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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continued in part C

thanks to Buddika for this great work

See Kent Hovind's reply to the lies
Kent Hovind's Homepage

email me (I am NOT Buddika.)