Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies ...
In the Evolution Vs Creationism resource thread, commentator "P" asked why I referred to Kent Hovind as a liar. Kent Hovind for those of you who don't know is one the most prolific creationists in the US who tirelessly tours the country giving lectures on Creationism and evolutionary biology. Using the pseudonym "DR Dino" he's perhaps best know for his 250,000 dollar offer to anyone who ostensibly offers 'evidence for evolution'. Needless to say, the fine print is quite a different story. Using Mr. Hovind's own criteria I'd be willing to offer anyone 250,000 who can prove that decapitation is fatal. For more on Hovind including a few reasons I think of him as a liar, follow me below the jump.
In past lectures and at one time on his site, Hovind uses a hilarious anecdote affectionately dubbed
Mister Hovind and the Professor. Oddly the material has been removed from his site and there is now a notice that the server is down ... it's been down for months! The spiel goes basically [paraphrasing]
"Evolutionists say the Big Bang was a little dot of dirt that was spinning and it blew up! But one thing I can tell you as someone with a doctorate in science education and years of experience teaching science, when something is spinning and it explodes, all the little pieces spin in the same direction! It's called 'the conservation of angular momentum. But a lot of the planets and moons spin backwards! And the evolutionists can't explain that so they try to not talk about it!"
Now, that spiel is a lie on so many levels (And it's but one of many in Hovind's video tapes and 'lectures') that we actually invented an informal scale and special units called "Hovinds" to measure the density of the lies and distortions one pack into a few sentences. No other person besides Hovind has scored above 400 milli-Hovinds on that scale.
I leave it as an exercise for the community to point out the inaccuracies in that paraphrased claim about the Big Bang, the spinning dot of dirt, and evolutionary biology.
Hovind claims to have a Ph.D. in "Science education". The name of the school is Patriot University. "PU" is an unaccredited diploma mill which looks suspiciously like a split level ranch home (Below).
Note-PU does have many of the same features of a full sized University though such as a lecture hall and a physical plant.
Hovind's doctoral thesis can be mail ordered. I've seen and studied a copy (Unlike real dissertations it's unavailable to the public at large). It's unfinished, of the supposed dozen or so 'chapters' only four are actually written. The pages are not numbered, the whole thing is untitled. I don't know if you ever been in front of a Ph.D. review board, but an unfinished dissertation with no title, no page numbers, and no footnotes would not pass muster to say the least. It's written at the tenth grade level with atrocious misspellings; "Immerged from the slime", "geological epic", "aught to [be able to prove]", just to name a few of the funnier ones. And in one section is an illustration which appears to be cut out of a magazine and glued onto the page. It's painfully bad.
Here's Hovind's rock solid proof that chimps and tobacco are genetic twins. (Shortly after the table in the link was published Hovind's server experienced another traffic surge and had to be taken offline. That was a few years ago ... and they're still having problems with that dang ole server. Thankfully a copy was saved by a fellow creationist hunter. We offered it to Mr. Hovind as back up for his lost data, he has never responded)
Chimp number of chromosomes 48
Tobacco number of chromosomes 48
Therefore according to evolution, chimps and tobacco are the same thing!
Hovind's conclusion: Evolution is false.
"Kent Hovind has an interesting relationship with the IRS. He also has an interesting perspective on the need to pay personal income tax. Mr. Hovind is of the opinion that he doesn't need to pay income tax because the IRS is part of a New World Order and Communist conspiracy [1]
Of course the IRS took a dim view of this opinion and filed returns on behalf of Mr. Hovind. This left Mr. Hovind with a substantial tax liability. The IRS then seized personal assets of equivalent value as payment (three vehicles, a homemade trailer, and $54 in cash). [2]
Mr. Hovind's response to this, and this is where the lying comes in, was an attempt to declare himself bankrupt when in fact he was not. Apart from attempting to falsely file bankruptcy, Hovind declared that "he had no property, received no income, had no expenses, and had no creditors (except for the IRS)" as well "did not acknowledge that he was a citizen of the U.S. nor subject to its tax laws, and claimed that he was was 'an evangelist employed by God'". This is despite the fact that "he had a home with recently installed central air conditioning, and sent all three children to a private Christian school at a cost of $4,800 per year." The Court had no qualms about declaring Mr. Hovind a tax protester who was attempting to seek relief under Chapter 13 to seek the release of property seized by the IRS."
(Source: [1] Hovind, 2000, How are evolution, Communism, the new-world order, and the IRS connected? [mid 2001?] [2] Case of the Month - Tax Protesters Beware [August 2001] )
The above exemplars are just the tip of the iceberg for Mr. Hovind's many lies, distortions, and conflation's. His dishonesty, or ignorance if you prefer, is legendary even among his fellow creationists.
Now there actually are some honest creationists out there, often lost in the glare of the Hovinds of the world. Most of them are theistic evolutionists like my friend Glenn Morton who believe that God initiated the Big Bang planned out in such a way as to produce God's Will, from butterflies to bears. But there are even some honest Young Earth Creationists (Kurt Wise for example); what makes them honest?
What makes them honest is they don't use grossly misleading statements to enrich themselves at the expense of their theistic 'victims'. They do not repeat those errors over and over again regardless of how many times they're corrected. They do not avoid the evidence and they freely admit that their Young Earth views are a matter of faith and that the evidence is solidly against them. Kent Hovind is not among that cadre.
I do have to give Hovind credit where credit is due though. For awhile back in the late 1990s, Hovind was blaming the Trail of Tears on evolutionary biology:
"The Trail of Tears was where the Cherokee Indians were driven out of the Chattanooga area all the way to Oklahoma. One third of the entire nation died en route.... Evolution is responsible for what happened to the Indians. How any Indian can believe in evolution just blows my mind.... the evolution theory is what destroyed them." --- Rev Hovind, Ch. 4
It was pointed out to Mr. Hovind over and over that the Trail of Tears occurred in ~1830 and that The Origin of Species was not published until 1859. It took years but my understanding is he no longer uses that particular lie.
Now I don't know for a fact that Hovind understands he's lying. He could be deluded, or totally off his rocker. But I don't really care. He's been corrected often enough, even by his fellow creationists, that if he wanted to be honest about it, he would alter his lectures. He goes on to repeat the same nonsense at his very next lecture/debate, never acknowledging that those statements have been shot down; and imo, that makes him a liar pure and simple.