The Hovind Theory

Introducing, for the first time ever in complete written form, the Hovind Theory.  As of November 2000 even Hovind's web site doesn't have this text, though Hovind has been giving this speech and selling the videos for years.  A supposed scientific theory that isn't presented in written form for peer review is probably a world first. This is Kent Hovind's attempt at explaining the geologic features of the world, debunk modern geology and palaeontology and explain how the Flood happened.

The science section begins with an explanation of the technical concepts supporting the Hovind Theory. Hovind's dialogue (bold) is based upon my personal transcription of Hovind's mp3 speeches from Seminar Video -Part 6

It is also disappointing to note that the Hovind Theory is not the work of Kent Hovind.  He is putting his name to someone else's work, which is technically plagiarism.

This ice meteor is just a theory, and I cannot prove it. The concept of the ice meteor did not originate with me. There is a great book on this subject from the 1960's called The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epic. It is about a four hundred page book devoted to the ice meteor theory. It does, however, solve a lot of problems. Source

 

A "theory" which can not be tested (ie falsified) is not scientific.

 


Continental Drift

Now what about Pangaea?  The textbooks says all the continents used to fit together.  Almost every text book shows you a map like this. And says all the continents fit together in one big super continent and they broke apart, you know, 200 million years ago. They usually say something like that.

They always say South America and Africa seem to fit. ..... But I will show you some changes they don't want you to know about.  The evidence they use to support this continental drift theory is that the continents seem to fit. They also say the similar fossils are found on opposite sides of the ocean.  Well that could be because there was a world wide flood. That would form similar fossils all over the place, wouldn't it. Or they could float anywhere.

Straw man Hovind has failed to mention that, more significantly, the geology of the continents align

And they talk about the mid Atlantic ridge having magnetic lines and that's supposed to be proof for the separating of the continent.

Straw man Hovind has conveniently failed to mention that the magnetic imprint also occurs throughout the geology of the planet and not just at the Mid Atlantic Ridge.

There's some serious problems with all of this.  Here's what they don't tell you.  In order to make that map you saw in the textbook, Africa was shrunk by 40% to make it fit. Didn't tell you about that did they?

False There is a good reason they didn't "tell you that". This claim originates from another Young Earth Creationist, Walt Brown. Actually, Brown claims a 35% difference.  Brown "measured" only modern exposed Africa without taking into consideration any of the observable changes in African geology, which of course, produced an anomalous number.

Brown, W, In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood (7th Edition) online edition, http://www.creationscience.com/ [August 2004]

 

They took Mexico and central America out to make it fit.

Straw man Mexico and central America are usually not included because their exact original locations are still debated and relatively minor.

They don't tell you that Europe and South America had been rotated counter clockwise and Africa has been rotated clockwise to make 'em fit.

Red herring Why is this a problem?

Looks real good when they put it in the textbooks but there is a lot of deceit behind all that folks. That is not quite as simple as they make it look.

And they also don't tell you that the ocean is not quite the way it looks on a globe. ..... But the oceans have two distinct parts, the deep part, and the shallow part called the continental shelf. This map right here from National Pornographic, er, Geographic I mean. If you look at the map of South America and Africa they look as though they might fit together.  You say they have blue in-between they must fit together.

Straw man bordering on false

Well that's true but that water has two different depths. There's the deep part and the shallow part. The continental shelf of all the continents does not really line up at all. If you lower the water a few hundred feet the continental shelf would be exposed. We'll talk about that more later. Well, this is not really the shape of the continent what we see above the water level.

Now it is true the Earth has cracks all over it. San Andreas Fault, ...... there's no question the Earth has these fault lines, these cracks, all over it, and the Mid Atlantic Ridge.  But how did they get that way?


Magnetism

In the textbooks they show the ocean having these Mid Atlantic Ridge lines. How many of you have seen those before?  Those lines?   They say the magnetic field of the Earth has reversed. Absolutely not true. Pure deception of someone's part.  This quote here will help to explain. "It's clear the idea of uniformal crustal blocks of alternating polarity does not represent reality." [Hall, J.M and  Robinson, P.T, Deep Crustal Drilling in the North Atlantic Ocean, Science vol 204 (May 11 1979) p578)]

Quote mining Note the use of the phrase "uniformal crustral blocks". Hall et al are not claiming that evidence from the Mid Atlantic Ridge is not consistent with the view of an ancient planet.

For a quick introduction to the Mid Ocean Ridges see  http://www.ahainfo.com/oceanridge.asp

There are no magnetic reversals on the ocean floor. There's only areas of weak magnetism. That makes a big difference. .....

False

Now when rock is hot it does not maintain its magnetic strength. The magnetic lines can move around. When they show you  in a text book what this looks like, their going to show you the nice neat lines of all these magnetic lines. That is not what they really find down there.  What they really find is a jumbled up mess. The lines are caused by the bulging of the Earth and the rock rips and cracks and the water rushes into the crack and cools it down. The water rushing in cooling off this rock changes the magnetic structure of the rock. See, hot basalt, which is the type of rock down there, hot basalt looses it magnetism.

False The rock is not magnetic.  The structure of the rock has an alignment to whatever magnetic field it is exposed to when in a heated state.

Straw man The basalt looses any original magnetic alignment of its molecular structure upon melting then forms a new alignment based upon exposure to any magnetic fields.  Not only can this exposure imprint the alignment, it can also indicates the strength of the field.  This fact has been observed in the laboratory and is the basis for magnetostratigraphy.

So what they have here are areas of weak magnetism and strong magnetism but none of them are actual reversals. There is no point of the ocean floor where a north pointing compass will point south.  No place. There are no magnetic reversals at the bottom of the ocean. Don't let them tell you there are.

Straw man The alignment of the structure of the basalt will not affect your compass.  It's the structure of the basalt that has aligned to the magnetic field at the time of its formation. For an illustration of the actual data used to support this theory see  http://deeptow.whoi.edu/images/srpfig6a.gif

[Hovind's source, In the Beginning, Walt Brown]



Mammoths

Now what about the ice age, where does that fit in?  Did ice come all the way down to Kansas city? Oh yeah. Where's that fit into the Bible? Well I'm going to give you the Hovind Theory in just a few minutes and explain the whole thing.  And what about these mammoths? The big hairy hippy elephants that are all frozen standing up. Some have 30 inch long hair. But it's interesting the hair, at the base of the hair they do not have a sebaceous gland which is a gland to oil on the hair. The mammoth, in spite of his long hippy hair was not designed for cold weather. It was a warm weather animal. Could not survive in cold climates. They found one in 1901, frozen standing up. The wolves had eaten his trunk and part of his head and one of his feet but the rest of him was frozen in the muck.  So they dug the mammoth out in 1901 and took it to a museum.  It's still there in Russia where it was found, called the Beresovka Mammoth.  They find thousands of mammoths. Estimates are there could be as many as 5 million that perished in one big catastrophe.......

False The Beresovka Mammoth was not standing up.

False  Only a handful of complete mammoths (and other fauna) has been found.

Straw man The claim of 'one big catastrophe' is misleading.  The catastrophe was likely a combination of ice age and human contact over an extended period of time.  The figure of 5 million is a maximum population of mammoths that may have existed at any one time.

What froze these mammoths?  Mammoths found frozen, where these red dots are, all across Alaska and Siberia. They find frozen rhinoceros, frozen camels, frozen wolves. What happened up there anyway?

Contradiction Why are there frozen mammoths, etc. but no frozen dinosaurs? After all, the dinosaurs were supposed to be still wandering the Earth around at this time according to Hovind.

Well a couple of things about the mammoth, you need to understand. They are frozen standing up.

False Not a single mammoth or other mega fauna has been found "standing up"

There is undigested food still in their mouth and their stomach. They didn't even swallow their last bit.

Straw man  I don't know which specimen Hovind is referring too.  Dying animals will sometimes attempt to eat out of reflex, hence unswallowed food.  Any dead animal, unless it starves, will have undigested food in its stomach.

They died of suffocation, there's no water found in the lungs.  Well how do you suffocate 5 million mammoths? Kind of strange.

Non sequitur The mammoths didn't drown therefor they all suffocated? Wow, I'm speechless.

False What is the basis for Hovind's claim there 5 million mammoths suffocated?

And there are ice crystals indicating they froze in less than 4 to 5 hours.

Non sequitur  I'm putting a red flag here until someone can explain to me the connection between "ice crystals" and freezing speed of the entire mammoth.

Well I got curious about the mammoths and I want to know what it would take to freeze an elephant. ..... So I call Birds Eye frozen food people in New York. .... "How long would it take to freeze an elephant?".
"Well it would take about 5 days"
I said "I can't wait five days, I need to freeze my elephant in less than five hours".
He said "the only way you are going to freeze you elephant is to put him in liquid nitrogen".
About 300 below zero. .....



Inverse Square Law

First things. There is a law in physics called the Inverse Square Law.  It sounds a little complicated but it's not too bad. Here's the way it works. Two objects are attracted to each other, like the Earth and the Moon have gravity pulling them together and centrifugal force throws them apart and they are staying the same distance apart as it goes around.  But the gravity pulling them together has a pretty strong force. If you move the Moon back in to one third the distance, if the Moon was one third the distance away, you would take that fraction of one third, flip it over, inverse it, and square it. The pull of gravity would be nine times as great, if the moon were one third as close. Not three times as great, nine times as great. That's called the Inverse Square Law. Inverse Square Law says when the distance is halved the attraction is quadrupled.  It works when you are dealing with gravity, light, magnetism and girls ......

The key to the Inverse Square Law is the strength of a field decreases very quickly over distance.



Spinning Tops

Next thing you need to know in science before this theory will make any sense. If a top is spinning, there is a peculiar way it behaves. .....  If a top is spinning and you throw something at it like some mud and it sticks on the top. It will make the top wobble for a while. And when it wobbles it will finally end up stabilizing, spinning smoothly but it will be spinning at a new angle. It will be tilted over. You can tell when it was hit if you trace out on a graph the wobbling action of this top you can trace back and see, well, something hit it and you can tell about how long ago it got hit. Just by the wobble.

Next thing you need to keep in mind, there are some strange temples around this world. Like Stonehenge. ..... nobody knows for  sure why it was built or even when it was built but apparently it was built to study the Summer Solstice shadow. The longest day of the year is June 21st .....  See the Earth is tilted over, and because of this tilt in the Earth we have seasons......  Well a famous Australian astronomer, named George Dodwell got together all the information he could find on what all the ancient people used to think was the angle of the Earth based upon the summer solstice shadow.  He studied the recording from ....... [Temple of] Amon Ra and Stonehenge. He said the tilt of the Earth, if you graph it out on a timeline, makes a wavy line that is a match to the spinning top wavy line.  He said it looks to him that something struck the Earth about 4350 years ago. He graphed it out and said it looks like something struck the Earth right there. 4350 years ago, that is about what the Bible says of the time of the Flood. [source It's a Young World Afterall, Ackerman]

Contradiction  Hovind never claimed his comet actually impacted into the Earth.  His "theory" depends on the comet breaking up before impact and floating to the North and South poles.

From my personal research I couldn't find any references to Dodwell's original work.  The origin of the present manifestation of this claim dates back to two articles written for Answers in Genesis

Barry Setterfield, An asteroid tilts the Earth Creation Magazine (Ex Nihilo) Volume 5 Number 4, May 1983
Carl Wieland, An asteroid tilts the earth Creation Magazine (Ex Nihilo), Volume 5 Number 3, May 1983

Note the dates. That is the limit of original writings on the topic by Young Earth Creationists.  I am not aware of any follow up research in the last two decades.  The name Barry Setterfield may be familiar as the Young Earth Creationist who claimed that the speed of light was slowing down.

Its interesting to note that whatever Dodwell thought he found hasn't had a negative impact on the development of a new branch of archeology called archeoastronomy.



Moon Craters

Next thing to keep in mind, the moon has craters on it. So do lots of the planets have these big craters. And the craters on the moon are not evenly distributed.  There seems to be more craters on one side than the other. If the moon got its crater slowly over billions and billions of years you would expect the craters just by pure chance to be evenly distributed. But they're not evenly distributed on the moon.

Straw man

"There are two primary types of terrain on the Moon: the heavily cratered and very old highlands and the relatively smooth and younger maria. The maria (which comprise about 16% of the Moon's surface) are huge impact craters that were later flooded by molten lava. .... For some unknown reason, the maria are concentrated on the near side".   Source

 

So what caused the craters anyway? You know we have never seen the moon get hit by anything 'cept for what we send up there ..... So what caused all the craters on the other planets, Venus and Mercury in particular? ....

False You can test Hovind's claim that nothing hits the moon anymore.  Take a trip to the country and look at the sky and notice how many "shooting stars" you see.  Why do those meteors hit the Earth but never the Moon? Once you solve that riddle then maybe Kent Hovind's argument may have some merit.



Mysner [sic] Effect

.... There's an effect called the Mysner [sic] Effect. You ever seen one magnet floating on top of another magnet?  You've seen those little games you can get where you can stick a magnet on top of another magnet? And you put the north pole and the north pole together and the magnet floats, it won't touch each other. The Mysner [sic] Effect is when two magnets are floating on top of each other. .....

Incorrect I used  Transcript 1b and the Table of Contents on Hovind's own web site to confirm that Hovind (or someone who works for him) doesn't know how to spell the name of the scientific property on which so much of the Hovind Theory depends.  The correct spelling is Meissner after the co-discoverer Fritz Meissner

The Meissner Effect describes a property of superconductors.  A superconductor is a special material that is a perfect conductor of electricity, usually at extremely low temperatures.  When a superconductor is exposed to a magnetic field an identical strength field is generated on the surface of the superconductor.  If the field the superconductor is exposed to is strong enough, the repulsion between the two fields can allow for levitation of either the magnet or the superconductor. Note the levitation is dependent on the strength of the magnetic field as this will be important later on.



Comets and Craters

Next thing, and almost the last thing to keep in mind,  outer space is full of comets. These comets are flying around, great big huge snowballs. ...... But the snowballs in outer space, these comets, are about 300 to 400 below zero Fahrenheit.  . ....  Now some of these comets flying around space are extremely cold muddy snowballs.  Actually astronomers refer to comets as being a dirty snowball. Some are full of dirt and rock and iron and nickel. Most though are just chunks of ice. Lot of them are glued together,... and they're glued together with ice .....

Even the biggest comets have 100 million times less mass than the Earth 

The 'ice' of a comet is likely to be a mixture of frozen water, methane and ammonia.  Comet Composition

If you throw a snowball too fast something happens. If you throw a snowball too fast it will break apart. You couldn't possibly shoot a snowball out of a cannon. It would come unglued before it made it out the end of the barrel. .....

It's the air resistance and acceleration forces.  The acceleration speed due to gravity at the Earth's surface is about 10 meters per second per second.  This means after one second the object would fall at 10 meters per second, increasing speed after two seconds to 20 meters per second.  Remember the Inverse Square Law from above? The further away from Earth you go the acceleration due to gravity decreases dramatically.  A comet already travelling at huge speeds would be only marginally affected by the gravity of the Earth prior to impact.

Next the Earth has a magnetic field around it and this magnetic field of the Earth is what protects us from radiation.  There's a lot of stuff that comes towards the Earth but it is deflected around the North Pole and South Pole and that is what causes the ..... [Northern and Southern Lights].

False The Van Allen Belts protect the Earth from charged atomic particles; usually electrons and protons from the solar wind.  These charged atomic particles are channelled along the lines of the Earth's magnetic field and interact with the Earth's atmosphere in a concentrated form to cause the Northern and Southern Lights.  The reason for this accumulation is the low mass of the particles and the affinity of charge particles to align with magnetic fields.



Peleg and Joktan

Alright the next thing to keep in mind. The pre Flood world, the world before the Flood, was very different to the world we have today.  The Bible says it was protected by a canopy of water overhead and also there was water under the crust of the Earth. Actually had the crust of the Earth with water and an atmosphere and then water above the canopy and water under the crust. Now there is still water in the crust of the Earth you can drill down and get water almost anywhere. But there apparently was a lot more water under the crust of the Earth before the Flood came and that's the water that came steaming out when the fountains of the deep broke open.

Circular reasoning Hovind has just used his conclusion of the Bible being literally correct as the foundation for his use of evidence from the Bible. Circular reasoning is called a logical fallacy for a good reason.

Last thing to keep in mind. Who was Peleg? ..... [Genesis 10:25]  and its says "... unto Eber were born two sons: the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided ....".  Why would it say that?  What do you mean the Earth was divided? And then it says "... his brother's name was Joktan".  The the word Joktan is a Hebrew word that means shortening.  Peleg means divided, Joktan means shortening. So what happened in the days of Peleg anyway. Well we are going to talk about that. Peleg was born about 100 years after the Flood and he was the first guy recorded in the Bible to live less than 400 years..... See, before the Flood they lived 900 years, after the Flood it dropped off to 400, then in the days of Peleg is dropped off again, a lot, from 400 to 230.  So what happened in the days of Peleg and what was shortened?  Why did they name Joktan, "shortening"?

Circular reasoning  I almost cut this part out of Hovind's Theory because it is based upon subjective interpretations of a religious text rather than the scientific method.  I decided to leave the text in to highlight how Hovind has used circular reasoning within his theory.  Remember, his theory is trying to prove the accuracy of the Bible etc.  You can not logically use parts of the Bible to prove your conclusion that the Bible is accurate.  It is a classic logical fallacy.

Because this part of the Hovind Theory is theological in nature I will not comment on its merit however I will provide a link to an alternative interpretation of that particular chapter Navigating the Bible II



Summary of the Hovind Theory

So with all that said let me give you the Hovind Theory of what I think happened and I've studied this quite a while. I'm going to give you the order of events that I think happened then go back and kinda review each of them in just a little bit to try and put it into perspective of what happened to cause the Flood.

 

So, this 300 degree ice meteor, below zero, came flying through the solar system and began to break apart.

Contradiction  Where did this comet  come from? Hovind doesn't acknowledge the existence of the Oort Cloud or the Kuiper Belt.

Hovind has also failed to explain why the "comet" broke apart as soon as it entered into the solar system.

Fragments cratered the Moon and Mercury and some of the planets and they have craters on them.  Interesting thing about these craters, there is a giant hole where something hit but there is no evidence of what hit. A chunk of ice hitting these planets would make a big hole and then melt and turn to steam and drift off into space and there would be no evidence except the hole. No meteorite is found there.

Here is a quick description of the physics behind a meteor impact

"Cratering is caused by the partial conversion of the kinetic energy of a fast moving impactor into the crushing, melting, vaporization and acceleration of the target material .... In reality, an impact does all those things to some degree and divides its energy over all possible outcome.  Thus an impactor may crush 1000 times its own mass of rock, melt 10 times its mass, vaporize a few times its own mass and eject 100 times its mass at speeds of tens to hundreds of meters per second and still give off a substantial amount of energy as seismic waves and radiation from the fireball"
(source lost)

 

After all that Hovind expects to find the original meteorite?

As this meteor came flying through the solar system it broke apart. Some of the fragments got caught in the gravitational field of Jupiter Uranus and Neptune and they became the ice rings around those planets. See these planets have rings that are made of rock and ice. Any text book will tell you that. Most of the rings are made of ice around these planets. I think that might have happened at the time of the Flood.

The size of this "ice meteor" just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Hovind obviously hasn't considered the size of the rings of these planets.

And as it approached the Earth these fragments of meteor began to break apart even more and it snowed, mostly around the North and South Pole because the Earth has this magnetic field which protected it.  See super cold ice is easily statically charged.  ..... So just the friction hitting the atmosphere or just the fact that ice at low temperature becomes magnetic, Im not sure which it was, static or magnetic. But either one is going to tend to suck most of it in and dump around the North and South pole. .....

Hovind cant make up his mind if he wants to use the Meissner Effect or static charges. Both are flawed for different reasons.

The Meissner Effect argument fails because the Earth's magnetic field is only strong enough to influence atomic particles. The Earth's magnetic field can barely move a compass needle in a near frictionless environment. Also, remember the "Inverse Square Law" from above? Hovind's own argument is working against him because the magnetic field exponentially decreases (inverse cubic) in strength the further from the Earth you go. 

Lets assume the ice did miraculously stop and is floating on the Earth's magnetic field. The ice would still not move towards the poles. Remember the Meissner Effect causes a superconductor (assuming water can even be a superconductor) to generate an exactly identical field. If the ice moved North it would create a north field which would repel it back south. In fact, if the Meissner Effect could be applied to this scenario the ice would accumulate in orbit around the equator.  But remember the Earth's magnetic field is pathetically weak.

The static charge explanation also fails. By the time these chunks of ice meteor have reached the upper atmosphere they are only a few miles away from impact traveling at 1000's of miles per hour.  Why does the Space Shuttle need ceramic tiles for heat protection?  These high velocity chunks of "ice meteor" would very quickly turn to steam before any hope of ever being statically charged (even if such a thing is possible).

Contradiction How did all this ice get through the "water canopy"?

When they drill down through the ice at Greenland or the South Pole they find under the ice, coal. Well coal's made from plants. When they went to the South Pole they found what's called the Dirty Diamond Mine in 1962. Anthracite coal under the ice near the South Pole. Well folks there are no trees near the South Pole. There are zero trees in Antarctica. None. Certainly not enough to make coal. There's as many as 30 or 40 layers of coal in some of these places. Admiral Bird said when he went down there, they saw what looked like frozen palm leaves under the ice near the South Pole.  Well there are no palm trees. ....  Scientist reported discovering the first set of dinosaur fossils found in Antarctica.  Well that is the bottom of the world .... Dinosaurs, reptiles, they don't live good in cold weather.

These accumulations are due to continental drift but Hovind doesn't like that idea because one of the evidences for this drift is the magnetic imprints in certain rocks (independent of the Mid Atlantic Ridge formation).

Contradiction Why are there no instantly frozen animals from this great "ice meteor" found in the Antarctic?  Now if the Antarctic was frozen by this "comet" how do we get dinosaur fossils (supposedly caused by the flood) deposited underneath the remains of the comet which was supposed to have caused the flood?   Since the poles were frozen in the "ice age" why are there fossils under this ice cap?  Why are there dinosaur fossils but no snap frozen dinosaurs?



Mammoths

Next thought, the North Pole ..... I think what happened, these mammoths, were up there chomping on their tropical flowers. There was a beautiful day, about 70 degrees. They're eating buttercups and the seeds found in their stomachs indicate it was warm weather, spring time. And all of a sudden it began to snow. The mammoths had never seen snow before. So one of them looked to the other one. He said "Herman, it is snowing. Man, this is peculiar weather we are having. Lets get out of here Herman" And so they began to run around to find a place to hide as the snow got deeper and deeper and deeper. As it began to snow this super cold, 300 below zero snow on top of these mammoths. They ended up getting buried and they suffocated in this snow bank and froze standing up. Froze in 3 to 5 hours because the snow was so cold. Buried 'em. As the ice went pushing out towards the Equator, it carved out the glacier effects we see.  There are grooves in solid rock. Grooves that are deep as this building for miles, as if a rock was slide across another rock. Sliding across, scratching it. Glacial grooves found all over the place. And the ice went all the way down to Southern Illinois. Yes there really was an Ice Age. And as this mass of ice was on the North and South Pole that's of course going to cause a cold front to come off of there and its going to collapse the canopy. The bible says the water above the atmosphere, its mentioned several times in the Bible. This water above the atmosphere would I think begin to collapse and it rained for 40 days and 40 nights. See cold air, when it hits warm air it makes it rain.  .....

Most of Hovind's explanations depend on the erroneous basis of his previous arguments.  This high speed glaciation idea is simply without evidence. More accurately, the evidence is identical to a slow ice age plus normal glacier flows.

Contradiction  Elsewhere Hovind says the "canopy" was already made of ice which conflicts with his "cold front" idea

Have you ever seen a magnet floating on top of another magnet?  That is called the Mysner [sic] Effect.  If ice was up there, say 10 miles up, 6 inches of ice just to pick a number, that super cold ice suspended by the magnetic field would increase air pressure on the earth and would filter out the sunlight.  See, water stops a lot of the damaging effects of the sunlight; it would make the whole earth like a big greenhouse.  .....  Well, apparently the whole earth used to be that way. Creation Seminar Part 2

 

False  I cant even quote Hovind without introducing another flaw.  Suspending the "ice canopy" on the Earth's magnetic field (which is impossible) would not cause an increase in air pressure.   Air pressure can only be increased when the volume of air is compressed (like in a bicycle pump).  The only way the "ice canopy" could increase air pressure would be for it to air tight which would mean a complete spherical enclosure of the Earth.  This produces the ludicrous scenario of the Earth bouncing around inside an ice bubble.
 

Previously, Hovind has described the canopy as water. In fact logic dictates it must be water or else there will be a massive reduction in sunlight due to the low transparency of clouds or ice.  Remember the sun and moon were visible according to Genesis. So ignoring the impossibility of floating water on air, a cold front would have no effect upon the water because it is already condensed.



Clams of Mt Everest

When they climbed Mt Everest in 1953, Edmund Hillary got up to the 26 000 foot level and he began to find sea shells. I got some stuff like they found up there.  Petrified clams. Sea shells packed together. Millions of them. Interesting thing about these clams, that are even found of top of Mt Everest, the clams are petrified and dead, I believe, and closed. Well you can walk along the beach and pick up a whole train load of sea shells but you hardly ever find a matched pair. And you never find them closed.  The only way this could happen is these had to be buried alive. ..... How do you get these on top of Mt Everest? In case you don't know, Mt Everest is a little ways from the beach. Secondly, clams don't climb mountains very good. So what happened to these petrified claims anyway? Some places they are ten feet thick in the world. ..... Well the only way I can think of this to happen is for an awful lot of clams to be buried instantly.  I think during the Flood .....

This appears to be a variation on an old Young Earth Proof which argued that only a global flood could wash all those "clams" up onto the top of Mt Everest.
 

The Bible says all the fountains of the deep were broken up and the windows of heaven were opened up. What I suspect happened, these cracks in the surface of the Earth let the water come shooting out, and the Earth wobbled for a while from the weight of the Earth being dumped on the North and South Poles.  And you would have a lot of things going on simultaneously to the poor folks outside of the Ark. There wasn't much chance of survival for them. The Earth cracked along the Mid Atlantic Ridge.  Sort of like a balloon splitting. If you take a balloon a blow it up real big and you poke one hole in one side, how long does it take for the other side of the balloon to split? Almost instantly.  That crack spreads around the balloon just like that?  Well I think that happened to the Earth.

The Earth split open, the fountains of the deep came shooting out,  hot water came shooting out from inside the crust of the Earth. And this hot water came out to the top, probably shot way up into the stratosphere. As it went shooting out along these cracks it would erode the sides of the cracks.  Adding lots of mud to the water and this mud is going to spread out everywhere. You'd get sediment layers everywhere, all over the Earth from this mud spreading out.

It might even push the continental plate a little bit. And the pushing of these plates, as long as there is water underneath for lubricant, you get the plates actually sliding and they would smash into another plate and wrinkle up the mountain ranges that we see.  The Mid Atlantic Ridge as the plates slide back, the bottom of it, the basalt underneath, lifted up and bulged, and split open as it bent and that splitting caused the water go down in and made the Mid Atlantic Ridge lines that we see. This mountain range we see here in Southern British Columbia, obviously was wrinkled up like an accordion. I think one of the plates of the Earth smacked another one and wrinkled it up like that. Its a horizontal compression. Not just lifting up but being compressed like that, wrinkling it like that.

Then this hot water when it came shooting up from out of the fountains of the deep. The hot water shooting out is going to kill creatures that are going to live in the oceans right near where the water hits it.  ..... if the fountains of the deep broke open, the hot water would come shooting out from inside the Earth and it would kill the diatoms within a certain effective radius, maybe within a few hundred miles they would all die. Now diatoms a beautiful little glass bodied creatures that live in the ocean. You cant see them without a microscope but when they die they fall to the bottom and when their grand kids die they fall to the bottom

In Lompoc California, ...... They were digging in a diatomaceous earth quarry back ..... back in 1976 ..... While they are digging along they find this fossil skeleton of a Baleen whale.  The whale was standing on end and 80 feet long. Now the whale was standing up, but the layers were also tilted up so its not really the 80 feet length of the whale that makes the problem its the thickness of the whale that makes the problem. But still its a problem. Because diatomaceous earth accumulates very slowly. Well how do you get this whale to not rot for millions of years while it slowly forms around him? I was there at the museum in Lompoc, California, where they've got a dolphin on display where they've dug it out of diatomaceous earth. The guy gave me a chunk of diatomaceous earth which has hundreds, in just that one little chunk of diatomaceous earth, hundreds of fish fossils. .....

Straw man  The variations of the descriptions of this buried whale are quite astounding. Here is a good explanation of the actual facts  A Whale of a Tale

When you go to England you see the chalk cliffs over there. Solid chalk 300 feet thick. I mean you can dig out a piece of your yard and write on the chalk board with it. What happened in England. Don't tell me all the chalk critters that make all the chalk formations decided to go to Dover to die for millions and millions of years.  I think there was a catastrophe that formed that. .....

Contradiction So all those critter were killed in the Flood and all that swirling water that Hovind claims (see immediately below) sorted the fossils but left these deposits intact? Amazing.  Also these deposits contain huge amounts of fossils, many times more than could be supported at any one time,  even in the most optimistic of environments

.....  During the first few months [of the Flood], dead animals settled out and they became the fossil grave yards that we see today and some were floated to the top and were rotted and began to fall apart and things began to petrify. Some of the animals were swirling around in this moving water and they would become disarticulated is the word, which means they would rot and fall apart. See moving water automatically separates particles based upon their density. You get water to move rapidly and the heavier stuff drops out first and the lighter stuff drops out last. You can go out into the yard and get a jar of dirt, add some water. Shake it up and set it down and it will settle out into layers for you.  Moving water does that. .....

I suggest that anybody who thinks Hovind's idea has any merit to try that experiment.  Add some bones of different animals, shake and see if you get any sort of order which would be considered "evolutionary".  Then see if you can repeat the order twice. Then imagine doing this on a global scale without a single fossil out of place.

As the Earth was turning during this flood of course you would get little eddies and whirl pools and things going around from the world wide Flood and the dead animals would tend to rot and be caught in the whirl pools and they would fall apart.  The head falls off, the tail falls off, the ribs fall off and you would end up later with a tangled mess of dinosaur bones. In Colorado and Vernal Utah there are dinosaur graveyards, actually quite a view graveyards around the world. Notice this dinosaur, that back bone has not ribs, no head, no tail, no legs and no teeth marks. The other backbone behind it is bent backwards. That's the way they find dinosaurs in tangled up messes. .....

Straw man The mainstream view of such fossil formations is localized catastrophes and unique local conditions.  Where is it written that fossils must form under 'normal' conditions?

These fossils that are found all over the world are often times are packed into tight sediment layers. I mean what would cause the fossil formation that we see?  "In Belgium back in 1878 a remarkable concentration of Iguanadon skeleton", that's a dinosaur, " were discovered 1000 feet below ground in a Belgium coal mine. Thus it could be seen that the fossil bone yard was one of gigantic proportions especially notable because of its vertical extensions through more than a hundred feet of rock". [Men and Dinosaurs, Edwin Colbert, p58] How do you get a hundred feet of petrified animals? You have to a big flood. I think the fossil evidence is overwhelming evidence for a flood.

Now of course the Divil has tricked people into thinking you can use the fossils as proof for evolution. When actually its proof of God's judgment on this world .....

Poisoning the well

This quote here "much to my surprise the book documented literally hundreds not just a handful of well exposed dinosaur track sites, in other words dinosaur foot prints, trails of dinosaurs spread all over the world. Tracks, track ways, nests, eggs and  coprolite, petrified dinosaur do do, of the reptilian master of the Mesozoic era chronicled from all over the world and the record is an impressive one indeed in terms of not only abundance and geographic distribution but also of quality of preservation. Lockley and Gellitte reported more than 400 dinosaur track sites in North and South America alone and they especially note 12 large localities around the world that contain more than a thousand individual tracks and/or greater than a hundred different track ways each". [Ekdale,A.A Dinosaur Tracks and Traces review of sumposium Dinosaur Tracks and Tracks edited by DD Gillette and MG Lockley (New York, Cambridge University Press 1989, Palaios (April 1990) p 199]

Non sequitur  So what?

I've been to see dinosaur track ways or footprints preserved in Connecticut, I saw them at the Red Rock Amphitheater in Denver Colorado. I've been to Glen Rose Texas. I've been to Massachusetts, Holy Oak where the dinosaur footprints are. There are these dinosaur footprints preserved in rock all over. What happened anyway. Well I think there was a world wide flood that's the obvious explanation of all this. Robert Bloom the South African paleontologist estimated there are  800 000 million skeletons of vertebrate animals in one formation in Africa [Karroo formation]. 800 000 million.  800 billion. Almost a trillion vertebrate animals. [Newell, Norman D, Adequacy of the Fossil Record, Journal of Paleontology, vol 33 (May 1959) p492]

Contradiction  Hovind does not have any explanation for how 800 billion vertebrates are supposed to be alive in the same general area at the same moment in time.

[from slide show]  Well folks you can go out West where they killed the buffalo.  They killed literally millions of buffalo in the last 200 years trying to starve the Indians out. Millions of buffalo were slaughtered and I would defy you to find me one fossilized buffalo. They didn't fossilize because they weren't buried.  The only way to get a fossil is to bury it real quickly. And soft bodied animals are found fossilized, worms, fossilized.  Well how long would a worm last before it would rot. Or jelly fish, fossilized? I think the Flood is the only explanation of all this.

Non sequitur Why is one global flood the only answer? Fossil conditions and events are even occurring within human lifetimes. Hovind's description of the eruption of Mt St. Helens describes how even a minor geologic event is capable of burying lots of fossils very quickly. Hovind even describes the beginning of possible polystrate fossilization.

So what I think happened, petrifaction started to happen straight away with these animals buried in the sediment layers because of this world wide flood and things can petrify very quickly. I was up in Connecticut recently and a guy bought me a bit of petrified wood. .... and I remember we chomped this down like thirty years earlier " .....

I think what happened during the days of Noah you would get all these layers of sediment dropped off very quickly. Now students are told that all those layers are different in age by million and millions of years. That's the typical evolutionary teaching. That simply is not true. Satan is using evidence for Gods flood .....

Poisoning the well Gee, twice in only a few minutes

The atheists are always saying, Mr Hovind, the animals are sorted in these layers. Actually they are not sorted in the layers very well. They interpret which layer is which age by which fossil they find in it. So the evolutionary glasses they put on determines how they look at these layers to begin with. But they are not found in the layers they say. In general, I would have to agree that in general, birds are found on top of the so called geologic column. And clams are found at the bottom, in general, though there are thousands of exception to that. And their going to say see this proves clams evolved first and birds evolved last. I say no no fellas, there might be another way of looking at this. It might be that clams are found at the bottom because their already at the bottom when the flood starts. That's where they live, they'd be the first ones buried. Maybe their sorted based upon their habitats. Birds would end on top of a flood in sediment layers because birds would be the  last ones to drown, obviously. They can fly around until they run out of gas. They might be sorted based upon their intelligence. As best we can figure it out clams are not to bright. They might be sorted based upon their mobility, clams cant run very fast. Maybe that's why they got buried first and birds got buried last. They might be sorted based upon their body density. Clams are a little heavier than birds. Birds have hollow feathers and hollow bones. If they do drown they are going to float. So don't let them tell you in school that the order of the fossil burial is proof for evolution. From fish to amphibian to reptile to mammal. No no no no. Its proof of a flood, that's what its proof of.

Contradiction But remember all that "hydrologic sorting" which Hovind has repeatedly mentioned? All that turbulence and sediment being moved around and not one modern mammal is found intermixed with the dinosaurs.  Not one major fossil found out of order. Isn't that odd?  How long were those birds supposed to stay aloft for? What about flightless birds?  How were fossils formed under the "ice age" ice sheet?  How many of you tried Kent Hovind's experiment of getting some dirt and testing for hydrologic sorting?  How many of you threw in some bones to see if you could get a repeatable pattern?

 



Grand Canyon

As the mountains lifted up the water ran off and carved features like the Grand Canyon in a hurry. The mountains arose and the valleys sank down and the water is just going to rush off. Its just what its going to do.

So what happened as the mountain arose? Some of the mountain ranges were formed at that time. Its interesting that the mountain ranges are parallel to the ocean. The Rocky mountains are right parallel with the Pacific Ocean. Andes Mountains in South America are parallel with the South Pacific. Even the Appellations are parallel with the North Atlantic. And the Alps are parallel with the Mediterranean. I think its not a coincident that these rocks lifted up these mountains lifted up and the rock layers were bent. See you can bend rock when its still soft layers that's not a problem.  Once it gets hard rock its pretty hard to bend. I think all this happened when the sediment layers were soft. As the mountains went pushing up, the pressure would change some of the rocks into what is called metamorphic rock. Sedimentary rock is squeezed or pressurized and changes to metamorphic rock and that all happened during the time of the Flood.

Then the mountains rose and the water rushed off into the low places but I think right after the flood the oceans were smaller than they are today. If you lower the ocean just a few hundred feet all the continental shelf becomes exposed and England would not be an island. ..... See the oceans have two parts, the continental shelf, the shallow part and the deep part called the abyss ..... So if the oceans were lower after the flood and the continental shelf was exposed where's the extra water going to come from to fill it in.  Why do we have this continental shelf? And didn't it take millions of years to make Grand Canyon? And what about all the coal forming in the world? There's just so many questions to be answered. I mean if this Bible story is true that God made the world 6000 years ago we got some questions we need to answer. That's what we are going to try to do here with the Hovind Theory.

I think the world wide Flood in the days of Noah is the only way to explain lots of things we see on Earth today. See the Devil wants ........  you don't get a fossil unless an animal is buried quickly. Proof of the flood folks.

Poisoning the well  ..... again

Yet Hovind's description of the eruption of Mt St. Helens describes how even a minor geologic event is capable of burying lots of fossils very quickly. Hovind even describes the beginning of possible polystrate fossilization.

I think during the last few months of the flood that lasted about 12-13 months, the plates of the Earth shifted. One place lifted up, some place else went down. The runoff caused erosion canyons that were huge. See the Earth is almost perfectly smooth ....... I was in California a few months ago and  I drove past this road side where they cut the V in the hill for the road and I saw this erosion. I took a few pictures of it as I kept getting closer, taking pictures. I thought that looks exactly like a miniature canyon formation out West. See all these canyons formed out there in just a few minutes. I suspect the Gulf of Mexico sank down slowly and the water ran off gently. That's why the whole central part of the United States is pretty flat. .......

But there is a big purple spot [on slide show] where Grand Canyon is. There used to be a huge lake right there. Gigantic lake trapped after the flood. The mountains wrinkle up and there was a wrinkle in the mountains called the Kiabab Uplift. And there's this gigantic lake behind this temporary dam. And then all the water found a weak spot and began rushing through one place and carved out Grand Canyon in a hurry.  ......

Textbook says over millions of years the Colorado River carved Grand Canyon from solid rock. There's a couple of problems with that. I was a university a few months ago and a professor said " Mr. Hovind, obviously Grand Canyon took millions of years to form" .....

I said "well did you know the top of Grand Canyon is higher than where the river enters the Canyon?" Hmmm Which means if the river made that canyon it had to flow up hill for millions of years to cut the groove deep enough to flow down hill. I don't think so. Rivers don't flow up hill very good. I think the flood made Grand Canyon and the river just runs through the crack that's all. by the way the sides of Grand Canyon have those nice neat layers, and they say they are millions of years different in age, don't you think there would be a few erosion marks in between the layers? Why is it they are all stacked like pan cakes on top each other?  .....

And if you see the layers of the canyons, you can see the ones in Yellow Stone National Park, I was up there a couple of months ago ..... massive canyon with a little bitty river running at the bottom. That river didn't make that canyon. Grand Canyon, the text book says is kinda puzzling because the river loops back and forth, meanders. They call it a meandering stream but it also has steep sides. Now a looping meandering stream is typical of what they call an old age river or low slope. Just gently moving water, it moves back and forth like the Mississippi.

Straw man What Hovind is trying to refer to here is the physics of river flow not the characteristics the surrounding geography. A slow flowing river has a shallow depth and wide width. A fast flowing river is deeper and less wide.  None of these principles means that a slow river can not carve a deep canyon. Nor does it mean that a fast flowing river can not exist in a shallow canyon.

But steep sides indicate fast moving rivers and yet Grand Canyon has both. Steep sides and loops and meanders. Well the Flood washed out most of that in a hurry, now we've had erosion since then for 4400 years.

Contradiction If the Grand Canyon was the result of massive flood runoff then, according to Hovind's own argument, the Grand Canyon should be deep but not meander.

You cant look at Grand Canyon and say Colorado River did that. Just didn't happen that way. See one catastrophe can rearrange the real estate in a hurry.  In Alaska they had a big earthquake and it messed things up big time. Sections of ground were lifted up 50 or 60 feet in a few seconds.  Well during the world wide Flood you'd get all kind of disasters happening on this Earth.

Circular reasoning The conclusion is not supposed to be a premise of the argument itself



Mt St. Helens

Mt St. Helens is an itty bitty volcano by volcano standards ..... When that volcano began to blow, the whole North side of the volcano slide down, kinda like uncorked it. And steam began to shot out as one side slide down ..... This steam was traveling at 150-200 miles per hour. Ash and steam shooting out. .....

I went up to visit it a couple of years after the eruption and flew down into the volcano (my brother in law is a pilot). We flew all over that area.  The ash was everywhere. ..... Some of the ash from that volcano traveled clear over several states. Covered nearly all of Montana, a little bit of it landed in New York City. And that was a small volcano, you should see what the big ones do.

And that hot ash, when it shot out, stratified into millions of layers in a hurry.  The mud that slide down was kinda interesting.  The north slope slide off. Now of course when it started to blow there were chunks of ice that used to cover this mountain, glaciers, it was all covered snow cap mountain.  The chunks of ice, as big as this room, blew off down into the valley.  The hot mud slide right across the top of it. We had ice covered under hot mud. Gunna be a problem in a few days. .....  This hot mud on top of this ice made this ice of course melt and turn to steam. And when water turns to steam it expands 1700 times and nothing can stop it. And it just blew out.  Five days later they thought the volcano was going off again.  But it wasn't the volcano, it was the ice exploding. When the ice exploded under there it made what is called a steam explosion pit. ...... Cos, as soon as it exploded out a bunch of the material slumped back into the hole. And it looked like erosion marks all around the side of this thing. Now I guarantee that some teacher 20 years from now is going to bring his class down there and say "Now boys and girls you see these erosions marks? This took millions of years" Some kid is going to say "No, my daddy watched this happen. Took about fifteen seconds" Doesn't take millions of years.

The Toutle River, that was blocked ..... its only about 20 feet wide ..... blocked off by the mud. ..... Several days later there is this water ..... backed up behind this soft mud dam.  And it went up over the top.  Once the water started going up over the top of the mudslide it carved out canyons.  Erosion marks. These canyons were carved very rapidly. One canyon here was 1 000 feet wide, 140 feet deep and 2 000 feet long. It was carved out in about fifteen minutes. .....  Now when they went inside that canyon, after it dried out, they noticed the sides of this canyon ..... have layers.  Thousands and thousands of strata layers. Now some of these guys try to tell you that each of these layers is a different year.  And this represents, you know, 500 years worth. No it doesn't.  Happened in a few seconds. The moving mud automatically separated into thousands of layers. .....

Grand Canyon has these thousands of layers. They did not form slowly over millions of years.  They formed very rapidly and during the last few months of the flood the erosion through these layers was very rapid.

When the volcano blew at Mt St. Helens it blew so many trees down ..... millions and millions of trees blown down. ..... It blew so many trees into Spirit Lake, which is a lake on the north side of the volcano you could literally walk across the water in places. Three square miles, 2 000 acres ,I believe is what they calculated, of logs floating on Spirit Lake. All these logs are floating around there .... they blow back and forth around this lake.  Thousands of these trees that blew into Spirit Lake became water logged and as the water soaked in they began to float in the upright position. They call them upright floaters for a lack of a better term. ..... and then of course they began to slowly sink to the bottom as they got soaked full of water. ..... As these logs sank to the bottom they're going to get stuck in the mud at the bottom of the lake. And more mud washes in every year and you get lots of layers of sediment at the bottom of the lake.  Some of the logs today are fifteen feet deep, buried in layers of mud at the bottom of the lake.  It looks like they grew there. None of them grew there. They got transported in there and sank. Scuba divers went down and estimated there are probably 20 000 logs stuck in the bottom of the mud at Spirit Lake. Petrified trees are found standing straight up.  Running through multiple layers.  I think the flood is the only explanation of this.

Non sequitur Hovind has just described an actual observed example of the natural formation of "polystrate" fossils yet makes the illogical conclusion that this supports something other than a regular natural event.

Sometimes there are even layers of coal around these petrified logs. Things petrify rather quickly under good conditions. Petrified hat found in New Zealand. Petrified logs standing up running through many layers had to happen fairly quickly. In Yellow Stone National Park there are petrified trees standing straight up. ..... massive logs standing straight up.  Well if that [petrified] log ever falls down its gonna break. ..... and yet petrified trees, found laying down like that are found all over the world.  I think they petrified standing up and over the next few thousand years they fell over and cracked.

Here's some scuba divers ..... as they went under these logs they noticed the bark was all rolled off.  They'd drifted back and forth and rubbed against each other and all the bark fell off.  Well the bark ended up at the bottom of Spirit Lake. At the bottom there is a thick layer of bark and tree branches, twigs and all sorts of junk down there off these ..... logs.  Someday that is going to form a layer of coal.  See coal is made from vegetable material so what I think happened during the flood you'd get log mats as big as Texas floating around during this world wide flood in Noah's day.  And as these things drift across the ocean these massive log mats.  Some insects could survive on there ..... as these log mats drop off layers of debris which ended up being layers of coal.  And the coal layers we find in the world are nice neat layers.  Sometimes up to a hundred feet thick.  Sometimes they will follow ..... two coal seams that are separated. And the evolutionists of course says each of these is millions of years different in age.  And you go along a few miles and they join together. Now how can they be millions of years different in age, they're joined together? Split or forked, branching coal seams had to form quickly. ......


Humans and Coal Formation

And the coal was formed when people were here, not 225 million years ago in the Carboniferous Era like the textbooks said.  There is no such thing as a Carboniferous Era, all this happened at the Flood.  Here's a bell found inside a lump of coal. I talked to the man who found it in West Virginia. He said "Yeah I broke open a lump of coal and there was this bell inside.  I got it sitting on my desk for a paper weight."

A very scientific place to have a supposedly important artifact

This thing was found inside solid rock in Massachusetts.  Zinc and silver vessel in solid rock?

What looked like a spark plug was found inside a rock.  Its in Readers Digest you can read it for yourself. They're not sure what it was.

False. More commonly known as the Coso Artifact.  It is a heavily corroded spark plug from the 1920's. See  http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/coso.html for more detail.

In 1891 a lady broke open a lump of coal and there was a gold chain inside. Ten inches long.

In Iowa they found a carved stone.  Rock with carvings on it inside a lump of coal.

An iron cup was found in a coal mine in Oklahoma.

The sole of a shoe found in a coal mine in Nevada.

Now if coal formed during the Flood and if before the Flood came there were people here and they were doing all sorts of things. And there were a lot of things buried in the mud and in the coal. There is probably a lot of stuff still down there.

Notice that all these artifacts are equal in technology and culture as the time periods they were found.