100 Reasons Why Kent Hovind Is Stupid.

It's time to let some real anger out.

I've decided to finally write about one of the topics which I care about most in the world. This will certainly be the first of many posts about the hilarious claims of religious people, and the religions themselves. We've already covered the absurdity of one well respected feminist, and now it's time to look at the daddy of modern day foolishness. A towering cathedral built to the gods of lies and misinformation, I'm talking, of course, about the heaving festival of idiocy which is Young Earth Creationism.

I love science. Lots of people say that they love science, and they go around saying things like this to people: "Guess what! If you put a cat in a box, you can't tell if it's alive or dead!" Which is one of the biggest and most tragic misunderstandings of a joke which has ever happened.

(Schroedinger's cat was actually a demonstration of how ridiculous the observations of quantum mechanics are, especially in the macroscopic world. The whole point of the joke is that you obviously know whether the cat is alive or dead. Whereas firing a single electron at a target in the right circumstances will lead to the electron impacting the target not in the expected distribution, but a highly unintuitive one, identical to that of two electrons being fired at once. Any attempt to observe the electron in-flight to discern how this happens, is met with the electron behaving normally, and reverting to the standard, common sense impact disrtibution.)

When I say I love science, I mean that I love seeing lines of correlation on graph paper, or watching a mathematical proof, or hearing that an idea I wish was correct cannot possibly be true. 

I also love the numbers. Oh, God. The numbers. As you may have read in my journal about my visit to the Large Hadron Collider earlier this year, numbers in physics are wonderful, awe-inspiring things.

I say all this, so that when I describe Kent Hovind, a man who claims to be a fan of science while simultaneously preaching creationism, as a despicable, reprehensible, disgusting child abuser, you'll understand that it's a largely visceral response because he's insulting something I love very much. (I say child abuser because he lies to children about our world, and claims to any child smart enough to question him, that if they don't believe him they'll be tortured forever in hell. Lying to and threatening children for monetary gain is, without question, child abuse.)

Kent Hovind is the man who brought Creationism kicking and screaming into a scientific world. His attempts to marry his lunacy with cherry-picked parts of missunderstood science are used by many, many young earth creationists attempting to defend their positions.
 So, with cards hurled onto the table hard enough to split the veneer, let's take a look at some of the things this ludicrous, backward, thieving criminal has said. (He's currently in prison for roughly $1,000,000 in tax fraud.)

Now. I highly recommend trying to watch that video. But do it in shifts, because it's utterly infuriating. I've never managed more than 45 minutes at a time. It took me a week to watch it the first time. And subsequent viewings have not been an improvement.

It is titled: "100 Reasons Why Evolution Is STUPID" And it contains hundreds of lies, misinterpretations and misquotations knowledgeable people. Along with rampant non-sequiturs, dozens of contradictions and many, many statements which are just, plain, stupid.

You can tell this man's favourite book is the Bible. Can't you?

Any information about creationism or it's refutations can be found at TalkOrigins.org, including a complete list of creationist claims and their refutations. although they do it in a very dry and professional manner. I'm going to have a little bit more fun.

Let's go through, chronologically through the video, and point out the problems with it, and come up with a new, fun insult each time. I'll have to do a series of journals on this, because there's just so much to cover. Every internet atheist at some point or another, has to have a talk about this man, and these claims. It's basically a right of passage.

Anyway, let's begin:

0:00:00. 
   Our first flaw. The title card on the video says: "Dr. Kent Hovind." This man has no official doctorate from any accredited institution in any field of study and the fact that he claims to is a lie. His "Qualifications" were obtained from the American Accrediting Association of Theological Institutions, and the entire process of obtaining it was, rather than the years of work and study which most people undergo to achieve the title of Doctor, instead a single afternoon of paperwork and a $100 fee. What an unbearable fart.

0:00:01.

   Hovind claims to have taught high school science for 15 years. While this is not a lie, it should be noted that it was not a public school, and he needed no qualifications to do it. He started his own school and church, and so you should not take away any false sense of credibility from him. He is an insidious, lying insect.

0:00:38
   Wow. A whole 37 seconds without an obvious lie, mistake or butchery of the foundation of our modern civilisation. But then he says this: "I believe the Bible. It is the infallible, inspired, inerrant word of the living God, and I believe it from cover to cover." Now, this discussion has taken up entire books in the past, but if all we need to do is prove that it's not infallible, well! That's easy, All we have to do is ask one question: 

"What did Judas do with the 30 pieces of silver?"

Matthew 27:5 And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went hanged himself.

Acts 1:18 Now this man purchased a field with the reward of iniquity; and falling headlong, he burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out. 

Now, both of these statements cannot be true at once. It's impossible. Therefore, one of them must be wrong, ergo the Bible contains at least one inaccuracy, thus there is no way to know if the rest of it can be trusted, and no perfect being could have written such a problematic text. This easily does away with the claim that it was inspired by God, and that it is infallible. The fact that there are different versions of it clearly disposes of the claim of inerrancy.

So, from the outset, Hovind is basing his claims at least partly on something which is known to be unreliable.

He is also lying about his beliefs. He does not believe the book is perfect, otherwise he would follow the rules in it. He would execute people for switching on lights on the sabbath, and he'd realise that he's going to hell for cutting the sides of his hair and beard. (Read Leviticus, it's messed up.)

Kent Hovind is a dishonest puddle of mucus.

0:01:50

   "I like science." This makes me boil and froth and seethe with barely suppressed fury. This man, does not like science. I would put a massive wager that he doesn't even know what science is. Science is not a collection of factoids. It is the method by which we forcefully interrogate our universe. Kent Hovind has no understanding of this. i guarantee it. He lives in a world built by science. Everything he has ever owned would not exist if the scientific claims about the age of our universe and planet earth were wrong, he knows this, yet his statements are some of the biggest affronts to science in recorded media. What a disgusting hypocrite.

0:03:10

   "The word evolution has at least 6 different meanings." No Kent, no it doesn't. It has one. It means, "change over time." That's it. That's all. But, since lots of different things change over the course of seconds, days and millenia, the term describes many different phenomena.

Now, this entire section is stupid. Because every single thing he describes, is actually real, and he misunderstands it anyway. 

"Cosmic Evolution" is not "The big bang" It would describe how the cosmos changes on large scales, the expansion of the universe, and the cooling due to this expansion would be examples. 

"Chemical Evolution." This is where Hovind gets really goddamned stupid for the first time. It seems that he's never heard of nuclear fusion. Despite years of reading science books and teaching "science" the concept of elements fusing with one another and creating new elements has never been explained to him. I'm beginning to think he's never read a textbook on our Sun before. He doesn't know a single thing about our universe, but he claims to know more than any human can possibly know because he's an ignorant, lying fuck.

"Stellar Evolution" happens all the time. There are few facts known to the human species more resolutely than the fact that stars change. In fact, it would be almost impossible to even conceive of laws of physics which would even allow them to not evolve. And he claims that we've never seen one form! roughly one in thirty of the visible lights in our sky is a nebula. Looking at a nebula, is looking at millions of stars forming, I mean, Jesus Christ you idiot.

"Organic Evolution" this one is just nonsense. Abiogenesis (The origin of the first self-replicating molecules) is definitely not a form of organic evolution as anyone sentient would understand the term. He goes on about this subject at punishingly ignorant length later on, so I'll be brief now: Think of the sheer volume of organic (carbon-containing) chemistry which would be dissolved in the earth's oceans back then. All it takes is one correct interaction for that molecule to form, and start copying itself. Even if that happened, and then the molecule broken, it certainly wouldn't be long before it happened again. This is not a miracle, this is not a mystery, this is not stupid. This is a factual claim.

The he does this goddamned stupid thing where people split evolution up into two types, "Micro" and "Macro". There are no two types of evolution. There is one. it's called natural selection. Eventually, lots and lots of small changes build up, until two animals look very different to one another. That's it. Claiming that no amount of micro-evolution could turn a small, ancient rodent into a modern primate, is like saying: "I don't care how much you try! No matter how many 1 yard steps you take, it will never add up to walking a mile. Never!" 

Goddamned Fucking Idiot.

Okay, that takes us up to just over 5 minutes into the video. I'll come back to this topic until the entire video is done. Next time: The big bang!

 But for now, I think it's time we had a little break.

This has been an Empirical Opinions journal, allow me to play you out with a selection of things I'd like to say to Kent Hovind if I ever met him: