shem who built it after the flood. Or maybe it was Adam and Enoch who built it before the flood, and it was the only structure to survive the flood."

What a mess of screwed up English that is! Hovind is entitled to his belief, but he has nothing other than belief to offer for this. There is no evidence to support this contention and every evidence against it.

The Great Pyramid is positioned perfectly, north, south, east, and west...We have no idea how they built it. We could not build it today."

Lie #131. Yes we do know how they built it as even a casual glance at any book on the pyramids will show. The pyramid is not perfectly oriented - it is off by over 5 degrees and the sides are out by about 8 inches from one another - therefore it is not the work of god (or space aliens). Yes we could build it today and build it even better than the Egyptians did. There is nothing mystical or magical about the pyramids. Any study of Egyptian history will show how the pyramids literally arose in sequence, from simple mastabas (slabs over graves in the ground) to small pyramids and finally the accomplishments of the Egyptians of Khufu's era, for whom the Great Pyramid was built.

Hovind: "The symbolism for Christianity is all through the building."

Lie #132. Where? Where is the crucifix? Where is the lamb? Where is the trinity? Where are the Biblical inscriptions? If it was not built for Khufu, why was his name (inscribed in the pyramid) found by Vyse and Perring in the 1837/8 archaeology season when they broke into a previously unexplored chamber? What was the meaning of the sarcophagus if it were not for the coffin of a pharaoh?

Hovind: "The sides of it have 144,000, smooth, polished limestone blocks. Ah, 144,000, that number is in the Bible."

Lie #133. Yes it is, and it doesn't include westerners, but you will find it nowhere on the pyramid - there are no smooth sides. Any guess as to how many polished blocks there were is just that - a guess.

Hovind: "Did you know that there is about 160 countries in the world right now?"

Lie #134. Try 'more than 185' - which was the 1997 membership of the UN.

Hovind: "Ten are going to get together for the European common market."

Lie #135. There were 15 members of the European economic Community by 1994 - the year before Hovind's seminar is dated, so he was lying in it and he knew it - either that or he was too stupid to check. There are about 13 other European nations who would like membership, but even if we count these (making 28) and deduct that number from 185 (sovereign nations), it leaves 157 - nowhere near Hovind's prophetic 153. Obviously he is completely wrong.

Hovind: "Satan is trying to muscle in and take over and he will not have a problem"

Lie #136 - there is no "Satan." The word, 'satan' actually translates as 'adversary' - it has nothing to do with a fallen angel, the Evil One, or Lucifer.

Hovind: "God looks at these conspiracies and laughs."

Given that in the Gospel according to Hovind, god created everything and knew beforehand how it was going to turn out, why wouldn't he? He has been responsible for everything all along.

Hovind: "The Great Pyramid is a neat subject to study. If you go up to the kings chamber you will notice an empty tomb with a red granite coffin. The coffin has the exact dimensions of the ark of the covenant."

Lie #137. Reckoning a cubit as between 17 and 21 inches, this translates to a rounded maximum of 53"x32"x32" for the ark. To the best of my knowledge, the internal dimensions of the sarcophagus are over six feet long, by just over two feet wide, by almost three feet deep.

Hovind: "The angle of the shaft leading down or the angle leading up is twenty-six degrees, nine minutes and seven seconds. It is noteworthy, that this is the exact angle from the pyramid to Bethlehem, right to the second."

Lie #138. My book gives 26 deg. 2 min. 30 sec., but either way, the Pyramid is on the outskirts of Cairo. The angle between Cairo and Bethlehem is closer to 19 degrees than to 26, if I recall my earlier calculation correctly.

Hovind: "The Great Pyramid is positioned on the latitude line and the longitude line, which happens to be the longest ones in the world above sea level.

Lie #139. I don't know which map Hovind looks at, but when I look at my map, the longitude line with the most land under it seems to be either something around 20 deg. East, or 50 degrees West. As far as latitude is concerned, the line covering the most land would have to be somewhere up in the 50 to 70 degree range. Nothing as far south as Cairo gets even close.

Hovind: "This is all part of the New World Order, which was a conspiracy started by Satan back in the garden of Eden. He wanted to rule the world."

Lie #140. He is already considered lord of this world! However, if you actually read Genesis and don't let Hovind do your thinking for you, all the serpent (not satan - a serpent) wanted to do was to educate Eve. The Church has been against women's liberation from the start!

Hovind: "...he will cause everyone to receive a mark in their right hand or in their forehead...The mark is going to be six-hundred three-score and six, 666."

Or in some versions of the Bible, 616.

Hovind: "In 1972, IBM Corporation developed the bar code where the computer can actually translate lines and spaces into zeros and ones, a binary language, and read it."

Lie #141. IBM did not develop this at all. On October 20, 1949, Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver filed a patent application titled "Classifying Apparatus and Method," which was designed to read a bar code pattern of four white lines on a dark background

Hovind: "If you look at the first two lines on the bar code, they are longer than the rest and are unmarked. The system does not tell you what these numbers are."

Lie #142. That's because they are not numbers, they are markers.

Hovind: "It just so happens that two skinny lines with a space in between them is the computer binary code for the number six."

Lie #143. There are two bar codes for a six - and they have nothing to do with computer binary codes as such - they relate only to the bar pattern. Here they are (and neither consists of two lines only):

0101111 1010000

You will notice that the bar code on the right has ones where there are zeroes in the bar code on the left. The scanner reads the bar code from the center outwards, reading both to the left and the right. This is how it can read the bar code no matter which way up it is. This is why there are two codes - so the scanner can read it either way and verify the number. This is why there are two bars in the middle of the code - to tell the scanner where to begin. This is why there are two lines at either end of the code - to tell the scanner where to end. Hovind is heaping lie upon lie upon lie.

Hovind: "Why would they put a six at the beginning, middle and end? Why didnt they choose a two or a four? Its on every product. Check it out and see for yourself."

Obviously Hovind's brain power is severely limited (if it were not, he would not be a creationist), so let me help him out. The reason there are two lines with a white space in between is that the scanner reads not only the lines and spaces, but the width of the lines and spaces (how else would it read two or more consecutive ones or zeroes?). The two lines and space are to show the scanner where to begin and also what the width of a single line and space is, so it can tell when there are lines and spaces that are double, triple, or quadruple width.

Hovind: "The Bible says if you receive that mark and worship the beast, you are going to be in trouble. Read Revelation chapter 14 and you will see how they will be tormented and punished."

Ever wonder why the fundies take such a delight in contemplating the torments and punishments of the damned? They are sadists, that's why - they have no time for loving they neighbor.

Hovind: "In 1990, they begin putting little magnetic strips inside our paper bills. If you examine a five, a ten, or a twenty dollar bill while holding it up to the light, you will see the strip about one-inch in on the left side. This is to prevent counterfeiting, but there are other things that they can do with it. They can detect, roughly, how much money is in your pocket when you walk past sensors, based on that strip."

Lie #144. I am going to call this a lie until and unless Hovind offers proof for this.

Hovind: "A little microchip was developed to aid paralyzed people to walk. Plans were to inject this microchip in the muscles of paralyzed people and utilize a computer attached to their back to stimulate the muscles."

Lie #145. Until Hovind comes up with a reference, this is a lie, because I don't see how the chip is going to help the muscles. A computer with electrodes in the muscles, I can see some use for, but chips in the muscles? If the chip is there, why do they need a computer on their back?. Hovind makes no sense.

Hovind: "You see, America is bankrupt. The world bankers already own the world. The national debt exceeds the value of the country."

Lie #146 - until and unless Hovind backs this preposterous claim with fact.

Hovind: "We are bankrupt, but they cannot really cash in and foreclose on the mortgage because too many people still have guns."

Yeah, right! Like the IRS never manages to get taxes from gun owners. Or creationist evangelists.

Hovind: "Thats why we have some senators and representatives in there saying, The second amendment is to protect your right to have guns so that you can go hunting. No, no, no!...The purpose of the second amendment, the right to bear arms, was so the citizens could protect themselves from their own government."

Darn! And I thought that was what the voting process was for.

Hovind: "Everybody ought to be allowed to have an M1 tank in their front yard if that's what they want to without having it registered."

!

Hovind: "There are too many people here that cannot be controlled; so get rid of them. Thats why AIDS was purposefully developed in a Maryland laboratory to wipe out population."

Lie #147. It has been traced to chimpanzees in Africa.

Hovind: "I know exactly what I am talking about."

Next time you see Hovind - ask him to produce the evidence, because although creationist freaks and weirdoes frequently talk up these conspiracies, they never ever produce documentation to back it up even though they always claim it is there.

The only time I have seen any so-called documentation on a conspiracy was over that insane "Clinton is assassinating people" garbage that was out on the Internet a while ago. I believe Pat Robertson and his ilk were selling videos on this topic - they'll do anything to fleece the sheep, won't they? Well, Barbara Mikkelson did an investigation into the names on the list and found out that the claims were nothing but bullshit. When I last looked at this, the web page was located here:

http://www.american-politics.com/101598BodyCount.html

Hovind: "The Bible states in Hosea 4:6a, My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge..."

A better injunction to adhere to the principles of scientific investigation, I cannot offer.

Hovind: Paul Hoaglar, the head of the Nebraska Board of Education, a former Nebraska senator, said to Everette Silivans lawyer, Fundamentalist parents have no right to indoctrinate their children in their beliefs. We are preparing their children for the year 2000 and life in a global one-world society (New World Order, the same thing thats on the dollar bill), and those children will not fit in"

We have no idea what Hoaglar (if that's how his name is spelled - we can never tell with Hovind) actually said and what Hovind added since there are no quote marks and no references. This is from Hovind, who claims to be a scholar. How one world pulling together would be a bad thing - and something which god would not rejoice in, I cannot imagine.

Hovind: "Persecution has already begun against creationists in the public school system. It is shocking to see what is happening to many of our public school teachers and how they have lost their jobs because they were creationists."

Lie #148. Knowing Hovind, I have no problem calling this a lie - even if teachers have been fired (all we have is Hovind's word, which is as good as a lie), I am willing to bet it is because they were not doing the job they were contracted to do, or were proselytizing to kids in school.

Hovind: "Look what Kendrick Frazier, an Iowa professor said in the Fall 1983 issue of Skeptical Inquirer, The professor has the right to fail any student, no matter what his grades are, if the professor finds out he is a creationist."

Well all I can confirm about this is that there was an article about creationist pseudo-science in that issue. Since I do not have the issue, I cannot confirm what Frazier may or may not have said. The bottom line here is that Frazier is an author. He is not the judiciary. He is not a tribunal. He is not a legislator nor is he military, or police, or one of Hovind's men in black, so Hovind needs to explain how one man expressing an opinion constitutes persecution. If this is the case, then I want Hovind arrested for persecuting evolutionists.

Hovind: "It is time to become motivated!...What do you want to accomplish with your life? What is your driving force in life? Get a bigger house? Get a fancier car?"

Or a new air-conditioning system like Hovind did?

Hovind: "What drives me is helping to defeat evolution and helping Christians to have a renewed faith in Gods word. I think about it at night. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and make notes, Gotta make a slide on this, to show this fact."

Does this, or does this not, sound like an obsessive compulsive?

Hovind: "If America should become a communist country or a dictatorship, which we inevitably will unless a miracle happens in the very near future"

Lie #149. Well here we are four years on from his seminar and we are no closer to Hovind's prediction now than when he made it.

Continued in part J

Budikka

From budikka@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:20:18 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part J 23K

Hovind: "I have enjoyed the freedom in America that I have had so far"

Yet he would cheat the government out of taxes, and see this free society overthrown for an oppressive and restrictive fundamentalist regime that would turn America into a Christian version of Iran under the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Hovind: "Start a tape lending ministry. Maybe you do not know how to preach on creationism. I do, so get my tapes and books, and pass them out to somebody."

Be sure to pay Hovind first, so he can travel the country preaching lies at your expense.

Hovind: "Cancel cable TV and newspapers (give time and money to God)"

And render yourself ignorant of what is really going on in the world so you will fall prey more easily to the lies of the creationists and fundamentalists.

Hovind: "When you are dealing with Jews, you talk about Scripture, and the Messiah. When you go to the heathen, you must to do it as Paul did on Mars Hill. I want to talk to you about the unknown God, the creator of the universe. Thats where you must start. Scripture does not phase them."

So Hovind has no faith in the so-called word of god?

Hovind: "Start a Bible club release time. A lot of counties have release time. Thats where they have to allow the students out of school for an hour to have Bible study."

So rather than have them get an education in school and study the Bible in the evenings and on weekends, Hovind wants to tear your children away from their education and have them read the Bible. Next time you see him - ask him why.

Hovind: "Jesus said to preach the gospel to every creature"

Lie #150. (Although this depends on where in the Bible you look - you look in the right places, you can use the Bible to justify anything you care to). In Matthew, 10:5 it specifically says, "These twelve Jesus sent forth, and commanded them, saying, Go not into the way of the Gentiles, and into [any] city of the Samaritans enter ye not." So why is Hovind overriding Jesus express command?

Hovind: "What about pangaea? Were the continents ever connected?...School children are still being taught this theory. The only evidence to support this theory is that Africa and South America look as if they would fit together."

Lie #151. When you consider there is a volcanic trench running the length of the Atlantic (it comes ashore in Iceland), and that either side of this trench, the seabed is pulling away measurably, does this sound like it's 'only a theory'? There are similar trenches in other places (California sits on one of them).

Hovind: "The second evidence that is given for pangaea is..."

Wait a minute! He just got through saying 'The only evidence to support this theory...' - now he is saying there is more?

Hovind: "...the idea that the continents are drifting. There is a little movement, but that doesnt prove that it has been happening for millions of years. It could have started one hundred years ago."

Lie #152. If it started one hundred years ago, then Hovind and his cronies need to come up with an explanation as to why the continents on either side of the rifts actually contain similar fossils in the rock strata - rock strata which are also similar. They also need to explain the pattern of embedded magnetism in the rocks, which has changed, along with the earth's magnetic field, over the time the seabed has spread apart, leaving a magnetic pattern in the rock, which matches on either side of the fissure.

Hovind: "Camels have been found at the North Pole. That doesnt prove that the North Pole was at the equator in times past."

Lie #153. I would love for Hovind to explain how camels were found at the pole, since there is no land up there, only ice. Were they aquatic camels which got stuck in the ice? It is unfortunate for Hovind that he made me check up on camels, since I found an interesting FAQ at the www.talkorigins.org archives which mentions camels several times in relation to transitional forms!

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional/part2c.html is where you'll find them.

Hovind: "...many mammoths are found frozen standing straight up...they suffocated, which means they didnt drown. They were frozen so fast that the food in their stomach and teeth is still fresh. The food is still green as if they just ate it!".

Lie #154. This is as much a deceit as a lie. A quick visit to:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mammoths.html#bishop

reveals information from a book by E. W. Pfizenmayer, one of the scientists who actually recovered and studied the Berezovka mammoth, and wrote a book, "Siberian Man and Mammoth" about it. In this book, he reveals the lie to Hovind's nonsense above: "When one looked at the body one had the impression that it must have suddenly fallen into an unexpected fissure in the ice...After its fall the unlucky animal must have tried to get out of its hopeless position, for the right forefoot was doubled up and the left stretched forward as if it had struggled to rise. But its strength had apparently not been up to it, for when we dug it out still farther we found that in its fall it had not only broken several bones, but had been almost completely buried by the falls of earth which tumbled in on it, so that it had suffocated...Its death must have occurred very quickly after its fall, for we found half-chewed food still in its mouth, between the back teeth and on its tongue, which was in good preservation. The food consisted of leaves and grasses, some of the later carrying seeds. We could tell from these that the mammoth must have come to its miserable end in the autumn."

So from this one incident, Hovind typically, for a creationist, extrapolates into several, the food fresh as could be.

Hovind: "A gentleman from Waterloo, Ontario told me, Brother Hovind, my dad lived at the north slope of Alaska, and he ate mammoth meat. They dug one out of the ground, cut the meat off, and ate it. They said it tasted like roast beef and it was still as fresh as the day it was killed."

Lie #155. I am not sure if Hovind made this one up and is lying, or if the guy who told Hovind is lying, but mammoth meat, whether in the ice for 4,000 years or 40,000, is going to be so desiccated that I doubt very much it would be as tender as freshly slain mammoth, but it could, I guess, be edible, if you were really, really hungry - kinda like beef jerky. There is no way, regardless of how it met its end, that the meat could be fresh. Anyone who owns a freezer and has left meat in it too long understands this.

Here is another typical creationist ploy: it didn't happen to the creationist directly. The creationist never attempted to verify this information which came not from the person it happened to, but from yet another person. It was already second hand by the time Hovind got it. This scenario is typical in UFO lore as well. Can you imagine trying to defend yourself in court with such nonsense? Oh yeah, your Honor, my dad says he knows some guy who swears I didn't do it.

Hovind: "Baron Toll, the Arctic explorer, found a frozen, ninety-foot tall plumb tree on the New Siberian Island, which is 600 miles north of the Arctic Circle. This tree still had huge plumbs and leaves on it."

Lie #156. Plumb tree? I think this illiterate moron means 'plum' tree. I had a hard time locating this Baron Toll, until I discovered his name mentioned in the talk.origins archives (obviously, I should have gone there first!). There is an article by E.T. Babinski at:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ce/3/part3.html from which I took this information.

Again, though he offers no credit, Hovind stole this story from Bible-Science News Vol 23. #4, April 1985. The article was entitled, "The Mystery of the Frozen Giants" by Lee Grady. He, in turn, took the information from "The Waters Above" by creationist Joseph Dillow (Moody Press, Chicago, 1981). Neither of these latter creationists, Hovind or Grady, bothered to check the source - they simply took another creationist's word for it. So much for creationist research. So much for their desire to learn the truth.

Was this information original with Dillow? Nope - he got it from another book: "The Mammoth and Mammoth Hunting in North-East Siberia" by Bassett Digby (H.F. & G. Witherby, London, 1926)! This book talks about what Baron von Toll found. Notice that none of this information comes direct from von Toll himself. Here is what Digby's book states:

"There was lying among them, too, a 90 ft. alder-tree (Alnus fructicosa), with even its roots and seeds preserved."

In other words, Hovind's story is fifth hand. Not one of the creationists tried to discover what the original story said, and so they pass on this legend of a "plumb" tree, when the truth is about an alder tree. Babinski actually tracked down von Toll's own report, which revealed that far from finding a freshly preserved saber-toothed cat, what was found was only a shoulder bone. Far from finding fresh "plumbs", all that was found was a well preserved tree - with no information whatsoever as to its freshness - all of that is invented by the creationists.

If there are so very many freshly preserved mammoths lying around, why is it that the Japanese cannot buy one from the Russians? According to an article in Discover magazine (April 1999), Japanese researchers believe they can clone a mammoth if they can find tissue which is fresh enough - they have so far failed to find any. Obviously, if this is the case, Hovind's entire story about fresh mammoth meat is a lie.

Hovind: "Mammoths do not have any sweat glands. They were not designed for cold climates."

Lie #157. Obviously Hovind is too stupid to see the connection between sweating and heat. Mammoths were, by every indication, evolved precisely for cold climates, although I am really skeptical about Hovind's categorical denial that mammoths had no sweat glands - they were mammals, after all. See the following web page:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/mammoths.html#burns (by Philip Burns)

for further information on mammoths.

Hovind: "Before the flood, there was no cold climates in the world. It was seventy-five degrees from pole-to-pole. The temperature was perfect everywhere."

Lie #158. There was no cold climates? I would love to know how it is that a supposed PhD can write a sentence like that. Anyway, if this is not a lie, Hovind needs to come up with the science to explain how the planet managed to be a 'perfect' 75 degrees everywhere, despite it being a globe. First of all, by whose definition is 75 perfect? Secondly, how was it that it never cooled at night? Thirdly, how was it that the poles, which receive sunlight at a very shallow angle at the best of times, managed to stay as warm as the equator, where the sun is largely overhead all the time. Also, he needs to explain, scientifically, how all of the present animals - which must have been alive then if there is no evolution, managed to survive in that climate.

Hovind: "The mammoths were not designed to live in cold climates, in spite of their long hair."

Lie #159. From the web page by Bush, cited above, the mammoths showed the following adaptations to cold climate:

Mammoths in what is now northern Russia were smaller than those living in warmer climes, and smaller than today's elephants. Their trunks, ears, and tail were all smaller, suggesting they lived in a cold climate, where frostbite was a bigger problem than heat dissipation.

Mammoths had a dense inner coat of wool, protected by a long outer coat of shaggy hair. This is typical of mammals in cold climates - it is not found in mammals in warm climates.

Mammoths had a 3 inch layer of fat under their skin. This is typical of cold environment animals (think of whale blubber) but a distinct disadvantage in warm climes.

Hovind: "About 2,300 BC the earth was stuck by an outside object."

Until Hovind proves this - as he ought to be able to do if it is that recent, then this is nothing but a lie. Since Earth does get struck by objects from time to time, I shall not include this in the official tally. It is worth asking Hovind, if you ever see him, the following questions: what size of object would it take to hit the Earth and tilt it by 23 degrees? How it was that _any_ living thing survived this massive impact? How it was that not one single civilization recorded the incident? How could something with the mass of a snowball do this?.

Hovind: "Today, the earth is leaning over about twenty-three and one half degrees, which is what causes our seasons. By the way, the seasons as far as spring, winter, and harvest, are not mentioned in the Bible until after the flood. Genesis 8:22 is the first mention of cold weather."

Lie #160. Once again Hovind doesn't even know his own Bible. Genesis 1:14 specifically mentions seasons:

"And god said, let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and for years."

By the Bible's own word, there were seasons before the flood - god designed it that way.

Hovind: "the earths magnetic field was much stronger back in those days. The magnetic field is getting weaker and weaker with time. It was probably twenty times stronger in Adam and Eves day."

Lie #161. Hovind needs to prove this with scientific evidence. Until he does, this is a lie.

Hovind: "God designed the original creation to take care of all the problems that we have today...Insects wouldnt bite. They didnt have to worry about mosquitoes. Everything was vegetarian according to Genesis 1:30. All the animals were friendly. It was an unbelievable paradise. That is what the world started off to be like until sin messed it up."

Lie #162. And god threw all of this out just because Eve wanted to learn something? What a childish god Hovind worships! If he is going to make claims about non-'biting' mosquitoes and non-aggressive animals, he needs to come up with the scientific evidence. I am not going to take a proven liar's word, especially since female mosquitoes preserved in amber have bloodsucking mouth parts. How did they use this as vegetarians? If they had different mouth parts, how did the present mouth parts arise - with no mutations and no evolution?

Hovind: "Another factor to keep in mind is that there are comets (figure 5-3) that fly around in space. Most comets are extremely cold snowballs, while some are rocks and iron.

Lie #163. All comets are what has been described as 'dirty snowballs' - they are mostly ice with some space debris. The 'rocks and iron' bodies are meteors and asteroids. Hovind ought to know this. If he doesn't, he's an idiot, if he does, he's a liar.

Hovind: "God sent a comet or knew that one was coming toward the earth..."

God must have both sent it and knew about it if the Bible is true! Why does Hovind have this confusion?

Hovind: "As it was progressing through our solar system, some of the fragments broke off and became trapped in what is now some of the rings around Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. All three of these planets have ice rings around them that are still not stabilized, indicating that they have not been there for millions of years. These rings are still separating the lighter particles from the heavier particles from the Pointing Robertson Effect of the solar wind."

Lie #164. That's the Poynting-Robertson effect, which was discussed in lie #19, so I am not counting this again. What I am counting is the suggestion that the rings of the outer planets are not stabilized and are therefore new. I challenge Hovind to provide evidence that would prove, scientifically, that these rings are only 4,000 years old, and in addition, demonstrate how this proves that the universe is not millions of years old. In doing this, he needs to disprove the alternate explanation, that the rings are renewed by material from the satellites orbiting these planets. Until and unless he does this, I am calling this a lie.

Hovind: "Some of those meteors may have hit the moon and caused the craters on the moon. What made the craters? On Mars and the moon there are actually flow marks as if there was water flowing. Maybe the ice meteor hit the planets, made a crater, and then melted in the heat of the day, because in the heat of the day the surface of these planets is about 250 degrees."

Lie #165. Assuming he is sticking with Fahrenheit for his 250 degrees (notice how he never specifies the scale - this is how scientific the creationists are), this would be 120 deg. Celsius. Well it's a lie. The average temperature on Mars is about -55 C, but temperatures range from -133 C at the winter pole to almost 27 C during summer days, so the maximum temperature on Mars is less than the temperature of your blood. It is definitely not 250 degrees.

I don't understand how a self-proclaimed physics teacher can mistake the Moon for a planet, but Hovind appears to. He should have stuck with the Moon because it is closer to what he wants than Mars is. It can climb over 120 C, which is almost exactly the 250 degrees that Hovind quotes, but note that it is the maximum. Unfortunately, all of this exercise is really farcical unless Hovind seriously expects us to believe that an "ice meteor" crashing into the surface of the moon would not vaporize on contact, but would instead make a soft landing and then melt....

Hovind: "The closer it got the stronger the pull of gravity and the faster it traveled. It continued travel to closer and move faster until it reached a point called Rosches Limit, which is about 2.44 times the diameter of the larger planet."

Lie #166. The imbecile means "Roche Limit," and it is about 2 1/2 times the _radius_ of the larger body, not the diameter. It does not make any major impact on the smaller body unless the smaller body in question is one held together by gravity only. If this were not the case, then we would not be able to orbit satellites within the Earth's Roche limit (approx 10,000 miles) because they would break up. Hovind's so-called theory falls apart even more dramatically than his supposed "ice meteor" ever would

Hovind: "About 20,000 miles out, the meteor exploded in space and turned into a puff of snow. Ice that is 300 degrees or below becomes magnetic and can be picked up by a magnet."

Lie #167. It is hard to tell since, once again, there are no references, but I think what Hovind is talking about here is diamagnetism, which can affect water. Unfortunately for Hovind, this is the very opposite of magnetic attraction - if this applied, Hovind's 'space snow' would be repelled by the Earth's magnetic field and would not fall at all!

Hovind: "At this low temperature, this magnetic ice would be sucked to the north and south pole because of the intense magnetic field. That would cause a very rapid snow fall of some very cold snow, about 300 degrees below zero, at the North and South Poles."

Lie #168. Unless, of course, this speeding ice which exploded into a 'puff of snow' was heated up as it entered the atmosphere, and melted....

Hovind: "Another thought to keep in mind is that the South Pole is considered a desert because they receive less that ten inches of precipitation a year; yet, the ice is up to 14,000 feet thick at the South Pole. Either it took millions of years to accumulate 14,000 feet of ice or it was dumped there all at once."

Lie #169. I am glad that Hovind offered this dichotomy, because if these are the only options, then the slow accumulation has to be the answer - if it were not so, there would not be seasonal layers of ice, would there?

Lie #170. The deepest ice, to my knowledge, at the south pole, is less than 10,000 feet. Hovind needs to quote solid references for his higher figure to get this lie repealed.

Lie #171. The continent of Antarctica is the Earth's fifth largest, with a summer area of over 5 million square miles. Assuming a depth of ice of 2 miles, that amounts to 10 million cubic miles of ice - minimum, and this does not even include the ice at the North Pole.

According to Hovind's theory, all of this came from space. How is it that no one on the entire planet has ever made mention, just 4,000 years ago, when civilizations were flourishing, of a celestial body, growing larger in the sky every single day, that was over 250 miles in diameter? Most comets are relatively small (Halley's comet is thought to be no larger than nine miles, for example) - can you imagine the tail that would stream out from such a massive comet? It would have been like a white ribbon across the midday sky, and have been visible for months before it arrived. Yet nowhere, not in any known inscription, carving, engraving, or frieze is there any mention of this super-comet.

Lie #172. Hovind seems to think all comets are like giant snowballs - made of ice water. Yet the rings of Saturn, which Hovind claims were created by this mega-comet, are actually, as measured spectroscopically in 1969 by the University of Arizona, ammonia ice. Can you imagine, for a minute, the catastrophe inherent in a 250 mile comet composed of ammonia ice hitting the Earth?

Hovind: "This is just a theory that seems to fit some of the facts."

Lie #173. It doesn't fit any of the facts! This is proof categorical that creation 'science' is nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of its adherents.

Hovind: "As the snow deepened, it began to push toward the equator, and the glaciers went racing across the Northern Hemisphere...possibly hundreds of miles an hour. As the ice pushed out further and further, it carved out all the glacial effects we now see today."

Lie #174. How is ice rushing at 'hundreds of miles an hour' not going to leave distinctive marks? How is it not going to melt from friction? How are there going to be dead, preserved animals standing upright at the North Pole if the ice has just pushed out from there at hundreds of miles per hour?

Hovind: "Between the ice coming from outer space, the rain coming down to earth from the canopy..."

By the way - how did this 'space snow' get through that thick canopy of water without melting (or alternately, without freezing the water)?

Hovind: "...and one more source I will discuss next, the earth was completely covered with water from pole to pole. Some was liquid water and some was frozen water."

Lie #175. There is no evidence of one, huge, worldwide flood. At least, the creationists have never offered any. Until they do, this is a lie. Anyway, why was the water not all frozen if a 250 mile comet at -300 degrees hit the Earth (and Noah survived this!)? How could there possibly be a flood at this temperature?

Continued in part K

Budikka

From budikka@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:20:50 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part K 23K

Hovind: "The Bible also states in Genesis chapter 7 that the fountains of the deep were broken up. Inside the earths crust resides a lot of water....If the fountains of the deep were all broken up, maybe this all happened at the start of the flood or because of the flood. Maybe it all happened because of the meteor hitting the earth."

Lie #176. Didn't he just get through saying it broke up _before_ hitting the Earth, into a 'puff of snow'? If creationists want to adopt the position of having water shooting out of the Earth's core, then they need to offer the science to back it up. So far they have none.

Does Hovind have any idea whatsoever what a comet of this size would do to the planet? Earth's effective atmosphere is only about seven miles high - the comet would have plowed deep into the Earth's crust after only 2% of it arrived in the atmosphere!

A meteor thought to be about six miles across was what wiped out most life on the planet 65 million years ago. What is a 250 mile comet going to do? Far from flooding the planet, the heat involved in its arrival would have vaporized not only the Earth's water, but a good portion of the Earth itself. How did Noah survive this? Why is there no evidence of this impact?

Hovind: "...all around the world there are little tiny diatoms in the ocean ...When Diatoms become tired of living, they die and fall to the bottom of the ocean....Pretty soon a layer of Diatoms cover the bottom of the ocean....It takes about one-thousand years to accumulate an inch of Diatoms in the bottom of the ocean....If the temperature changed too fast in the ocean, all the Diatoms would die at the same time in that area, and they would snow to the bottom"

Lie #177. Hovind is suggesting that 4,000 or so years ago absolutely all of the limestone in the White Cliffs of Dover, and over 1,000 feet of it in California, and other instances elsewhere was laid down in one worldwide flood, and that none of it was washed away when the floodwater receded. This takes far more believing than to envision it happening slowly over millions of years. How would there be diatoms alive after the flood, unless Noah had some on the ark? Even if he did, there is no way to account for how they spread all over the planet (in the ocean and on land) in the short time since the flood. Clearly Hovind's fantasy flood never happened.

Hovind: "It takes about one-thousand years to accumulate an inch of Diatoms in the bottom of the ocean."

I don't know where he gets his figures, but I'll use 'em this time. Let's see now - 1,000 years times the 12,000 inch depth of limestone in California - that makes 12,000,000 years - quite a bit more than Hovind's 6,000 years of Earth's existence! That's not the point I care about, however. What bothers me is that, if it takes 1,000 years for diatoms to accumulate to an inch thick, how ever were there enough alive in the ocean at the time of the flood to make a 1,000 foot depth of them in California?

Hovind: "In 1976, workers in Lompoc, California were digging in the diatomaceous earth quarry and found the bones of an eighty-foot baleen whale standing on its tail"

Lie #178. I have personally challenged Hovind on this one and he didn't answer, instead, deflecting my questions by preaching to me about how misguided I was. That's how pathetically inadequate Hovind is when challenged. Well, at:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/polystrate/whale.html

there is an article by Darby South which has this to say:

"First, the skeleton was not found in a vertical position, but was lying at an angle 50 to 40 degrees from horizontal. Finally, although at this angle, the whale skeleton lay parallel to the bedding of strata which at one time was the sea floor on which the dead whale fell after its death. These facts were confirmed by inquiring with the people at the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History who excavated the whale."

If Hovind or any creationist disagrees with this, I challenge them to present a reasonable scenario which would have a whale, in a catastrophic flood, land and sit on its tail - the lightest part of its body - while a bunch of dead diatoms settled around it with sufficient pressure to hold it upright in the midst of a raging ocean which has, by Hovind's own admission, huge tides rushing around it every six hours.

Hovind: "In Dover the chalk is three hundred feet thick in places. It is pure chalk just like what you use to write on the chalkboard."

Not quite (I have been there), but I am not going to count this one.

Hovind: "Chalk is also a microscopic critter that lives in the ocean. Dont try to tell me that all the chalk in the world decided to go to Dover, England to die...I think that there is a better explanation like a thermal shock. Hot water came gushing out, killed the chalk in that location"

Lie #179. Chalk is calcium carbonate, just like limestone, and from the same origin. There is no such living thing as a 'chalk'. Either Hovind is too stupid to know this and too poor of a scholar to check it out, or he is too sloppy to write accurately and deserves not to be taken seriously.

Hovind: "You can get a jar of dirt out of your yard, put water in it, and shake it up and set it down. The dirt will settle out into layers every time."

So would the animals - lightest on top, heaviest on the bottom. If this happened in Hovind's catastrophic flood, why do we not see this in the fossil record? If that didn't happen - what did happen and why?

Hovind: "Animals of similar density would tend to be buried together. The reason most dinosaur bones are found in similar layers is most dinosaurs are lizards, and weigh about the same as lizards... The reason birds are found on the top soil of the geologic column is not because they evolved last but because the birds were the last ones to drown in the flood."

Lie #180. Most dinosaurs are lizards and weigh the same as lizards? What exactly is that supposed to mean?!! This is not so much a lie as it is bullshit #15 or whatever. What is the weight of a lizard? Does Hovind realize that animals in the past, just like animals today, came in all shapes and sizes? There is no 'average size' for this purpose! Not all dinosaurs were the towering monsters that everyone envisions. Many were the size of chickens.

I challenge Hovind, or any creationist, to show how this happened, and to explain, with scientific logic and evidence, why it is that the tiniest primitive lizards are found with the largest primitive dinosaurs. Why are no small dinosaurs found in relatively modern layers? Why is archaeopteryx, a modern bird according to creationists, sitting so far back down the pile, yet modern birds sit near the top? Why are there no pterosaurs mixed in with modern birds? Why are elephants not found with dinosaurs of the same size? Why are there no modern whales at the bottom of the heap? Why are all the lightest creatures found in the lowest layer - the Cambrian - and none of the heaviest creatures? If the rock strata were laid down entirely by the flood, what happened to deposition and fossilization afterwards? Did it stop? If not, then where are the recent strata exhibiting a growth of all modern fauna and flora from a minuscule number over the last 4,400 years?

Hovind: 'The geologic column, the order of the index fossils, has some order to the layers in some places, but there are many places where its totally out of order."

But never, ever, is there a mixture of ancient and modern, as defined by evolutionary science. By the way: Hovind will never tell you this, but two of the so-called scientists who are affiliated with the Institute for Creation Science - Henry Morris' organization - have admitted that the most famous case of out of order strata is explicable by geological over-thrusting and does not lend itself to a flood explanation.

Hovind: 'The picture in figure 5-12 is of a man chiseling out the backbone of an animal that has no legs, head, tail, rib cage attached to it, or teeth marks on the bone. It wasnt torn apart by scavengers. That dinosaur rotted apart in the flood. Right next to it is another back bone bent backwards. Obviously, a flood killed those critters."

Lie #181. The reason many skeletons are found with the back bone so bent is that after death, tendons and ligaments contract.

Hovind: "There are so many hippopotamus bones in places like Sicily (figure 5-14 that they dig them out with bulldozers and use them to make charcoal. Dont try to tell me that all the hippos decided to go to Sicily to die for millions of years. I think that there had to be a flood that buried them all there."

Lie #182. Don't try to tell me that the flood magically decided to deposit all the dead hippos in Sicily.

Hovind: "Genesis 8:1 says that the waters asswaged. The word asswaged means to sink down. The waters actually sank down...The earths crust as compared to the size of the earth is thinner than the skin of an apple compared to the apple. The earths crust is about three miles thick under the ocean. The earths crust is about thirty miles thick under the continents."

Lie #183. Try an average 44 miles, not 30 - and not 'under the continents' - the rock _is_ the continent! What Hovind doesn't want you to know is that the 'ocean crust' if I can call it that, is a single layer of dense, dark basaltic rock which is mostly iron and magnesium mineral. The continents 'float' on this basaltic crust precisely because they are less dense rock, multi-layered and mostly aluminosilicate mineral.

Hovind's mountain ranges, which he thinks rose up because of the weight of the retreating flood water, not only rise high because of their lighter consistency, but they also press down to great depths - almost like they are taking root in the basalt. If Hovind is going to claim the flat earth suddenly decided to buckle so that the mountains arose and the water was somehow sucked into the resultant valleys, then he needs to offer the physics to explain both that and the separation of the rock types, otherwise his claim is at best a fairy tale, at worst, a lie.

Hovind: "It would be no problem to carve out the Grand Canyon due to the soft sediment."

Lie #184. There is no way a worldwide flood of rushing water is going to carve out an intensely meandering and complex canyon, one mile deep in soft mud. When water rushes, it does not meander and vice versa. Hovind needs to come up with empirical hydrodynamics to explain this ridiculous assertion.

Hovind: "People often say, There isnt enough water to cover Mt. Everest. The simple answer is that Mt. Everest didnt exist until after the flood."

Lie #185. If this isn't a lie, Hovind needs to come up with the geology to explain how Everest arose. If it was under the flood, it must have been less than 30 feet high 4,400 years ago That means Everest has been rising at the rate of at least six feet per year, since then. Why don't we see this? If it arose quickly at the time of the flood, then why is there no evidence of this catastrophic upheaval? If the weight of the waters "asswaging" was what caused the mountains to arise, why was it only in the mountain ranges? Why didn't the crust simply bend into domes between water bodies? What was it that caused this running off of water? What was it that caused the land to arise? If the land wasn't arising, there was nowhere for the water to rush off - it was all flat. If the water didn't rush off, there was nothing to force the land to rise. How did this process begin? Hovind needs to explain the mechanics of all of this.

Hovind: "Have you ever looked at a globe and noticed that...All of the mountain ranges follow the coast lines as if thats the way they broke into place, tilted and shifted, making the water run off and the mountains lift up."

Nope . Obviously Hovind hasn't either, or he would have noticed that there are no significant ranges on the north and south coasts of North or South America. The northern part of the west African coast and the northern European/Ukrainian coast are also free of such. The mountains of eastern Asia and also of Western USA run far inland. The simplest explanation of these is that plates, moving on the magma underneath the Earth's crust, are slowly rising as they butt up against one another. This is a process that makes sense, has left traces on the ocean bed, and is still going on today. If Hovind wants to overthrow this hard science, he needs to come up with something a little stronger than his faith.

Hovind: "There is no question that Los Angeles is moving northward. That does not prove that it has been happening for millions of years. That might be left over movement from the flood 4,400 years ago."

Lie #186. How did the "asswaging" of the oceans cause L.A. to slide northward? Why is there geological evidence that this has been going on, at the present rate, for ages longer than 4,000 years?

Hovind: "It is also noteworthy that there are rock layers...found all over the world in bent, twisted, and contorted positions. Have you noticed that rocks dont bend very easily? Layers that are bent and twisted as these were bent while they were soft. After a year-long flood there would be thousands upon thousands of layers of soft mud at the bottom. As the mountains arose some of the layers were twisted, and bend. When they finally hardened over the next few weeks, months or years, they would be stuck in a twisted position"

Lie #187. Ever noticed how mud doesn't bend? Try it next time you see some mud that has been soaking in water for some time (preferably for over a year). Try to bend it. What happens? It slithers through your hands because it is semi-liquid. Hovind needs to explain how this mud managed to bend. Rock can bend quite easily in the right conditions of temperature and pressure. Notice how Hovind ignores geological faults and shears. Obviously, he has to - mud does not break and shear.

Hovind: "Water ran off leaving behind fossils like the seastars...Obviously, moving water conditions left them behind. Notice that their legs are all going the same direction. The flood did that."

Lie #188. Floodwater charging off the escalating mountains would have scoured everything off the land not even leaving soil, let along quaint little fossils with their legs bent in one direction. Besides, how does Hovind's "asswaging" water - water rushing back and forth, by his own definition - manage to get all the sea stars lined up in the same direction (assuming he isn't lying about that too)?

Hovind: 'The top of Mt. Everest is very interesting. Edmund Hillary climbed Mt. Everest in 1953. When he got to the 26,000 foot level, he stuck his pick into the ground to pull himself up when he noticed sea shells."

Lie #189. At 26,000 feet, you do not stick your pick in ground. There is no 'ground' - it's all hard snow and ice.

Hovind: "If you walk into the ocean, it is rather shallow. Sometimes you can go out for hundreds of miles before it reaches even 500 to 1,000 feet deep....For the first, one-hundred or so years after the flood, people could walk anyplace in the world.

Lie #190. To do so - to get from the mountains of Ararat to the tip of South America in 100 years, even if you could walk all the way, as Hovind claims, you would have to move at the rate of 150 miles per year, every single year, and you would just make it in 100 years. That's every month, no matter what your circumstances - no matter how good the local food supply was, you would have to move on another 12 or 13 miles. While you were doing it, you would have to start all of the vast civilizations history shows to have existed fully blown at that time, all over the world

Hovind seems to think only humans had to get from one end of the Earth to the other. Nope. The animals - all of which were located in Ararat according to the Bible, would have to move at that same rate. This includes the microscopic nematode worms and also the diatoms Hovind is so fond of. It includes the snails, slugs, regular worms, sloths, snakes, creepy-crawlies - all dedicatedly heading for South America, desperate to get there before the rising water closed off the land. Is this likely?

Hovind: "Those rock layers that the Grand Canyon run through are obviously sedimentary rock....If those layers are really millions of years different in age...wouldnt you suppose if one layer was exposed for a couple of million years there would be canyons cut into that layer before the next one was put on top?"

Lie #191. It depends entirely on the circumstances in which they were laid down. I wouldn't suppose we would find footprints and rain drop pits in between layers of sedimentary rock if they were all laid down under the ocean, but we do! And if they were all laid down as Hovind claims, why is it that we expressly do _not_ find the layers sorted hydrologically, as Hovind claims they would be - with the coarsest rock on the bottom and the finest on top?

Hovind: "Why are all the layers nice and neatly stacked on top of each other?"

If they were all laid down during a catastrophic rainfall and flooding, why are there any such layers at all? Most of the canyon is steep walled, and these walls reveal an interesting pattern. Towards the top is Kaibab limestone followed by Coconino sandstone followed by Hermit shale. Below that is a series of mixed layers of shales and sandstones known as the Supai. The Redwall limestone comes next, followed by the Temple Butte, the Muav limestone, the Bright Angel shale and the Tapeats sandstone.

Hovind is so fond of promoting his dirt-in-a-jar geology that he never stops to think about this. There are some things he and his cronies need to explain. How is it that the magical hydrological sorting Hovind yaps about manages to intersperse the very fine grained shales and limestones with the coarse sandstone just like we see in the Grand Canyon? Ask him to explain it next time you see him, with his dirt in a jar.

How is it that there is more than one kind of limestone (not necessarily in the canyon, but most definitely close by - Colorado, for example, has marble) if all of it were laid down when the diatoms died in the flood? All of it ought to be the same, but it isn't. There is coqina and chalk, both varieties of soft limestone. Beyond this is regular limestone, and then there is marble. How could one simple flood have laid down four different kinds of limestone? Ask this of Hovind, next time you see him with his dirt in a jar.

Hovind: "There ought to be erosion marks in between those layers, and there arent any."

Lie #192. There are many examples of erosion between layers.

Hovind: "If that layer was exposed for millions of years, dont you believe that maybe some meteors would fall on it? We find meteors all over the world, and yet no one has ever found a fossilized meteorite. No one has ever found a meteor in any layer except the top layer of the earth."

Lie #193. Hovind assumes that layers are left exposed over millions of years. This is not the case. How long does an exposed surface in your home stay uncovered in dust if you leave it uncleaned?

How easily do you imagine that we would find a 'fossil' of a rock in a rock? Given that small meteors burn up, leaving at best a fragment, and larger meteors often explode as they enter the atmosphere, how easy do you think it would be to find evidence of meteor impacts? Well - we found them. Dave Matson, in his creationism-destroying article on the talk.origins archives, quotes this publication: Grieve, R.A.F. and P.B. Robertson. 1979. "The Terrestrial Cratering Record" - Icarus, Vol.38, No.2 (May 1979), pp.212-229 Space Sciences Building, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-6801. These guys list 130 "fossil" craters. In addition to this, how do you suppose they learned of the meteor which wiped out the dinosaurs? It was from fossil evidence of meteor impact at the cretacious-tertiary boundary layer.

Hovind: "[After the Mt. St. Helen's eruption] The Toutle River was stopped for five days as the mud flowed across...Five days later the water got deep enough that the water began to go over the top of the mud slide. Once it started washing over the top, it started washing out canyons in a hurry (figure 5-29). It washed out a canyon 140 feet deep, 1,000 feet wide, and 2,000 feet long in fifteen minutes."

Did the canyon meander? I challenge Hovind to detail exactly how this canyon matched the Grand - in terms of meandering complexity, layering of sediment and transverse profile. This is real empirical science the creationists could be doing - but for some reason never seem to be able to get around to.

Hovind: "The trees floating in Spirit Lake were very interesting....Do you know what is going to happen to those trees? They are going to petrify, and they will petrify in a standing position running through all the different layers. This is the same condition that was discussed in chapter four about the petrified trees standing upright through many layers of strata."

Lie #194. The trees discussed earlier were in river flood plains and had nothing whatsoever to do with a worldwide flood, nor are they connected with the volcanic influences on the trees around Spirit Lake.

Hovind: "Some ask me, Brother Hovind, doesnt it take millions of years for wood to petrify? No, it can happen fairly quickly. It can be accomplished in a laboratory in about two years."

So this guy who insists that evolution cannot possibly be proven in the laboratory is quite comfortable with laboratory proof (assuming it exists) that trees can petrify in 2 years?

Hovind: "Genesis 8:3a says, And the waters returned from off the earth continually...The Hebrew phrase, Halak-va-shub means the water was going and returning....The water was not steadily decreasing, rather it was going and returning....If the mountains lifted up and the valleys sank down and became the oceans, the water would rush into the hole, and then tidal waves would rush back and forth across the ocean, causing secondary erosion"

And all of this managed to carve out the Grand Canyon, in soft mud, with all its meandering, one mile deep? How does this tie in with Hovind's Toutle river example, where water gushed in one direction only? How ever did Noah survive this violent sloshing of the oceans?

Continued in part L

Budikka

From budikka@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:21:26 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part L 24K

Hovind: "That is why there are dinosaur foot prints found at forty-five degree angles in the Red Rock Amphitheater outside Denver, Colorado. Dinosaur footprints are all over that place. Did dinosaurs walk on hillsides at a forty-five degree angle? No, the land was all flat. They laid their prints down, and then the ground was lifted up afterwards -- the mountains arose."

Lie #195. I cannot help but call this one. So let me get this straight. First the dinosaurs walk on the soft, flat ground. Then the world is covered in a massive flood with torrential rain, then the mountains rise and the floods retreat, and despite all this turmoil, perfect dinosaur footprints are preserved at a 45 degree angle? Nothing got filled in during a year long flood that left chalk deposits 300 feet deep? Nothing washed away in 40 days and 40 nights of torrential rain?

Hovind: "The textbooks state that it took billions of years to form the Grand Canyon. That is just not true"

Lie #196. You're damned right it didn't take _billions_ of years, and for Hovind to portray it as such is truly pathetic. Only an imbecile would pull a cheap stunt like that. Creationists are forced to lie about what the textbooks say because if they told the truth, their own lies would be startlingly obvious. The canyon formed in about six million years as far as scientists can determine from the _observable evidence_. Where is Hovind's observable evidence that shows it was caused by sloshing floodwater?

Hovind: "The tour guides will tell you that it took millions of years to form the Grand Canyon..."

Hovind corrects his lie.

Hovind: "...and the Bad Lands. How do you know that sir? He will say, Well, we only get about twelve inches of rain out here every year. You can tell by the hardness of the rock, and the amount of rain we get that it would take millions of years to make these Bad Lands. Well now sir, you are assuming that the rock hardness has always been the same. What if it was all soft mud, and there was 500 feet of water running through there?"

Then everything would have been washed away! The mud would be on the bottom of the ocean and there would be flat rock, no mud, no soil, and no canyon. How does Hovind propose that a mile high wall of mud did not collapse and slither away along with the rushing water?

Hovind: "Was it a little bit of water over lots of time, or was it lots of water over a little time? There is a big difference."

Yes there is, and only a moron could confuse the two.

Hovind: "If the ocean was lowered, you could walk anyplace in the world. For the first one-hundred years, the oceans were smaller, the continents were bigger, and the ice caps were huge, trapping lots of water."

Lie #197. And all that water, an entire planet full of it, heated 24 hours a day by the sun for a year, couldn't melt all those ice caps?

Hovind: "The people spread out across the world could walk anywhere they wanted to go. As the water level rose because of the ice caps melting, they became trapped in certain regions. The people then developed peculiar traits."

Lie #198. Why did these traits develop? How did they develop, if mutations are always harmful? If we came from such a small stock, so very recently, how is it even possible to have as much genetic variation as we see in humans, whether or not there is evolution?

Hovind: "They all developed these peculiar traits as small inbreeding groups were trapped in localized areas after the flood."

Lie #199. Localized areas like The Russian steppes? Like North America? Like Africa? Tiny, tiny localized areas!

Hovind: "I think that it took one-hundred years for those ice caps to melt. It would take a long time for a big block of ice to melt. As the ice melted back from Kansas City, it left behind Drumlins, Terminal Moraines, and glaciers."

Lie #200. This is the same heavy weight of ice that is sitting right smack on top of those mountains that were trying to rise up after the flood waters tried to "asswage"? How did the ice melt in 100 years? That amount of ice would have taken considerably longer since the earth would have cooled dramatically as all that ice reflected away the warming sunlight.

Hovind: "The Bible warns us in I Timothy chapter 6 to be careful about what is so-called science."

Lie #201. Go ahead - look it up - it mentions nothing even akin to science. It takes about slavery (not once denouncing it) and rich people.

Hovind: "I wish to re-emphasize that I believe the Bible is the infallible, inspired, inerrant Word of the living God. I taught high school science for fifteen years, and I can assure you that there are no conflicts with the Bible. It is Gods Word."

Lie #202. It is the word of a bunch of primitive, ignorant, narrow perspective, undereducated writers, the names of whom we do not even know. How anyone, anyone at all, who claims to be a believer can put their faith in that book as opposed to seeking the answers directly from god is beyond me to comprehend. The Bible is provably errant:

Examine 2 Chronicles, 36. verse 23, the last verse, ends right in the middle of a sentence. The very next book in the standard Bible, Ezra, begins at verse one of course, but verse one of Ezra 1, is really verse 22 of 2 Chronicles, 36, and the two parallel each other from that point through verse 3 of Ezra 1, where Ezra actually continues the story broken abruptly at the end of Chronicles.

There is no arguing this, no debating it, no weaseling out of it as fundamentalists incessantly do when errors are brought to their attention. This is simply, plainly, clearly, unarguably a gross mistake in the Holy Bible. If this one, which shouts at you, which glares in your face, has survived down to us today uncorrected, how many other mistakes and misperceptions are there that are not so obvious? How many errors are there that we do not have any means of checking or verifying?

Precisely - we do not know. For someone like Hovind, or Duane Gish, or Henry Morris to pretend, even for an instant, that this book is the inspired and inerrant word of god is the most blasphemous insult to any god. To pretend that this ad hoc collection of writings, put together by ancient cardinals, none of whose veracity we can attest to, is patently insane. To hold sacred this anonymous scribble of primitive writers telling tales from even more primitive nomads, none of whom we know, is the act of an irresponsible idiot.

Everyone has heard of the game whereby a series of people whisper a few sentences to one another down the line, and then compare the beginning phrase with the final one. Imagine playing that same game, not down a short line of people at a party, but over decades, centuries even. After that, someone who speaks a different language writes the story down, and then it gets translated and retranslated for a few centuries more. Finally, a bunch of people get to sort through all these copies and without any reference whatsoever to the original storytellers, they compile these texts from multiple sources, in multiple languages.

Creationists are always whining about the odds against evolution happening. Well what are the odds that the Bible we have today accurately represents anything that might have happened five or six thousand years ago? Sure, it can come close on actual, major historical events - those would be well-known - but what about all those personal stories? What about those chats with god that happened when the writers were not even present? What about those miracles? Knowing what we know now about eyewitnesses and their complete unreliability, how can we begin to pretend the Bible is reliable? This is a matter of science, not of opinion.

Hovind is incessantly griping about how bones found here and there in the fossil record are put together and claimed to be from the same animal (case in point, his diatribe on horse evolution). Well what about his Bible, where texts found all over the place and not even in the same language were put together and claimed to be the word of one god? The man is a hypocritical numskull.

Hovind reveals his scatological roots: "I was raised in a Lutheran Church, a Mennonite Church, and a Methodist Church; we also visited the Catholic Church and just about every other kind that there was...I was saved when I was sixteen and started attending a little right-wing, radical, independent, temperamental, fundamental Baptist church."

Now you know the truth about Hovind. He's a Christian fascist.

Hovind: "I was only sixteen, and the brain doesnt even start developing until about twenty."

Lie #203. I will not even dignify this rank stupidity with an explanation. Hovind's brain obviously never did develop at any time.

Hovind: "My preacher had told me, If someone ever tells you there are contradictions in the Bible, hand them your Bible and tell them to show you one. I thought, Ill try it. I handed him my Bible, and I said, Show me one of those contradictions, would you please?"

I showed Hovind the problem I mentioned above - the Chronicles/Ezra mix up - in an email a couple of months ago. His response? He did not even address that issue. He doesn't dare. I have hit him with so many problems from his seminar material that he will not even write to me any more. That's what a 'great debater' he is. Pin him down with hard questions and he shrivels up. His excuse is that I won't tell him who I am, so he will not write to me. That's the kind of worthless piece of scummy, lowlife, lying, defrauding, moronic debater he is. If we won't play to his rules, so he can win, he won't play at all. The man is a jackass.

Hovind: "He took my Bible...He said...Look down in verse twenty. This is where we start day five. Verse twenty states, And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. He said, Kent, what day did God make the birds? I said, He made them on the fifth day. He said, What did he make the birds out of?...I said, He made the birds out of the water."

Lie #204. The creationists are constantly bleating as to how the evolutionists cannot prove that one animal evolved into another. Anyone who can show me a real living bird made out of nothing but hydrogen and oxygen will get a medal.

Hovind: "Look at Genesis 2:8-9. He read, And the LORD God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed."

When Hovind, in his usual tediously pedantic way, finally gets to the point, the point turns out to be his claim that there are not two creation stories, only one, and that the second story actually refers to only the creation of the garden of eden. Well, as usual, he is wrong. Even Biblical scholars agree that there are two distinct stories, and a casual reading of the Bible makes this clear.

Hovind: "This is a continuation of the creation. God is not done yet. God is still creating. It is still day six. When God finished making all the trees, he looked at Adam, and said, Adam, it is not good for you to be alone. I am going to make a help that is meet, or suitable for you."

And so god goes on to make a bunch of animals. What went wrong? Did the supreme being never think that a woman might be a suitable partner for a man - he wanted him to try bestiality, first? Was this creator so stupid that he didn't foresee that a man might like to have a woman - or even another man - for a partner? Was the creator of all things so stupid and short sighted that even though he just got through making male and female animals, it never occurred to him to create male and female humans? Or was it not that the creator was stupid, but the idiot who wrote this story and the bigger idiots who take it literally?

Hovind: "Out of the ground, God made one of each of the animals on the earth. The rest of the world is already full of animals. This is just taking place in the garden"

Lie #205. There is no indication whatsoever in the Bible to lead one to believe this. The actual text (assuming it was passed down and translated correctly, of course) says "every beast of the field and every fowl of the air." That sure sounds to me like a major creation event - not simply a small event to populate one garden.

Hovind: "This question comes up frequently, What are those little lines on the products for? It is not an Ethiopian family portrait."

Despite Hovind's having dealt with this in chapter 4, he seems unable to bar it from chapter 6. He is equally unable to avoid making note of the tiny strip in paper money in case we forgot that he lied his way through it in that same chapter. He covered radiocarbon dating in chapter one, but raises it again here. His mind is obviously decaying more than the carbon 14 is. I shredded his brain dead analogy of a candle burning in part 40 of my posting series.

Hovind: "If you assume that the candle was twelve inches tall, and you assume a constant burn rate, it had been burning for five hours. The answer is only as good as your assumptions."

I am glad he raised this point - "the answer is only as good as your assumptions" - because what is it, other than absolutely pure assumption, that there is a god and that the Bible describes his behavior and plan with utmost accuracy?

Hovind: "Carbon dating is based on the assumption that the amount of C14 in the atmosphere has remained constant through all time. This is a very faulty assumption."

Lie #206. Radiocarbon dating is based on the scientific fact that such dates have been tested and independently verified, and the decay of C14 into N14 is very well understood. If decay rates changed over time, we would see evidence of this in the radiation just now arriving on Earth from distant stars. It makes no difference if you believe those stars developed millions or billions of years ago or if you believe they were created just 6,000 years ago to fool intelligent, thinking people into believing there was a big bang. Either way, the radiation reaching us has traveled at least 6,000 years. It originated in the past either way, and we are able, in effect, to take a time machine back into the past by means of examining this electromagnetic radiation. It shows no evidence that the laws of physics have changed in any way since they developed out of the big bang.

Hovind: "Due to the fact that the magnetic field is decreasing, cosmic radiation causes the Northern Lights and the Southern Lights."

Lie #207. The aurora borealis is caused by electromagnetic disturbance - not by _decreasing_ electromagnetic disturbance.

Lie #208. The evidence of how the Earth's magnetic field has behaved in the past is preserved in igneous rock, which effectively "freezes" the pattern and strength when it solidifies. Regardless of how old you believe the Earth to be, these rocks show no consistent or reliable pattern of decreasing magnetic fields.

Hovind: "Uranium lead and potassium argon dating methods work on basically the same principle. They all make some faulty assumptions."

Lie #209. If the decrease in earth's magnetic field affects the dating of the earth, "proving" it to be only 6,000 years old, rather than 4.5 billion, how is it that the date of the moon rocks agrees completely with the 4.5 billion age of the Earth? There is no magnetic field on the moon. How is it that both these ancient ages agree completely with the measurements of the sun's fusion reactions, showing it to only a little older than the Earth?

Hovind: "Carbon dating is only good for about 30,000 or 40,000 years."

Lie #210. Now Hovind is putting lies into other people's mouths. No one who knows what they are talking about would shrink C14 dating spans down to 30,000 years. The age range for acceptably accurate dates from C14 is between about 500 years and 50,000 - quite a bit older than Hovind pretends, but not nearly old enough to measure the age of dinosaurs, and not nearly miraculous enough to measure the age of anything that was not, at some point, alive. Besides, if it is only good for 30,000 years (as Hovind here admits), that is five times longer than we need to disprove Bible chronology.

Hovind: "They brake off a piece and test it."

This is from someone who claims to be a PhD and a high school science teacher for 15 years. "They _brake_ off a piece"!

Hovind: "You see; everything must fit within the geologic column. The geologic column is the bible to the evolutionist. Any radiometric dating that is given that is outside the realm of the geologic column is rejected."

Lie # 211. I challenge Hovind or any creationist to show any incident where the general body of science has knowingly falsified dates - or any information - and sought to preserve the falsification. Next time you hear a creationist claim something like this, challenge them with this question: "Who is it that has most often and traditionally tripped up science when it has got something wrong? Has it been the church, or has it been other scientists? Ask them where this critical and painful honesty is within the creationist camp. Ask them why it is that every mistake they provide in their futile attempts to disprove evolution has been the result of the work of a scientist, never a creationist.

Creationist honesty is a contradiction in terms, I assure you. Creationists are fundamentally dishonest from day one, and they begin by being dishonest with themselves. After that, they have no compass whatsoever to guide them to the truth. If science is an evil conspiracy to overthrow god, why are scientists always calling out their own mistakes so loudly?

Hovind: "Dont fall for the statement, They proved it is so many millions of years old based on carbon dating."

Lie #212. Definitely don't! No real scientist ever claimed anything was proven millions of years old from carbon dating. See what I mean about Hovind's missing compass? I don't think he can even tell any more when he is lying. Let me give you a guide: How do you tell a creationist is lying? His lips are moving.

Hovind: "Who built the Great Pyramid?...The Egyptians did not build it. It is the only pyramid with no hieroglyphics in it. The other pyramids were copies of the Great Pyramid."

Lie #213. There are actually 3 lies here, but I'll only count one.

Hovind: "The Great Pyramid is very special. It does not have a cornerstone."

Lie #214. Yes it does - many for each corner. What it does not have is a capstone. Neither does the Washington monument in Washington DC have a capstone. Instead, there is an aluminum _pyramid_ which serves as a lightning conductor. How does Hovind know that these words do not refer to the Washington monument in prophecy?

Hovind: "The cornerstone was rejected by the builders just as the Bible says. Jesus Christ is the chief cornerstone"

Cornerstone - that's what Psalms118:22 (and Jer 51:26, and three of the gospels, and Acts, and Peter ) says - the Bible writers were obsessed with this imagery, but not one of them mentions pyramids or capstones. Even the Book of Mormon gets in on the act. It says: " The stone the builders refused is become the head of the corner." That's _corner_ not cap, or point, or top, or apex.

Hovind: "If they could have found the entrance, they could have just touched it and it would have swung open."

Lie #215. This pyramid was a tomb designed to glorify the Pharaoh and protect his wealth - there is no way the door would swing open at a touch. The tomb was, at one time, sealed.

Hovind: "When you enter into the pyramid, the passage leads downward. After a short distance you must make a choice....If you choose the narrow way to the kings chamber, you must to go up one-hundred and fifty-three steps."

Lie #216. To the best of my ability to determine, there is only one step in the Grand Gallery - immediately before the king's chamber area. The passage itself is not stepped, but it is roughly cut - and it is 153 feet long. No doubt this is from where the clueless creationists invented their steps. If Hovind has any evidence to the contrary, I challenge him to produce it. I am betting this is yet another example of one incestuous creationist stealing from others and being too bone-idle lazy to check the facts for themselves. Do you want these lying imbeciles teaching your children in school?

Hovind: "The men who developed the symbol on the back of our dollar bill in 1776 were the Illuminati group."

Lie #217. The designing of a seal was commissioned by the Continental Congress after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson together couldn't hack it (Jefferson never came up with an original idea in his life, and Franklin had his finger in too many pies), so two other committees were asked to do it. Neither of these came up with anything acceptable, either. In 1782 the task was turned over to Charles Thomson, secretary to the congress. He prepared a design that was adopted after some alterations, in June, 1782. To even pretend it was developed by the so-called "illuminati" in 1776 is a double lie.

Hovind: "If you notice, the Roman numerals at the bottom of the pyramid denote the date 1776, and they are not there because of the Declaration of Independence they signed. It is there because that is the date the Illuminati was formed, and this was their symbol."

Lie #218. And it is going to stay a lie until Hovind proves otherwise. I'm not going to take the lying skunk's word for it - are you?

Hovind: "Many of the wealthy and the super rich of this world have had a continuing conspiracy to control humanity by controlling the currency of this world. What they are trying to do is get all of humanity together so they can institute the light bearer, the all-seeing eye, as the ruler."

Sorry, but isn't that _precisely_ what the Christian evangelists are trying to do? The eye over the pyramid is representative of god. That's why the words "Annuit coeptis" are on there - they mean: 'He has smiled on our undertakings'.

Hovind: "That light bearer, the all-seeing eye, is Lucifer the devil."

Lie #219. Lucifer is nothing to do with the devil - it has to do with the planet Venus. If Hovind thinks he can prove otherwise, he is welcome to try.

Hovind: "The purpose if the New Age Movement is to get everybody together under one government, one religion,"

Lie #220. Isn't that the plan of the fundamentalists?

Hovind: "The Bible says that the new Jerusalem is going to measure 1,500 x 1,500 x 15,00 miles. Most people assume this to be a cube measurement. A pyramid can also be 1,500 x 1,500 x 1,500 miles."

Lie #221. Unless Hovind cares to prove otherwise.

Hovind: "It might be that Jesus Christ is the light bearer..."

Make up your mind!

Hovind: "...and since the city will be pure gold, translucent, it will not need any light."

Lie #222. Since when is pure gold translucent?

Hovind: "Jesus Christ is the light. When the chief cornerstone is put in place, it will light up the whole city. That is just something that is interesting to think about."

Hovind finally admits he is a liar!

Continued in part M

Budikka

From budikka@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:22:01 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part M 20K

Hovind: "Inside the kings chamber there is a red granite coffin. The inside dimensions of that coffin are exactly the same dimensions as the ark of the covenant"

This was lie #137, so I am not going to call it again.

Hovind: 'Where did Pharaoh and his army drown in the Red Sea? The children of Israel went across [the Gulf of Aqaba] on dry ground, and Pharaohs army drowned.

Lie #223. The Hebrew words usually thought of as 'Red Sea' are 'Yam Suph' which literally translated (something the creationists insist we do) means, 'sea of reeds'. According to Isaac Asimov, what is now called the Gulf of Suez extended north into two areas of saltwater swamps. These were filled in at the time the Suez Canal was constructed, but in the past would, literally, have been a sea of reeds which would have supported the passage of fleeing Israelites on foot, especially at low tide, but would have rendered passage by Egyptian chariots all but impossible, especially if they arrived later, when the tide was higher.

Hovind: "People have gone scuba diving in that location, and guess what they have found? At the bottom of the Red Sea, on each side of the Gulf of Aqaba, are pillars inscribed by King Solomon (figure 6-5). Inscribed on the pillars are: This is the place where they crossed the Red Sea. At the bottom of the Red Sea, there are chariot wheels that are not connected to the chariots."

I am going to call this a lie until and unless Hovind, or anybody, publishes a peer-reviewed scientific paper on the matter - after all, this is what a real scientist would do, isn't it?

Hovind: "There is a mountain on the right side of the Gulf of Aqaba called Jabal al-Law, which means, Mountain of Laws."

Lie #224. I looked this up in an Arab-English dictionary and also checked with an Omani woman with whom I work. Hovind is lying.

Hovind: "They also discovered the cities of Sodom and Gomorra. The actual cities of Sodom and Gomorra are at the south end of the Dead Sea. You cant see the cities unless you are about five miles away. When you get right up next to them, they look just like cliffs of ash. If you dig into the ash, you will find little sulfur balls that have been burned out."

Lie #225. Wait a minute - don't get too close because they look precisely like ash - go a long distance away and then look? What kind of advice is that? That's their philosophy, though - don't get too close and examine living things for evolution at the genetic level - keep your distance and just look at them anatomically.

Where are the published papers done by creationists on this? Here is a chance for them to prove the Bible is a record of god, yet they do nothing! Why is this? You would think the fundies would be pushing like crazy with all this evidence, wouldn't you? If they really had all this evidence. Finding a pile of something that looks like ash, or even of ash, proves nothing. It could represent anything. Where is their scientific testing? Where are the published papers? Where is the radiometric dating to show that this material really is old enough to be part of Sodom and Gomorra? Where are their excavations?

What about the sulfur? Has it been tested independently, and scientifically, to show that the white part was really burned, or is the white part simply caused by drying, or sun exposure? Are these mounds, that Hovind calls cities, nothing more than spoil heaps from the mining which has gone on for years around the Dead Sea? We will never know because the science has not been not done.

This is typical of creationists - they are great at preaching and holding meaningless debates, but not a single, solitary one of them has ever published a scientific paper on anything pertinent to their claims in any respected scientific journal. In light of this, we must dismiss Hovind's claims as nothing more than fabrications and fantasy.

Hovind: "There were no deformed genes or mutations as we have today. Today, each person carries quite a heavy genetic load. That is why if you marry someone that is closer than your first cousin, there is a good chance that the babies will be deformed because both carry similar mutations. The deformities will most likely show up in the baby in the form of six fingers, hemophilia, etc. Some of these very common mutations happen from marrying too close to the blood line."

Lie #226. I hope anyone out there with any of these so-called deformities sues Hovind's ass for his insult which is also a lie. If it isn't a lie, where is his published study, proving his insane assertion?

Hovind: "When God first made the world, there was not a genetic load."

Lie #227. If god made it and saw that it was good, how could there ever be a genetic load? The _only_ way to explain a genetic load is evolution - or a completely incompetent creator.

Hovind: "Therefore, they married sisters in the first generation, and in the second generation, they married cousins. After that, they were diversified enough to be no problem."

Lie #228. If they were all clones of Adam - as they had to be, how could there be any variation at all?

Hovind: "I am very often asked, Where did the black race come from? You might want to ask the question, Where did the white race come from? Adam may have been black."

Lie #229. May have been? Nay, was!

Hovind: "Look at Genesis 4:15, And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the LORD set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him. Some people think that he became a giant. That is a very real possibility, but we dont know for sure."

Lie #230. Cain was Adam and Eve's firstborn (if we are to trust the Bible). Abel was second. At that time there were only four people on the whole planet (according to Hovind). Who did Cain have to fear? There were no other humans to even threaten him, let alone kill him. Animals were all vegetarians (according to Hovind). What did Cain have to fear? This very story proves that the creation story so beloved by Hovind and his ilk - of one man and one woman giving rise to all - is nothing but a lie itself.

Hovind: "Fermentation was not even possible before the flood. The canopy of water protected the earth prior to the flood. They could not have made wine or alcohol even if they had wanted to make it. It simply could not be done."

Lie #231. Many fruits ferment naturally due to the sugar in them.

Lie #232. A canopy of water, real or myth, has nothing whatsoever to do with fermentation.

Hovind: "Noah, a preacher of righteousness, became drunk, and his son Ham laughed at his fathers nakedness. Noah awoke from his sleep and said, ...Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren."

Lie #233. There is nowhere in the Bible that says Ham laughed at his father's nakedness. This is more of Hovind's fiction. What he actually did, if the Bible is to be believed, was notify his brothers that his father was naked, and his brothers covered up his father. For this service of respect and decency, Noah curses not Ham, but Canaan, supposedly Ham's offspring!

Hovind: "I personally hold to the Tower of Babel explanation...where God confused the languages. The races were either miraculously created or the races were a natural byproduct of small groups of people who spoke the same language going off to their own place and inbreeding for generations within that small group of the same genetic pool. If that were the case, mutations would become dominate within a small population."

Lie #234. I think this imbecile means 'dominant' not 'dominate'. These wouldn't be the mutations creationists claim do not exist because mutations are always harmful, would they? These wouldn't be the mutations that creationists say could never have given rise to evolution, would they? Hovind loves to embrace evolutionary theory where it supports his arguments. He sure hates it when it works against him though. What kind of science is that? He is only going to play if he can be assured he will win?

If Hovind is going to pretend this happened, then why does he not pretend to get off his lazy ass and do some genetic research on it and try to prove his case? Personally I am willing to bet that he would have to postulate a rate of mutation far greater than evolutionists ever ask for to explain how one family of Middle Easterners could, in only 4,400 years, give rise to the diversity of humans evident on this planet.

In addition to this, I would love it if he could explain how there managed to be large civilizations with a few years of the flood which supposedly covered over 200 million square miles, to a depth of well over a mile (according to Hovind) and wiped out all but eight humans. Where did that 200 million cubic miles of water come from?

Hovind: "...because the races also have similar languages. The racial barrier and the language barrier seem to go together."

Lie #235. What barrier? Is this the same Hovind, who is about to argue that all nations are of one blood, now talking about a racial barrier? Language and race have nothing whatsoever to do with each other. According to Webster's 1998 CD Encyclopedia, there are approximately two billion speakers of Indo-European languages. The next most populous family is Sino-Tibetan, with over one billion; others include Niger-Congo (260 million), Afro-Asiatic (230 million), and Austronesian (200 million). Now you tell me where these language families coincide with racial boundaries. It took me two minutes to look this up. Obviously Hovind, or any creationist, is incapable of the most simple research. This is why he is a moron.

Hovind: "I do know this, all nations are of one blood, and we are not superior to the blacks, or the Orientals, or any other color, just because we may be white. We are all the same, and I am very much against racism!"

Lie #236. He may claim to be against chromatic racism, but he is definitely not against religious racism, whereby he dogmatically insists he is right and part of the chosen race, and anyone who does not believe precisely what he believes will rot in hell for all eternity. This kind of racism is no better than black and white racism, and it is far more insidious.

Hovind: "Is it true that a chromosome has been found that proves that homosexuals are born with the inability to choose their life style? I understand that all the research that has been done on this has been found to be false."

Lie #237. And it is going to stay a lie until and unless Hovind offers some sort of independent proof that this is indeed the case.

Hovind: "There has been research that indicates nearly all homosexuals come from families that have a weak father figure, and a dominate mother.I believe that research shows that there is a social link where the children are raised to be wimps or whatever."

Lie #238. Dominate mother? I am already in a bad mood today, so I am not going to start on what I think about those fundamentalists who pick on minorities in this appallingly derogatory manner. I might not be able to stop. This is a fine example of Hovind's sexism - that women cannot do the job - they have to have a 'dominate' man to control them or their children will go to hell.

What the fundies need to do is get out of people's lives. What other people do, as long as it is within sensible laws and not harming others, is entirely between them and whatever god they may worship. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Hovind or any of his asinine, moronic, clueless and brain dead dirt bag cronies. If there is a god who created this world, he created it and everything in it the way he wanted it for a purpose. For idolaters like Hovind to even pretend they know what god wants and to try and take it into their own hands to make it happen is the height of blasphemy. That is, if you believe in god.

Hovind: "If you believe stoning the homosexuals is still valid, then you ought also to stone those that commit adultery or fornication.

Hovind is writing his own Bible, just like he has made up his own religion so he can worship his own god. That's fine - people have done that throughout history. What he has no right to do is expect anyone to follow in his foolish footsteps. Besides, if he is going to take the Bible literally, why does he _not_ support stoning sinners? Is he saying that this part of "the infallible, inspired, inerrant Word of the living God" might be wrong? Is he saying we ought to improve on the word of god?

Hovind: "One of the motives of NASA is to prove the theory of evolution by using taxpayer dollars."

Lie #239. - unless, of course, Hovind has proof.

Hovind: "They are not thinking because all they are trying to do is prove a religion. Carl Pagan (I mean Segan) and his group are attempting to look for signals of intelligent life on other planets."

Take note of Hovind's ad hominem attack on Carl Sagan, just so you can remind him of it next time he accuses the evolutionists of such behavior.

Hovind: "I think God made all the stars just for us to marvel at His great intelligence and wisdom."

In Carl Sagan's view, what a waste of space! If this absurd claim of Hovind's is true, how is it that virtually all humans throughout virtually all history have never even been able to see most of this glory? If god made the heavens for us to marvel at, how come he made 90% of it out of dark matter which we cannot see even with telescopes?

Hovind: "Nobody has ever proven the existence of another planet around any other star except the nine that we know of around our star, the sun. Therefore, there may not be any other stars in the solar system that have planets around them. There may be, but we cannot prove it."

Lie #240. There may not be any other stars in the solar system? I can guarantee Hovind that there are not. What a moron he is! The truth is that there have been planets detected around other stars, and this was known in 1995 - the year Hovind dates his seminar. Many more are known now than were then.

Hovind: "What happens if you keep heating the gas? You would get plasma. What if you keep heating it? We do not know because we are unable to get gas that hot."

Lie #241. Has Hovind never heard of nuclear explosions - never heard of the interior of stars?

Hovind: "The principles behind electrogravidic propulsion are very different from the principle behind jet propulsion...Every atom would be drawn electrically."

Lie #242. Atoms are electrically neutral (the electrons cancel out the protons) so how are they going to be drawn? And why doesn't a self-proclaimed physics teacher know this?

Hovind: "I do not think that Satan fell from heaven until about one-hundred years after the creation. He could not have fallen before the creation because he was spoken about in the book of Ezekiel as being good while in the garden. Look at Ezekiel 28:13-15"

Lie #243. It is not clear what Ezekiel is talking about (as usual), but it sure looks more like it is about humans than it does about a fallen angel. Besides, Hovind's claim contradicts Revelation 12, which shows the dragon being cast out of heaven after the ark was in the temple - so this cannot have been so soon after the creation. On the other hand, it also talks about this same dragon taking over 30% of the stars in heaven and casting them onto the Earth, a clear impossibility. I guess we cannot trust the Bible. Ezekiel probably had too much sun - or peyote. The fact that Bible writers thought the stars were small enough to be cast onto the Earth is absolute testimony to the non-divine nature of the Bible.

Hovind: "God made the whole thing in six literal twenty-four hour days, including time, including the angels, and everything that is. What day he made the angles is not known"

Lie #244. If it is not known, how can Hovind claim it was in those six days? How does he know it was not before the creation of the universe? The angles? Hmm!

Hovind: "All that we know is Adam was one-hundred and thirty when Seth was born. That is the first date given in Scripture."

Lie #245. This is not a date, it is an age. If Hovind is going to call this a date, then I am going to count the words, "In the beginning..." as a date and say that is the first date given in the Bible.

Hovind tells one of his pedantic and tedious stories here, but since he offers no evidence he did not make it up, I am going to hold him to it as his own words: "You and I live in a three dimensional world. We actually see only two dimensions. We can see the width and the height, but we perceive depth based upon experience."

Lie #246. We perceive depth based on having two eyes.

Hovind: "You cannot put a three dimensional object into two dimensions in a way that it can be fully comprehended. It simply cannot be done."

Lie #247. I guess architects are out of business then - no more perspective drawings.

Hovind: "Now, with that thought in mind, maybe God has more than three dimensions. That would appear to be the case according to an unusual verse in the book of Ephesians 3:18, May be able to comprehend with all saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height."

When you look down into a swimming pool, you perceive it as depth. When you are on the bottom of the pool, cleaning it and painting it before the season starts, you perceive it as height. It's the same quality - different perception. For Hovind to be ranting on about perception and not see this is pathetic. Depth and height can be a continuation of the same thing - unless you are Kent Hovind desperate to make a point, of course, in trying to prove his bizarre theory that he is right and the rest of the world ought to bow down to his endless wisdom.

Hovind: "We are locked into time. You cannot go faster into the future, and you cannot go back to the past. You are stuck in the present."

Lie #248. If you were on the edge of a black hole, right on the event horizon, falling inwards, you would see the entire history of the universe flash before your eyes. If you were traveling at a significant percentage of the speed of light on a trip out into space and back, you would actually age slower than people on Earth. What might be six months for you could be fifty years on Earth. This is a proven fact.

Hovind: "God is not stuck in the present. God is not stuck in space or time or matter."

Kinda takes away the mystery, doesn't it? God knows exactly how everything will turn out - who will be saved, who will rot. Kind of a waste of time being an evangelist, isn't it?

Hovind: "Genesis 1:1 has the best illustration of the Trinity . In the beginning... That is time. Time has three parts to it, past, present, and future"

Lie #249. Only in our perception. Not in reality.

Hovind: "Space has three dimensions, depth, width, and height"

Not if string theory is right - parts of it have only two or less dimensions. For all we know, parts of it may have more. Space itself may have as many as 26 dimensions!

Hovind: "Matter has three dimensions, solid, liquid, and gas."

Lie #250. Not correct. What about plasma? What about energy - a form of 'non-frozen' matter. Hovind just got through mentioning plasma and now he forgets it? What about the Bose-Einstein condensate? Hovind claims to have been a physics teacher for 14 years and he has never heard of that state of matter? Hovind's attempt to prove the trinity falls flat. The only trinity in his life is himself, his beliefs, and who he can fool into sharing them.

Hovind: "Everything that was ever said, thought, or done is still traveling out through space."

Lie #251. Only radiation is traveling out through space - thoughts do not qualify. Sound cannot travel through space since there is no air to perpetuate it.

Hovind: "The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin."

What a sick thought - bathing in the blood of your savior? The Catholics practicing cannibalism? This concept is one of the sickest aspects of the Christian religion, and is a lethal blow to the purported divine origin of the Bible.

Continued in part N

Budikka

From yaawai@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:30:39 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part N 20K

Hovind: "When God is all finished with this world, he is going to stop time again. The first thing that you need to do when you get to heaven is take your watch off, and throw it away. There will be no time there."

Lie #252. Oh but there will - if you keep your watch and it keeps ticking, there will most definitely be time passing. Even if God stops your watch, time will pass and everyone will be aware of it. The only way to stop time is to 'freeze' the universe or have everything happen all at once. Is this Hovind's idea of heaven?

Hovind: 'What did God do for billions of years before he made Adam and Eve? There wasnt billions of years before he made Adam and Eve. He also made time when he made the world."

Lie #253. If there was no time, then god arrived instantaneously from nowhere in particular - just like science understands the universe to have arrived. What's the difference? On the other hand, if god were there for an eternity, well, it's time Hovind called it what it is....

Hovind: "How does one measure the distance to a star?...The farthest that we can get away on earth is eight-thousand miles."

Lie #254. We can actually get a 186 million mile baseline by taking measurements in January and July.

Hovind: 'The farthest that they can measure distance to stars is about sixty light years away. If somebody says that a star is ten billion light years away, you ask them how they know that. Who measured it, and how did they measure it? Show me the mathematics please."

Be happy to. Astronomers take parallax measurements for those objects that they can do so. The first of these was in about 1672, believe it or not, when the distance to Mars was measured. This effort alone disproved the Bible, which claims these lights in the sky were placed in a firmament.

By 1900, we had the distances to about 100 stars. Since the Hipparcos satellite went into orbit, we have accurate distances to about 100,000 stars. That is a stunningly large number that extend far beyond 60 light years. Obviously, parallax has its limits, but for Hovind to pretend that scientists are unaware of this, and have no other methods is nothing but a cheap lie.

Next in line is proper motion of stars. Two photographs of the same portion of the sky, taken a few years apart, will show inevitable differences of position since not all stars are the same distance from us. From this information, a lot of statistical and relative distance information can be gleaned.

It is a fine art, but you can say for a fact if we have measured one star by parallax, and know it to be 60 light years away, and we see another star, judged from proper motion to be further away yet, then it must be more than 60 light years away. If other stars, beyond that, move also, then they must be further still. Comparatively, you can bootstrap yourself out to the edge of the universe this way.

Next in line is absolute magnitude. Scientists (and Hovind would know this if he ever were a real teacher of physics) can calculate how bright a star of known distance would be at any other distance. By comparing stars of known distance with our sun, and examining the spectra of these stars, we can gauge luminosity, which is a key to gauging distance. The information for a know spectral type can be extrapolated to other stars of that type, and their distance determined from their luminosity. This is how we know, that's the math.

Hovind: "The first point on the starlight question is: We dont know how far away the stars are. They might be billions of light years away. Im not saying that they are not. I am saying that we cannot measure it."

Lie #255. In 1784, a deaf and mute English kid by the name of John Goodricke discovered that a star known as delta Cephei was not the perfect work of god that people had thought stars were - it was a variable star. From this discovery we get the name 'Cepheid Variables' - a group of stars which grow bright and dim with a regularity of between 2 days and 60 days. Polaris is a Cepheid - with a period of almost 4 days.

In 1912, Henrietta Leavitt, at Harvard College Observatory, discovered that longer period Cepheids have brighter average magnitudes. From this, astronomers (in my opinion some of the most brilliant scientists there are) were able to figure a way to gauge distances of stars much further away than could be measured by parallax. There are other methods. These methods are detailed in college textbooks. For Hovind to claim there are no methods is for him to admit that he is either ignorant or stupid.

Hovind: "Some say, What about the red shift? The red shift is the Doppler effect of light. Nobody knows what is causing the red shift. Maybe light becomes tired of traveling great distances. That cannot be used to prove that light is great distances away. The star could be very close, traveling away from us, and still give us the red shift."

Lie #256. Light becomes tired? I would love to see Hovind's physics on this one. (He stole this idea, also, by the way). I also would dearly love for him to explain how it is that increasing red shift, which has been verified over known distances, has nothing to do with speed of departure.

Hovind: "God made the stars in order to be a light upon the earth. The light was showing the instance they were created."

Lie #257. These same stars that can be cast down? There is no down in space. If god made the stars as a light, why couldn't he do a better job? It is dark on starlit nights, and very dark when there is cloud cover. Why didn't god just make the sky luminous? The moon was supposed to be a night light but is not there a good portion of the time and is often out in the daylight. Why didn't god make many moons? Why isn't the moon made of mirror-glass, so it reflects almost as much light as the sun shines on us? The pulverized rock of the Lunar surface is really a lousy reflector, and the lunar 'seas' hardly reflect at all. It would seem, according to the best available evidence, that either the moon was not made as a night light, or the creator of it was appallingly inept.

Hovind: "We do not know that the speed of light has always been the same. Maybe light traveled faster when God first made it. Some would say, No, the speed of light is a constant. That sounds impressive, but you really cant see it."

You can't see light?!!

Hovind: "If you are traveling down the highway at sixty miles an hour, and turn your headlights on, how fast is the light going from your headlights? Compared to you, it is going at the speed of light. Compared to someone on the sidewalk it is going at the speed of light plus sixty miles an hour."

Lie #258. No it isn't. Hovind is showing precisely how poor a scholar he is and how clueless he is about the physics he pretends to be able to debate. The speed of light is a constant by any measure we are able to make. If you were traveling at 75% of the speed of light, and someone were traveling towards you at the same speed, and you measured the speed of light emanating from them, it would 186,000 miles per second - not 279,000 miles per second.

That does not mean that light cannot go _slower_. It travels more slowly through a medium than it does through a vacuum (and the oft quoted speed for light is that through a vacuum), but the speed of light is an upper limit tied to the very fabric of the universe. It is a foundation of Einstein's theory of relativity - it was so important that rather than change Einstein's theory, it became necessary to change our way of thinking about physics to match his theory!.

Any physics teacher knows these facts (or should) and it is a sad indictment of Hovind's education and a total condemnation of his approach to science. The man is an ignorant and gullible moron who, if he had any intelligence at all would be ashamed to call himself a school teacher, let alone a PhD.

Hovind stole this idea about the speed of light from Australian creationists. I adore the Australians, but the two guys who invented this nonsense are idiots. The speed of light was first determined in 1675 by a Danish astronomer - Olaus Roemer. Prior to that it had been thought infinite. To date, more than fifty distinct measurements of the speed of light have been made using a variety of methods, and when the uncertainties for each of the measurements are taken into account, the speed of light has revealed itself to be constant ever since that first measurement. It is not slowing, it is not speeding up, it is constant. Even if it were changing, it is not the only means of measuring the age of the universe. To prove the universe younger than science currently accepts, you would have to destroy many more gauges than the speed of light.

Hovind: "We do not know that light has always traveled at the same speed. We dont even know what light is."

Lie #259. Err...can you say photons?

Hovind: "Did you know that bugs can see ultraviolet light, but you cannot see it? Did you know that bugs cannot see red? That is why you can put a red or yellow light out on your porch, and bugs will not see it. They think it is black. Their eyes pick up different wave lengths."

Interesting that god shorted us in this way, and benefited the bugs, isn't it? Maybe bugs are the chosen ones. There are definitely more of them.

Hovind: 'Suppose when we get to heaven God...expands your sense of sight. He now gives you an eyeball that is capable of seeing all the frequencies on the spectrum. That means that you would be able to see the radio waves going through the air as a color. Also, you would be able to see the sounds that come from a piano."

Lie #260. Sound waves are merely a vibration in the air - they are not part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Any teacher knows this - unless that so-called 'teacher' happens to be an imbecile called Kent Hovind.

Hovind: "That means in heaven there may be brand new colors. I dont mean new shades of the colors that we now see. Im talking about new colors that are unimaginable."

Lie #261. The rainbow of colors we are familiar with is simply the way our eyes detect those electromagnetic frequencies. They tail off toward the infrared at one end and the ultraviolet at the other - just how many shades of red and blue does Hovind imagine there are? Perhaps there is a god who can cause us to perceive frequencies off either end of the visible spectrum, but I am willing to bet they would be much more wonderfully perceived than Hovind's idea of new colors. What a limited imagination this idiot has.

Hovind: "Maybe when we get to heaven God will give us ears that can not only pick up 20,000 cycles per second, 20 kHz, but pick up the whole spectrum. Maybe when you get to heaven you might be able to hear the colors."

Lie #262. Maybe on LSD you think you can hear colors and see sounds, but this is simply an illusion caused by the fact that your brain's functioning is scrambled up by the drug. The same kind of things happen when people get very sick and run a high fever. It's not real and it's not normal. Once again, Hovind reveals his appalling ignorance. Here he is confusing the sound frequency spectrum - which is simply vibrations in a medium (such as air) and which are perceived when they cause our eardrums to vibrate likewise, with the electromagnetic spectrum, which is radiation.

Hovind: "Also, when Paul was rocked to sleep (I mean stoned) outside the city of Lystra, he was caught up to the third heaven. When he got up to heaven the Lord said, Paul, its good to see you hear, son!"

What a sick mind this man has - rocked to sleep? See you hear? I wonder if Hovind doesn't have something seriously wrong with his brain.

Hovind: "Paul went back down, and as they were dragging that old body out to the garbage heap, he climbed back into that wreck of a carcass, and arose from the dead. The disciples said, Paul, we thought that you were dead! Paul said, I was! They said, Paul, where have you been. Paul said, I have been to heaven"

A lot of people who have suffered brain damage have illusional experiences. Paul had already demonstrated some prior to this - he might well have started life with some kind of brain damage. To mistake brain damage for heaven is not only stupid, it is rather blasphemous.

Hovind: "Could you explain colors to a blind man? Where would you start when trying to explain colors to a blind man? You could not do it, could you?"

Lie # 263. How about the feeling of cold for blue and hot for red? Go on, Hovind, try it - try to develop an imagination in order to see the plank in your eye that you have mistaken as a soapbox to stand on so you can spout lies for god.

Hovind: "Could you explain sound to a deaf man? No."

Lie #264. Hovind's sexism compels him always to use men for examples. Deaf people, even those with no ear drum function, can still feel vibrations in their body. That's all that sound is. If the deaf person can see, you can hook up a sound receiver to an oscilloscope and show that person the wave forms. Yes - you can explain sound to a deaf person.

Hovind: "Could evolution have happened in giant leaps, known as punctuated equilibrium?"

Lie #265. Punctuated Equilibrium is not giant leaps, never has been, and Hovind knows this for a fact. The only way, however, that he can make it look bad, is to lie about what it is. This is the entire creationist strategy for dealing with evolution.

Hovind: "Goldsschmidt proposed that idea back in the 1940s."

Not quite a lie, but close. That was Richard Goldschmidt - with only one 's'. Doesn't this dimwit Hovind ever check anything? He wrote a book about it in 1940, called "The Material Basis of Evolution." Just like the modern promoters of punctuated equilibrium (PE), Goldschmidt accepted that evolution came in small and gradual changes. Modern evolutionary supporters of PE also assert (this is in addition to, not instead of) that there are times, in isolated populations, where this gradual change is, in effect, concentrated and speeded up, especially in changing environmental conditions.

By 'speeded up', they are talking about tens of thousands of years rather than millions - not a single one of them has ever suggested anything remotely like Hovind wants you to believe - that in one generation a new species can spontaneously arise. None, that is, except Goldschmidt, who couldn't imagine anything gradual producing a new species. In this regard he was no different from the brain dead creationists.

Goldschmidt speculated that there might be what could be called macro-mutations - "hopeful monsters" which were deformed as compared with their parents, but perfect for a new environment. Evolutionary science does not accept hopeful monsters - it leaves too much to chance and is not very scientific. Besides, it is not necessary. The gradual mechanism, with somewhat speedier transitions in isolated environments is quite sufficient to explain evolution between species.

Hovind: "It has just been revised by Nyles Eldridge"

Lie #266. I let him have the last one, so I am going to call this one. That's Niles Eldredge, and I have corrected Hovind on it so many times I didn't even have to look it up.

Hovind: "After he gave a boring lecture on evolution for about an hour, I went up to him and gave him my card. I said, Dr. Eldridge, I know that you strongly believe in evolution. It is obvious from your presentation, and I have read some of your work. On the back of my business card, it states, Ill pay $10,000 for anybody with empirical evidence (scientific proof) for evolution. I went on to say, I know that you believe very strongly in evolution."

Obviously Eldredge was not as boring as Hovind is tedious with his stories. Hovind ought to have paid attention - he desperately needs tutoring from an expert.

Hovind: "If you ever get any real proof for it, give me a call. Ill pay you $10,000."

Lie #267. Hovind has no intention whatsoever of paying - and I have proven it by challenging him. Rest assured I am not done with him yet on this score.

Hovind: 'They never present any evidence because there isnt any."

Lie #268. I have presented Hovind with evidence after evidence, after evidence. He lied about being serious in his offer, he lied about presenting my evidence to a panel of impartial judges and he lied about paying the money. He is nothing but a cheap, jumped-up snake-oil salesman, playing on people's poor science education. He is a fraud, and a charlatan. Well I intend to change him from being a fraud. I will make him afraid - afraid to speak of creationism for fear of utter ridicule.

Hovind: "I corresponded with Stephen Gould to try to schedule a debate for October 1993, and he refused."

Hovind even lied about this - claiming he had a debate scheduled before Gould even responded. Gould does not debate anyone because debate does not solve anything but who is the better at rhetoric.

Hovind "I was going to speak near Harvard and contacted him to schedule a debate punctuated equilibrium. The idea they present is called punctuated equilibrium, that is, there is no evidence for gradual change. There are no missing links. Therefore, evolution must have happened rapidly. In other words, a lizard laid an egg, and a chicken hatched out. That is the general idea behind punctuated equilibrium."

Lie #269. Punctuated equilibrium is nothing, in any way shape or form, akin to Hovind's description. Neither is evolution.

Hovind: "Nobody has time to read all the textbooks unless that is their full-time job...You probably will not find any of the books that are real strong on the creationist stand and against evolution."

I wonder why?

Hovind: "You can at least get some that are not so blatantly anti-Christian."

Lie #270. Science is neither pro- nor anti-religion. Science merely observes, tests, and records and theorizes. A better testimony to god's creation there cannot be - if indeed there is a god. It is not science that is anti-Christian, but Hovind. Hovind wants to get everything he dislikes banned, so he can control you, your children, your minds, and your money.

Hovind: "If they get responses from Christians by the thousands from across the country saying, We did not choose your book because... They will change what is published in the books."

This is Hovind's plan - the hell with what science says and can prove - ban the books. Isn't that what the Nazis did? He wants to declare facts not by how well they stand up to scrutiny and criticism, but by his own approval or veto. What he thinks is not a fact is banned, what he thinks is a fact is sacred. Hovind as god the creator, creating his own reality by force of will. How blasphemous can you get?

Hovind: "The second law of thermodynamics states that everything tends to fall apart, and break down or get worse with time."

It says nothing of the sort. Look it up. I covered this in lie #9.

Hovind: "You will find many scientists who argue that the earth is cooling off, and we are going into another ice age."

Maybe idiotic so-called creation scientists. Real scientists understand that we _are_ in an ice age right now - it just happens to be a warmer phase, and apparently getting warmer by the year.

Continued in part O

Budikka

From yaawai@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:31:23 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part O 22K

Hovind: "What I think happened is, the hippies of the sixties are now the college professors. They are still radical Communists who still want to destroy this country."

Lie #271. Until and unless Hovind cares to offer some proof. I wonder if he ever read that bit in the Bible about 'judge not, lest ye shall be judged"? He sure does a lot of judging of others, doesn't he?

Hovind: "One of the things they must do to be successful is bankrupt this country, make the currency useless, and put the people in poverty. Environmental issues are a great way to bankrupt the country."

Lie #272. Precisely the opposite is the case - if we had taken steps to safeguard the environment over the last fifty years, we would not be faced with the huge cost of cleaning it up, with children suffering brain damage from lead paint, with people getting sick from asbestos, with waterways getting polluted with fertilizers, with carbon dioxide running rampant in the air, and with ozone depleting yearly. We are going to find out the real cost of neglecting the environment, rest assured. We will truly learn that lesson before so very long.

Hovind: "There are many carburetors that have been designed that will get two-hundred miles per gallon. The Pogue carburetor was designed back in the 1930s, and it allowed a vehicle to get well over two-hundred miles per gallon on any vehicle."

Lie #273. Until and unless Hovind offers some proof.

Hovind: "The environmentalist issue is a smoke screen for Communist activity to get more control so that you have to get a permit for everything."

Lie #274. Until and unless Hovind offers proof. What would Hovind rather have - anarchy?

Hovind: "The ozone is not a problem...There is no ozone over Antarctica because there doesnt need to be ozone there because the sunlight never shines directly on that area."

Lie #275. I shall not even dignify it with a response (doesn't need to be?!).

Hovind: "Automobile air conditioners cost $900 more in 1993 than the did in 1992 due to the different refrigerants that are now required all because R-12 destroys ozone."

Lie #276. Until and unless Hovind offers proof.

Hovind: "There is more smoke than fire, and the real purpose for the environmental movement is control"

And this isn't Hovind's purpose?

Hovind: "Why wouldnt the ice meteor melt as it entered the atmosphere? If you had three-hundred degrees below zero snow, and enough of it, it would be overwhelming."

Lie #277. Nope. It would explode with the heat of entry. If it didn't explode, it would vaporize with the heat of impact. No more 300 degrees below. Sorry, Hovind, but you are lying. You want to call me on this? Show me your physics - let's see it worked out on paper and submitted to a peer reviewed journal. Hovind already claimed the thing exploded into a puff of snow before it entered the atmosphere, so he is lying to himself again here.

Hovind: "What is or who is the Illuminati?"

Lie #278. Hovind rambles on for a whole paragraph and does not even begin to explain who they are - he simply farms the answer off on the devil - one of the many Bible myths stolen from other cultures.

Hovind: "As far as cloning goes, it is defiantly not being done, and probably would be an impossibility."

Lie #279. Defiantly? I think he means definitely. And it is a lie. Cloning was being done in 1995/6 when Hovind's seminar was apparently written - and this was in a mammal. Cloning in amphibians and plants had been done long before that.

Hovind: "I dont know how far they are going to go in genetic engineering. Im a little nervous that they might develop a germ for which there is no antidote."

Hovind is too late - evolution has already done this. It's called TB. Or HIV. Or whatever other one you want to pick.

Hovind: 'I believe that the zodiac is the gospel in the stars. When God first made this world they did not have a Bible. Apparently the symbols or the patterns in the stars, the constellations, depict the gospel story. It starts with Virgo the virgin, and how she brought forth a son."

Lie #280. The zodiac begins at the Vernal Equinox, and the first sign is Ares, the ram. That's actually more appropriate since Jesus is the lamb of god (according to popular fiction). I have one small problem with Hovind's claim: right after virgo comes libra, then scorpio. Just how does this fit into the nativity scene? And why is Hovind obsessing on the western idea of what the zodiac is? The zodiac did not originate here, nor was Jesus supposedly born here. They both originated in the East. Shouldn't Hovind be looking there for the story in the stars? What a small-minded, provincial hick this hayseed is.

Hovind: "To make sure the information was not lost through history, some of the wise men, possibly Adam, Enoch, or somebody else before the flood, built the Sphinx in Egypt. The Sphinx is the face of a woman with the body of a lion, symbolizing how the zodiac begins with Virgo the virgin, and ends with Leo the lion."

Lie #281. The Sphinx represents Khufu, for whom the pyramid was built right by it. Khufu was a man, and there is a bust of him which looks just like the face of the Sphinx - but in better condition.

Hovind: "This may sound far fetched to you, but I believe if you were to study more of the zodiac it would fascinate you. Just the mathematics that is involved would cause you to say, WOW! "

Lie #282. Mathematics of the zodiac? What mathematics? I did study the zodiac, found out what a bunch of lies it was, and never said, "wow!" once.

Hovind: "There is no question that the guy was a screwball and a cult leader, but do you know who really attacked the Koresh cult? Did you know that the black suited organization that attacked the Koresh cult was a United Nations task force?"

Lie #283. Until and unless Hovind offers proof.

Hovind: "There is a United Nations task force, including 300,000 foreign troops in America."

Lie #284. Until and unless Hovind offers proof.

Hovind: "If you happen to believe the Bible, send your children to a Christian school, rebel, hoard guns, ammunition or food, or are nervous about the government, you are considered to be a dangerous cult in their minds."

Lie #285. Until and unless Hovind offers proof. The evidence I can see of the protections religion has - and has had ever since the constitution was written - completely contradict Hovind.

Hovind: "I heard a man give his testimony who manages a mental institution. He told me that the government pays him to keep 60 percent of his beds empty. They do this because they think there is going to be a great influx in the near future."

Lie #286. Until and unless Hovind offers proof. Is he sure the guy was not an inmate rather than a manager?

Hovind: "Do whatever you can within the law to keep your school out of the Goals 2000 program. You dont want in that program. It is going to be big brother deciding what your children learn, what propaganda they are fed."

Lie #287. Hovind is describing himself here, not the Goals 2000 program. Hovind wants your children to learn only what he personally approves.

Hovind: "Children can get evolution out of their schools. If they to look ahead in their textbook , and see that evolution is going to be taught, they can say, Hey, thats not what I believe. They can go home and talk to their parents, they should be sweet, be kind, be Christian about it, not make a big stink, not embarrass their teacher in front of the class"

Pity Hovind doesn't practice what he preaches, isn't it? Those that can, do, those that can't, evangelize. Here Hovind is saying that you should blind your children to differing points of view. Don't try to defeat the position with logic, reason, or science, simply isolate, insulate, regulate, constipate.

Hovind: "...get their parents to go to the principal and say, In two weeks they are going to be discussing this chapter on evolution. I do not want my child taught that. I want my child to be exempt. If 85 percent of the class is absent that day, pretty soon they will figure out that they need to skip that part of the curriculum because nobody wants to learn it"

This from the same hypocrite who insists that the majority is often wrong? From chapter one of his seminar: "Majority does not make it right! The majority is frequently wrong.." So if the majority does not want it, then skip it? Can you imagine, if children thought they could get away with this, how many of them would also skip the other sciences, math, and any other topic that is hard, or that they don't like?

Hovind: "If you are a Christian in a school system you should be a good student...Do your best. Dont get in trouble. Be nice. Be obedient."

But refuse to follow lesson plans because Hovind says so.

Hovind: "Maybe you need to give some tape or books to the teachers or school board members, and say, Would you watch this and tell me what you think? Give them one of my video tapes or this book."

So Hovind can be rewarded for telling lies by milking money out of you.

Hovind: "You need to expose them to the creationist material. They may have never heard of it."

Lie #288. I doubt that any teacher had not heard of the Bible.

Hovind: "I think that the earths crust was cracked, possibly from a number of factors. It could have been from the impact of the ice meteor that was discussed in chapter five."

Lie #289. The same ice meteor Hovind said exploded at the 'Rosches' limit? From Hovind's seminar, chapter 5: "It continued travel to closer and move faster until it reached a point called Rosches Limit, which is about 2.44 times the diameter of the larger planet. About 20,000 miles out, the meteor exploded in space and turned into a puff of snow." Hovind cannot even remember his lies, there are so many of them.

Hovind: "In order for it to be scientific it has to be observable, testable, and demonstrable. Evolution is none of those"

Lie #290. Evolution is all of these. Creationism is none of these - because it is a religion.

Hovind: "Some of the fish would have been killed in the flood, but not all of them."

Lie #291. Genesis 7:4, "...every living thing that I have made will I destroy..." Hovind apparently doesn't believe the Bible.

Hovind: "I believe that the oceans were all fresh water prior to the flood. After the flood, the salts began leaching out of the continents...The fish have gradually adjusted to that salt."

This from the man who claims there is no evolution - that it is not observable, testable or demonstrable. Let's see his scientific evidence for this. Here is one aspect of his faith - of his belief system, that is open to scientific testing - why isn't he doing this? Why is he just claiming it as a belief? Could it be that he knows if he has to prove it, he will fail?

Hovind: "There is a man in Minnesota that has two huge aquariums in his home, one is a salt water aquarium, and the other is fresh water...In about ten years, he was able to get both of them to about half salinity, and then he mixed all the fish together. They are doing fine."

Lie #292. Where is the published paper on this scientific research? Where is the ongoing study to show that this is true of _all_ fish, not just a chosen few species? Until I see the evidence, this is a lie. Real, working scientists publish papers frequently. Creationists never do. In a survey published in 1985, 68 journals were examined for creationist offerings. Out of 135,000 submissions between 1980 and 1983, only 18 dealt with creationism, 12 of these went to one single journal, which was not an appropriate one for first publishing of new science material anyway! All of these submissions were rejected on grounds of poor scholarship. (Quarterly Review of Biology (60)1, 1985, E. Scott and H. Cole.)

Hovind: "There are salt water crocodile and fresh water crocodile, which are totally different species, but they are still crocodiles. They are no longer inner-fertile, they cannot breed together..."

Inner-fertile? Does Hovind realize that crocodiles are reptiles, not fish? That it is immaterial to them whether the water is salty or not because they neither breathe via the water nor have osmotic problems like fish do?

Hovind: 'Is the NAFTA a stepping stone toward the New World Order? Absolutely! There are those who really object to nationalities. They want to get you to get rid of the I love America! and get you to say I love the world!"

And Hovind, who wants you to say, I love god and all else is unimportant, thinks nationalism is important? I would love to see his logic behind this.

Hovind: "Nobody knows what triggers an eruption [of a volcano].

Lie #293. Pressure of magma underneath. Next question?

Hovind: "Krakatoa, a volcano in Java near Vietnam, blew up in 1883. It was such a bad explosion that it made a tidal wave. The tidal wave traveled almost two-thousand miles an hour. It crossed the Indian ocean and hit Madagascar and killed 36,000 people."

Lie #294. The 36,000 people died in the coastal areas of Java and Sumatra. I would also like to take this opportunity to challenge him to show how the tidal wave traveled at three times the speed of sound, given that people miles away heard the volcano, before there was any flooding or tidal waves.

Hovind: "Questions to ask evolutionist: In the big bang, what exploded? And where did it come from? When they admit they don't know, ask, "Which is easier to believe: 'In the beginning God,' or 'In the beginning Dirt'?" The theory of evolution is something people chooses to believe. They do not and cannot know that it is true."

Lie #295. What people "chooses" to believe is up to them. What they can offer scientifically is something entirely different. It is not the theory of evolution which starts, "In the beginning, dirt..." - that's the Biblical creation story of humankind. What would you prefer to believe - that we came from so-called inanimate matter, stretching toward godhood, something truly miraculous, or that you are nothing more than animated dirt?

Hovind: "Plants and animals that lived on the earth four thousand years ago would have had much less C14 in their body to start with. This would make them appear to be thousands of years older than they really are... Since the rate of decay may not be constant, dates obtained by C14 must be accepted only with caution..."

They are accepted only with caution. Only creationists think they are not.

Hovind: "...Different parts of the same sample often yield different ratios... The sample being tested [may have] been contaminated...Parent of daughter products may have leached in or out of the sample. Many lab test have confirmed that this can happen."

Lie #296. If this is the case, why do objects _of known age_ test out accurately? How could science make this error when it is not the total amount of C14 they are testing, but the proportion of one isotope to another? Why do all radiometric dates fit together if there is so much uncertainty? The age of the Earth had been verified by at least five different radiometric methods. If there are so many variables, how come these all match?

Rest assured, radiometric dates are accepted only with utmost caution. Scientists who do this are experts and do not get fooled easily. They are quite aware of the variability of samples and ratios, and of contamination. The only reason Hovind can say that lab tests have confirmed this is because scientists have conducted such veracity checks!

Hovind: "Secular writers of antiquity tend to exaggerate ages so even these dates are suspect."

Lie #297. Until Hovind offers something more than an ad hominem attack on this topic. Secular writers of antiquity exaggerate ages, but religious writers exaggerate nothing? The Bible is absolute truth but other, comparable writes are wrong?

Hovind: "[Do not trust that] The geologic column can be used as a base to calibrate the C14 dates."

Lie #298. Since C14 is useless over 50,000 years of age and therefore is really irrelevant in the geological column, this is nothing more than a red Hovind, or herring.

Hovind: "II Peter 3:3-8 tells us that people who scoff at the Bible are "willingly ignorant" of the Creation and the Flood. In order to understand science and the Bible, we must not be ignorant of those two great events in Earth's history."

Lie #299. Here is Hovind, just getting done whining that scientists are dishonest and science unreliable, demanding they prove everything. Now he turns right around and demands that we accept and utterly swallow the Bible uncritically and without any evidence, proof, indication, reliability whatsoever. He insists that we accept, based on nothing more than the say-so of anonymous and primitive writers, the Biblical myths of creation and flood, both of which were demonstrably stolen from earlier myths, none of which Hovind himself accepts! Can you say 'hypocrite'?

Hovind: "Even using the small 18-inch cubit...the ark was large enough to hold all the required animals, people, and food with room to spare."

Lie #300, as I have demonstrated in several previous postings.

Hovind: "The length-to-width ratio of 6 to 1 is what shipbuilders today often use. This is the best ratio for stability in stormy weather. (God thinks of everything!)"

Lie #301. If god thinks of everything, why didn't he think to simply magic all the evildoers away and leave Noah and the Earth alone instead of subjecting the innocent animals to horrible drowning deaths, and Noah to a year of hell afloat caring for hundreds if not thousands of animals? It is no big deal that the ark shows a six to one ratio - presumably the writers were familiar with boats.

Hovind: "The ark may have had a "moon-pool" (sometimes called moon-pull) in the center. The larger ships would have a hole in the center of the bottom of the boat with walls extending up into the ship..It allowed water to go up into the hole as the ship crested waves...The rising and lowering water acted as a piston to pump fresh air in and out of the ship...The hole was a great place to dump garbage into the ocean without going outside."

Lie #302. I know of no large ship which was ever built with a hole in the bottom and the Biblical story itself - which gives explicit ark-building instructions - makes no mention of this feature. In rough seas (as there must have been with the entire Earth covered in water - sloshing back and forth, according to Hovind - with no wind breaks or shelter, continuing torrential rain, and the fountains of the deep breaking up) the water would have slopped all over the ark (together with the floating garbage), eventually sinking it. If the pool surround was built high enough to prevent this, it would not have ventilated the lower floors of the ark. A hole in the boat, far from strengthening it, would have made it weaker. If Hovind or any creationist disagrees with this, I challenge them to build such a boat, fill it with their family and animals, and go afloat for a year in rough seas. Let them put their faith where their mouth is.

Hovind: "Skeletons over 11 feet tall have been found!"

Lie #303. Until and unless any creationist produces a real one.

Hovind: "God told Noah to bring two of each kind, not of each species or variety."

Lie #304. Until and unless the creationists find some Biblical definition of kind that can withstand scientific scrutiny, there is no way Hovind can pretend 'kind' and species are different. Primitive peoples today very much define kinds in the same way as science defines species. Creationists need to do their homework on this and come back when they are ready to debate. They also need to explain how animals can vary dramatically within kinds, but never cross the kind barrier no matter how flimsy that barrier may be between two 'kinds'.

Hovind: "Animals have diversified into many varieties in the last 4,400 years since the Flood. This is not anything similar to great claims that the evolutionists teach.

Lie #305. Damned right it isn't. Evolutionists would not dare pretend to a rate of evolution that the creationists need in order to explain this immense diversity arising in such a short time.

Hovind: "Noah did not have to get the animals. God brought them to him (Gen. 6:20, "shall come to thee")."

Lie #306. This is one of the many Biblical contradictions. Hovind chooses Gen 6:20 because it suits his purpose, but it not only depends on which part of the story you read - it also depends on what translation you read. The Catholic Bible gives this same verse as "...two of each shall enter with you to be kept alive." The Dartmouth Bible specifies, "...two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark." I shall choose my own verse, just as Hovind did, since it suits my purpose, just like the one he chose suits his. My verse comes right after Hovind's - Gen 6:21. "And take unto thee of all food that is eaten, and thou shalt gather it to thee, and it shall be as food for thee and for them."

You see, the problem with Hovind is that he cannot think, and he cannot imagine anything outside of his own paranoid schizophrenic world. Does Hovind imagine, I wonder, if the food came unto Noah like his animals? Did it come walking like the brush figures from the Disney sorcerer's apprentice cartoon? Just how did this food get there? The Bible says Noah had to gather it; enough food for a year, for eight people and countless animals with specialized diets. The fact that god told Noah to gather enough food is proof positive that Hovind's insane idea that the animals hibernated is nonsense. They were alive and awake and desperately hungry, and there were only eight people to feed and clean them, and entertain the higher mammals for a year in rough seas on an ark with a door built in the side, and only one window.

Concluded in part P

Budikka

From yaawai@aol.com
Mon Mar 15 05:32:05 1999
300 Creationist Lies
Part P 22K

Hovind: "Only land-dwelling, air-breathing animals had to be included on the ark (Gen. 7:15, "in which is the breath of life").

Lie #307. Gen 6:13 "The end of all flesh is come before me" Gen 6:17 "...everything that is in the Earth shall die." Does this not mean all living things, including plants? Do not fish and plants take in oxygen (the breath of life)? Gen 6:19 "And of every living thing of all flesh, two of every sort shalt thou bring into the ark..." Doesn't this mean everything? Doesn't every sort mean every species?

Hovind: "Many animals sleep, hibernate, or become very inactive during bad weather."

Lie #308. In the comfort of their own home in winter, yes. Confined in the dark on an unstable boat in rough seas? No! Most animals would die. If you doubt this, find out how many slaves died in similar conditions on a simple trip across the Atlantic lasting a couple of months. These people were treated like animals and were doubtlessly scared, but at least they had a better understanding of their circumstances than any panicked animal would do. They were human, and many of them died under those conditions. Where does Hovind get off imagining that real and petrified animals would do better?

Hovind: "All animals (and people) were vegetarians before and during the Flood according to Gen. 1:20-30 with Gen. 9:3."

Lie #309. Animals were a mixture of herbivorous _and_ carnivorous according to the fossil record of their teeth. Hovind either has to find that fossil layer showing only herbivores, or he has to come up with the science to explain how carnivorous dentition was able to masticate plant material - and while he is at it, explain where all the aquatic species found all the plant material.

Hovind: "The pre-Flood people were probably much smarter and more advanced than people today."

Lie #310. Obviously they were not smart enough to avoid pissing off their god so much that he flooded them. Hovind needs to do the science here. If people back then were smarter, how come the further we look back, the smaller the human's brains were? I know within a certain range, brain size does most definitely correlate with intelligence, but there is a limit to this dictum. There is a consistent record of hominid cranial capacity increasing in the geological record, whether you believe the record covers 6,000 years or 6 million.

Hovind: "The Bible says that the highest mountains were covered by 15 cubits of water. This is half the height of the ark. The ark was safe from scraping bottom at all times."

30 feet of water? Hovind needs some consistency. Were the highest mountains lower than 30 feet or did the water go 30 feet above the highest mountains? The Bible is completely unclear on this, and the consequences are dramatically different in each case..

Hovind: "The continents were not separated until 100-300 years after the Flood (Gen. 10:25). The people and animals had time to migrate anywhere on earth by then."

Lie #311. The evidence shows that the continents have been drifting around for many millions of years, not 4,000 years.

Hovind: "Why would any plant or animal want to reproduce more of it's kind since this would only make more mouths to feed and decrease the chances of survival?"

Lie #312. I shall ignore Hovind's atrocious grammar and ask him who it was who ever said that animals consciously plan their families and their evolution.

Hovind: "How can mutations (recombining of the genetic code) create any new improved varieties?"

Lie #313. This is more like sleight of hand than a lie, but it is so brazen I am calling it. If Hovind has a problem with genetics, ask him how he supposes animals evolved after the flood from a few kinds to literally thousands of varieties seen all over the world with no mutation and no evolution permitted. Ask him how the Peppered moth varieties even arose if there is no improvement from mutation.

Hovind: "Should we continue to use outdated, disproved, questionable, or inconclusive evidences to support the theory of evolution because we don't have a suitable substitute (Piltdown man, recapitulation theory, Archaeopteryx, Lucy, Java Man, Neanderthal Man, etc.)?"

Lie #314. I am pleased that he admits that there is no suitable substitute to evolution, but Hovind includes Piltdown man which was a hoax _that was revealed by science_, not by religion. Either he is too stupid to know that Piltdown was exposed years ago, or he is deliberately throwing a known lie into the mix.

Next time you see Hovind, ask him about the faked 11'6" 'skeleton' of a man supposedly found in a coal mine. Ask him about the faked "Freiberg skull" that was fashioned out of coal and which Henry Morris, godfather of creationism, tried to pass off as real. Ask him about creationist Carl Baugh's discovery of a fossil human tooth that turned out to be a fish tooth. I can guarantee you if you compare a list of honest scientific mistakes, all of which were exposed by scientists, and deliberate creationist fraud - again, all of which were exposed by scientists), the latter will be the longer by a huge margin.

Hovind finishes off his appendix with a bunch of quotes from various people. As usual, he offers no references so that we can check up on these quotes. Creationists do not like references because they usually quote evolutionists out of context to dishonestly encourage the idea that there is a big fight going on about whether evolution happened. This is a lie. There is debate about details, but no serious biologist has any doubt that evolution is a fact. Fortunately, E.T. Babinski has tracked down many of these quotes and found out the truth about them. His comments can be found at:

http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ce/3/part6.html

It was with the aid of this material that I compiled my comments below.

Some of Hovind's quotes are wildly inappropriate. One, for example, is a quote (if we can trust Hovind to get it right) by Dr. T. N. Tahmisian, of the American Atomic Energy Commission. So what? Who is this guy to comment on evolution? Sure, anyone can comment, but it doesn't matter a damn if you are an employee of the AEC or some six year old kid - your opinion is of no scientific value if you are speaking from a position of ignorance. If an r>employee of the AEC told you that your favorite singer or sports star was an incompetent amateur, would you consider that an expert opinion? Tahmisian's comment on evolution is no different.

Hovind attributes this: "Evolution is a fairy tale for grown-ups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless." to Professor Louis Bounoure, supposedly the former president of the Biological Society of 'Strasbourg'. A creationist web site actually gives a reference: The Advocate, March 8, 1984, p. 17

Lie #315. E.T. Babinski actually contacted French authorities. They revealed that Louis Bounoure never served as Director or even a member of the CNRS. He was a professor of biology at the University of Strasbourg. Bounoure was a Christian but did not affirm that Genesis was to be taken to the letter.

The beginning of the quotation, "Evolution is a fairy tale for adults" is not from Bounoure but adapted from Jean Rostand, a member of the Academy of Sciences of the French Academy. Rostand also wrote that "Transformism may be considered as accepted, and no scientist, no philosopher, no longer discusses the fact of evolution." (L'Evolution des Especes [i.e., The Evolution of the Species], Hachette, p. 190).

The end of Bounoure's quotation is from his book, "Determinism and Finality." It runs, "That, by this, evolutionism would appear as a theory without value, is confirmed also pragmatically. A theory must not be required to be true, said Mr. H. Poincare, more or less, it must be required to be useable. Indeed, none of the progress made in biology depends even slightly on a theory, the principles of which are nevertheless filling every year volumes of books, periodicals, and congresses with their discussions and their disagreements."

In other words, Hovind's quote is complete fiction and he is too incompetent and dishonest to correct it or even check up on it.

Hovind quotes Lyall Watson, the same guy who published a book some years ago that claimed plants had feelings. This is where Hovind steals his 'coffin' quote from without attribution: "The remarkable fact is that all the physical evidence we have for human evolution can still be placed, with room to spare, inside a coffin!"

This quote dates back almost 20 years. It is no longer accurate or relevant, and for Hovind to use it is to demonstrate how clueless, dishonest, and out of date he is.

Malcolm Muggeridge is nothing more than a journalist. He is entitled to his opinion, but basically, he is no better informed than the journalist who wrote the article claiming Dewey had defeated Truman in 1948.

Why Hovind quotes Stephen Gould - one of the best-known and foremost proponents of evolution, I have no idea. How he can pretend that this quote: "This notion of species as 'natural kinds' fits splendidly with creationist tenets of pre-Darwinian age...But how could a division of the organic world into discrete entities be justified by an evolutionary theory that proclaimed ceaseless change as the fundamental fact of nature?" supports creationism or denies evolution is a mystery.

Lie #316. Hovind dishonestly misquotes Richard Dawkins - another outstanding supporter of evolutionary theory: "The more statistically improbable a thing is, the less can we believe that it just happened by blind chance. Superficially the obvious alternative to chance is an intelligent Designer." If Hovind had had the decency to finish the quote instead of removing it from its context, you would have gone on to read: "But Charles Darwin showed how it is possible for blind physical forces to mimic the effects of conscious design, and, by operating as a cumulative filter of chance variations, to lead eventual to organized and adaptive complexity..." (In 'The necessity of Darwinism'. New Scientist, vol. 94, 15 April 1982, P. 130.

Another quote: "And in Man is a three-pound brain which, as far as we know, is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter in the universe." Dr. Isaac Asimov

How that quote supports creationism, I have no idea! This is just Asimov's opinion - he offers no criteria by which to gauge his assessment. It is the easiest thing in the world to add to this that the human brain is no more complex than that of the whale, dolphin, or ape. If Hovind is aiming at entropy here, then he has been defeated in previous argument. If he is trying to claim that only an intelligent designer, smarter than his design, could create a brain, all I have to say is, if that is true, then only an intelligent designer smarter than god could have created god's brain.

Hariot's claim quoted by Hovind: "The universe we see when we look out to it's furthest horizons contains a hundred billion galaxies. Each of these galaxies contains another hundred billion stars. The silent embarrassment of modern astrophysics is that we do not know how even a single one of these stars managed to form. There's no lack of ideas, of course; we just can't substantiate them." is not strictly true, either. Suggesting a lack of substantiation is not the same as proving something wrong. The creationist theory here seems to be that if we cannot immediately explain a facet of nature down to the last detail, then the law is that this facet of nature must be the work of god. Well when the creationists to prove _that_ theory and I'll take them seriously.

Hovind quotes Gould: "In fact evolutionary trees that adorn our textbooks have data only at the tips and nodes of their branches; the rest is inference, however reasonable, not the evidence of fossils."

Lie #317. I am counting this because it is dishonest of Hovind to present Gould as supporting the creationist position, especially by quoting him out of context. This quote is familiar to me, but I have been so far unable to find it in my copies of his books, so in response, let me add a few quotes of my own, taken from these books, which more accurately portray Gould's position.

"We have oodles to learn about how evolution happened, but we have adequate proof that living forms are connected by bonds of genealogical descent." (Bully For Brontosaurus, ch 30.)

"One of the phoniest arguments raised for rhetorical effect by "creation scientists" tried to deny scientific status to evolution because its results take so much time to unfold and therefore can't be seen directly." (Eight Little Piggies, ch. 13.)

"Odd arrangements and funny solutions are the proof of evolution - paths that a sensible god would never tread but that a natural process, constrained by history, follows perforce." (The Panda's Thumb, ch. 1.)

"Many central features of our anatomy link us with fetal and juvenile stages of primates: small face, vaulted cranium, and large brain in relation to body size." (Mismeasure of Man, ch. 7.)

"Still, our creationist incubi, who would never let facts spoil a favorite argument, refuse to yield, and continue to assert the absence of _all_ transitional forms by ignoring those that have been found..." (Dinosaur in a Haystack, ch. 28.)

The moral of this story? Never ever trust a creationist quote of Gould again.

If we are to trust this quote of Ronald West of Kansas State University:

"Contrary to what most scientist write, the fossil record does not support the Darwinian theory of evolution because it is this theory (there are several) which we use to interpret the fossil record. By doing so we are guilty of circular reasoning if we then say the fossil record supports this theory."

we finally have something to work with, but given that the singular 'scientist' is used where the plural is clearly required, I suspect Hovind has misquoted this one, also.

West is wrong in his view, however (assuming Hovind is even close to what he said). The Darwinian theory began not with the fossil record, which was very sparse in Darwin's day, but with living things. Once Darwin's theory was developed from observation (thereby proving evolution is a science, and not a religion), the prediction was inevitable that support for evolution would be found in the fossil record. This proved to be the case. There is no circular reasoning here, any more than there is to say that if there was a big bang, then the universe should be expanding, and it is expanding, which means there was a big bang. You can 'circularize' anything you care to in this fashion! How about this one: the Bible is inerrant, therefore when the Bible writers say something is true, it must be so. What's more circular than that?

Hovind quotes Chester A. Arnold, supposedly a Professor of Botany at the University of Michigan: "As yet we have not been able to trace the phylogenetic history of single group of modern plants from it's beginning to the present."

To begin with, there is no Chester Arnold at Umich - I checked. Perhaps there once was, but how reliable is the out of date creationist quote if we cannot find the person who supposedly said it? I couldn't find any Chester A. Arnold in MI! Secondly, so what if we cannot trace from beginning to present? All we have to do is trace a significant portion of the trail - or several portions. Does Arnold's quote deny this? No!

Hovind offers this quote, supposedly from W. E. Swinton of the "British Museum of Natural History in London": "The [revolutionary] origin of birds is largely a matter of deduction. There is no fossil evidence of the stages through which the remarkable change from reptile to bird was achieved."

First of all this is inaccurate - there are several transitional forms extant - although if this quote is ancient, as many creationist quotes are, perhaps it was true when it was made. I was unable to find any mention of a Swinton or a W.E. Swinton in a search of the web site of this establishment, which is called, 'The Natural History Museum' - not "The British Museum of Natural History."

Hovind quotes a Dr. Robert Martin, supposedly a senior research fellow of the Zoological Society of London. I can find several such people in London, but no email address, and no society web page to check the membership. If this Martin exists, he is probably on the faculty of some university, but without that information, I am not going to spend my life searching every educational establishment in the UK to try and track him down.

So all I have is Hovind's word for this quote: "In recent years several authors have written popular books on human origins which were based more on fantasy and subjectivity than on fact and objectivity. At the moment science cannot offer a full answer on the origin of humanity..." which does not deny evolution! It is sad that the lying, cheating, and fundamentally dishonest creationists use the honesty of scientists against them. Here is a guy (if we are to trust Hovind) admitting that science does not know all the answers, yet Hovind quotes him as though it is some sort of indictment against evolution - that if we do not know every tiny detail, the whole edifice crumbles down.

Hovind takes another run at C14 in his quotes, which I shall ignore because it is so patently pathetic. Next he quotes a Dr. Robert Gentry, supposedly a research physicist, again offering no way to track the guy down. However, the quote is a farcical example if offered in support of the creationist position. Here it is: "The Big Bang is presumed to have produced just hydrogen and helium, only 2 of the 92 elements of the earth's crust."

So? What point is Hovind trying to make? No scientist ever said that the big bang produced anything more than this. The heavier elements were produced in supernovae and this has been the position of cosmologists ever since the details were worked out! For Hovind to offer this as some sort of proof of the inadequacy of (his definition of) evolution to explain the elements is merely to demonstrate what a mindless and incompetent moron he is.

Hovind: "How to collect the $10,000...Prove, beyond any reasonable doubt, that the process of evolution...is the only possible way the observed phenomena could have come into existence. Only empirical evidence is acceptable. Persons wishing to collect the $10,000 may submit their evidence in writing or schedule time for a public presentation. As in any fair court of law, the accuser must also rule out any other possible explanations. To the best of my ability, I will be fair and honest in my evaluation and judgment as the validity of the evidence presented."

Lie #318.

Hovind: "Evolution has been accused of being the only process capable of causing the observed phenomena. As with any just court, the burden of proof rests on the accuser."

Lie #319. Say what? Can you believe this mindless drivel? No - the accuser is the creationist camp in claiming that evolution does not explain our origins. If they disagree with evolution, it is incumbent upon them to disprove it.

Hovind: "Most thinking people will agree: 1. A highly ordered universe exist."

I would say, 'exists'.... Of course, the words, 'highly ordered' are Hovind's - I think his definition is very debatable, especially when you consider it in terms of what might have existed if a god truly had made everything.

Hovind: "3. Man appears to be the most advanced form of life on this planet."

Lie #320. Again his sexism is rife, but the lie is in declaring humanity to be the most advanced form of life. By what definition? It would be quite easily arguable that various other forms of life are more advanced than humans, depending upon your definition of 'advanced'. Each species alive today is at the pinnacle of its evolution. By this definition, we are no more advanced than anything else.

Hovind: "3. No one has ever observed life spontaneously arising from non-living matter."

Lie #321. German scientists, as reported on various web news sites recently have now observed this phenomenon - reproducing molecules arose in a laboratory experiment, proving that the first step on the road to life - what creationists call life from inanimate matter - has been observed.

Hovind: "4. Matter cannot make itself out of nothing."

Quantum physicists might disagree. Part of quantum physics is that this very thing does apparently occur (at least from the perspective of what turned into our universe). Quantum tunneling and zero-energy ballooning could cause a universe to come into existence from a previous universe. Since passage between the two is not navigable, this, in effect, constitutes a universe arising out of nothing.

In addition - or perhaps in connection - apparently the vacuum of space is not such a vacuum at all, but experiences quantum energy fluctuations all over the place in the absence of both matter and energy. There is a lot we do not know about this universe. What the creationists have done, like the supposed ostrich in denial, is to stick their heads in the dirt and keep chanting "Godidit!" Scientists are braver and more honest than that. Unlike the creationists, scientists have a compulsion to find the truth no matter what it reveals.

This concludes my presentation of creationist lies.

Budikka