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:
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 3/14/99.
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:
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?
