An Evangelist Confronts Hovind
19 May 2001
Hi (Name withheld),
Thanks for loaning me the Kent Hovind tapes on evolution and related subjects. I have several comments on them; which I am providing in writing. You are welcome to submit them to Mr. Hovind for his responses, if you wish. The gist of my comments is as follows:
Evangelical churches have made great progress in this country by demonstrating God's power over evil and by living out a message of self-sacrificial concern for those in need. Hovind's videos would undoubtedly energize some Believers in this country, but would also fill them with easily refutable misinformation, and would further an injustice against many nonBelievers. I predict that the net result would be to hinder further progress of the work that has been done here, and to re-create the situation that we face in the United States: determined, well-organized, well-financed opposition from educated, articulate people who view us as hypocrites for calling them tools of Satan while we sinfully misrepresent them and their beliefs.
I speak from experience: I used to be such a person, for which I now repent. I had become one in response to materials like Hovind's.
Yours in Christ,
Dr. James A. Smith, PE
INTRODUCTION
This document consists of three sections:
MY BACKGROUND
I earned a BS in metallurgical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines in 1978, and a Ph.D. in that subject from the University of Illinois in 1987. I worked as an engineer and scientist in nuclear-reactor research until 1990; previously, I had worked as an engineer in manufacture of jet-engine components for the F-14, F-15, and F-16.
Along the way, I had five classes in thermodynamics, approximately the same number of college physics courses, and later studied nonequilibrium thermodynamics on my own. In the one situation to which I had the opportunity to apply nonequilibrium thermodynamics, it worked very well.
Many experiences during my career in
metallurgy showed me that science is indeed rife with fraud, bad work, and
undue influence, both political and financial. Thus, I am not under any
illusions about science, as conducted by fallible, sinful humans, as I write
this commentary.
I became active in the Creation/Evolution
issues at the University of Illinois, while I was still a nonBeliever.
Various campus evangelists would give noontime presentations on the campus
quadrangle, “debunking” evolution via personal attacks against nonBelievers, and
via statements (regarding thermodynamics) that I knew to be false. I
checked into evolutionists’ claims that creationists misrepresented their work,
and found those claims to be true (1).
In the process, I read at least one Creationist textbook (by Morris) intended
for use in public schools.
Note that I opposed Creationists not because of my “sin nature”, but because I saw that leading Creationists were intellectually dishonest people who wanted to insinuate their religion into public schools, in the guise of a “science” that is scientifically untenable. I donated considerable money to organizations that opposed the Creationists. All of that was 12-15 years ago. Since then, I've become a Believer. I see many things differently, but my principles regarding on what constitutes basic honesty and civil behavior haven't changed, although I now see the true (i.e., Biblical) basis for them. As regards disputes with others, these principles include
1. We do not resort to name-calling;
2. We do not misrepresent them or their beliefs; and
3. When we do such things, we apologize and set the record straight.
The topics that follow deal with Hovind's more egregious inaccuracies, omissions, and misbehaviors. Please don't assume that I have no comments on other statements that I've not addressed here. I can refer you to appropriate sources if you're interested in learning more about the issues that I've addressed.
Statements such as “Anyone who teaches evolution is in trouble with God” and “Anybody who believes in evolution is calling Jesus Christ a liar”.
I’ll discuss such things in Concluding Remarks.
Statements such as “Evolution is a religion” and “Scoffers reject Biblical creation not because of science, but because of sin”.
To some people, evolution is a religion, but this is a consequence of human fallibility and sinfulness, not a fault of the theory itself. Similarly, some people do reject the Bible because they want to lead sinful lives. However, evolution is accepted and trusted as a framework for explaining phenomena because it has refuted (often brilliantly and compellingly) the various scientific objections made to it. In the process, it forced revisions to other theories (such as those regarding genetics and physics). You may recall that I told you about the early crises that it survived regarding inheritability of mutations (which was resolved in favor of evolution by discovery of Mendel’s work on genetics) and apparent impossibility of a long-lived sun (which was resolved in favor of evolution by discovery of nuclear energy).
The statement “Evolution says that everything gets better”.
This statement is a popular
misconception. It no doubt finds its way into many textbooks, but the
theory itself says no such thing.
The statement (made in connection with the
Big Bang) ”Matter cannot be created or destroyed”.
This statement expresses a limiting case of a more-general conservation law regarding matter and energy. This limiting case holds under everyday circumstances, but matter is destroyed (actually, converted into energy) all of the time in nuclear reactors. Matter is created by means such as the pair production (see attached, regarding the Compton Effect (2)). This limiting case is not even remotely applicable to the conditions posited for the Big Bang. (More on this later).
I understood Hovind to say that the First Law of Thermodynamics says that matter cannot be created or destroyed. If so, he is quite wrong: the First Law can be formulated in various ways, but it basically expresses the equivalence of heat and other forms of work/energy. I have never heard it expressed as “matter cannot be created or destroyed”; such an expression would be useless for most problems involving energy (which is the main use of thermodynamics) and untrue for situations in which matter is indeed converted to energy.
Some express the First Law as “energy can be
neither created nor destroyed”, in which case it is another limiting case of
the more-general conservation law.
The statement “The Second Law of Thermodynamics
says that everything tends toward randomness”.
This colloquial rendering of the Second Law is a seriously flawed generalization. Metallurgical industries produce materials with less randomness, from materials with greater randomness, on the scale of thousands of tons per day. No violation of the Second Law is involved. The metallurgical phenomenon that I analyzed according to nonequilibrium thermodynamics also involved a transition from greater to lesser randomness.
When confronted with such examples, Creationists usually reply that such processes can’t produce life (3). This response is an evasion. According to Creationists, such processes should not be possible at all. The Creationists are wrong, and they were caught in this error 20 years ago. Rather than admit their error, they’ve continued to misquote the Second Law. By now, this statement has the status of a deliberate, knowing falsehood.
The statement: “The Big Bang theory has several holes”
True, but it is also supported by much experimental evidence, and the “holes” involve highly esoteric considerations such as the inability of General Relativity to describe gravitational interactions between particles before the Planck Time (i.e., 10-43 seconds after the posited Big Bang; see attached articles). Satisfactory theoretical treatment of such problems may prove, ultimately, to be beyond human ability. Or perhaps no solution to them is to be had within the scope of science.
Hovind's objections are a different matter. He could find the answers to them in a week or so of serious reading on the subject, if he so chose. For the most part, his objections seem to arise from ignorance of the Theory's basic concepts, combined with an insistence upon applying high-school-level physics to situations in which it is demonstrably inapplicable (as confirmed by overwhelming experimental evidence; see attached articles on quantum mechanics).
Please note that I have supplied the attached articles [Regarding the Big Bang theory] not because I believe that scientists who have done the described work are infallible; rather, I provide them to show the astonishing depth of the questions that have been explored by them, and the nature of the puzzles that remain (and may have no solution within the realm of science — note the discussion of the Copenhagen interpretation of the measurement problem in quantum mechanics). Personally, I find it overwhelming to know that God created a universe that can be probed in such depth, and that He created minds capable of such probing. Believers’ mocking dismissal of such work earns us the contempt of many who are familiar with it.
Various “disproofs” of old-earth hypotheses
To the best of my knowledge, these “disproofs” have satisfactory refutations within the scope of the theories in question. Take the “Niagara Falls” disproof for example: no knowledgeable person claims that Niagara Falls is billions of years old. According to theory, the Falls didn't exist before the last Ice Age, approximately 10,000 years ago. Hovind may disagree with such theories, but he misleads his audience by neglecting to mention that those theories contain self-consistent answers to the questions he raises.
One of Hovind's “disproofs” deserves particular mention: estimation of the earth's age by salinity of the ocean. Morris presents it in one of his books as an alternate method (as opposed to radioisotope methods) of using uranium to determine the age of the earth. I don't have my references with me as I write, but as I recall, the concentration of uranium in seawater gave an estimated age of 50,000,000 years. (Or perhaps it was only 500,000 years.) He also presented ages based upon concentrations of other elements. Although these ages tended to be much smaller, they had quite a range, with some being unacceptably high for Creationists. He finally asserted that the shorter ages are assumedly the most reliable.
The shortest (based upon aluminum or titanium, as I recall) was about 150 years. I recall that others were less than 2000 years. He presented these ludicrous ages without comment, despite their being (by the standards he'd just finished presenting) the most reliable. At least one Believer has criticized the salinity method for exactly this reason. Is Hovind unaware of this?
Statements regarding giant skeletons
All of the giant skeletons have
vanished. We can blame human incompetence, government conspiracy, and
whatever else we wish, but without such artifacts at hand to examine, it's
impossible to accept them as genuine. Piltdown Man was a fraud, so why
shouldn't we suspect these skeletons as well? Which brings us to...
Statements regarding the Piltdown Man
Please see the attached article. Hovind makes much of this fraud and its implications for credibility of evolution, but ignores crucial points:
1. The Piltdown fossils became suspect because they had an anomalous combination of apelike jaw and human-like skull. It was the discovery of other human fossils that highlighted Piltdown Man as an anomaly.
2. Piltdown was a controversy that raged for over 40 years (4). Ultimately, it was exposed by scientists themselves. The individual perpetrator's conduct was shameful, but this episode provides no reason for sweeping indictments of human-fossil researchers as a whole. Quite the contrary.
The question “If monkeys produced humans in the past, why don't they do so today?”
This is almost certainly a deliberate straw-man argument. No knowledgeable evolutionist says that monkeys produced humans in anything like the sense that Hovind seems to imply. They do say that modern-day monkeys and humans shared common ancestors, from which both monkeys and humans evolved over millions of years, but that's an entirely different thing.
Repeated misrepresentation of evolutionists’ positions
For example, Hovind twists the evolutionist's statement “The fossil record provides an inadequate basis for saying when, where, and how humans evolved” into “Evolutionists have no idea how humans could have evolved”.
The statement “Scoffers are ignorant of Biblical Creation”
Most are, but some are quite knowledgeable about it, have analyzed it in depth, and reject it because they consider it scientifically indefensible.
The proposed “Canopy of water” over the earth
I have not yet seen the tape in which Hovind presents the Hovind Theory, so I’ll reserve my comments, except to say that if anyone chooses to believe in the canopy of water as a matter of faith, and to believe that both the canopy and life on earth endured through God's grace, because He held normal physical laws in abeyance, I have no objection.
The cartoon showing a fat little evolutionist lifting a human skull to an idol of a monkey
As accompaniment to this cartoon, Hovind says (of the putative evolutionist) “He spends all of his time digging for bones in the dirt — so does my dog”, and “He has the furniture disease — his chest has fallen into his drawers”.
We're supposed to stop making fun of others’ appearance long before adulthood. Making fun of someone's hypothetical appearance, which we have drawn (or otherwise obtained) for the purpose of mocking them, is truly sick behavior for an adult. Yet no one in Hovind's audience of Believers is shown to raise a protest. Do we really want anyone to see Believers acting this way?
I could say more, but surely this is sufficient.
According to Hovind, anyone who believes in evolution is calling Jesus Christ a liar. It would seem that many evangelicals agree.
It's instructive to note the extent to which Hovind appears to have become the very thing that he attacks: he commits vile slanders, and although it's unclear exactly which of his falsehoods and dishonest arguments are deliberate, which reflect willful ignorance, and which derive from ignorance that he simply doesn't bother to remedy, he is clearly an untruthful person. His own sin nature appears to be running rampant, and I hold his fellow Believers partly responsible. I expect that if he were he involved in any other ministry, Believers would be rebuking him for his behavior, but they encourage and support his behavior in this one. Why?
In my experience, a large segment of Evangelicals holds beliefs toward evolution and the Big Bang that can be summarized accurately as follows:
1. These theories contradict the Bible, and are ipso facto false.
2. These theories have no significant scientific basis or supporting evidence, and are easily refuted with a moment's thought, using everyday experience plus an elementary understanding of chemistry and physics.
3. These theories are taught in public schools precisely because they contradict the Bible, and are taught for the purpose of giving people license to indulge their sin natures.
4. The conflict over evolution and the Big Bang is a war against Satanic powers.
5. Anyone who speaks well of these theories is a tool of Satan, even if unknowingly.
6. A desire to learn
more about these theories is cause for suspicion: a Believer should dismiss
them out of hand because they contradict the Bible, and not even waste time
studying such dangerous ideas in depth.
In such an atmosphere, the Hovind's among us
flourish: few Evangelicals have the background to challenge his scientific
assertions, and few who object to his behavior will risk being considered an
“enemy sympathizer” by criticizing a leader in a war against Satan.
Yet we must do so: as a matter of pastoral concern, Hovind appears to have strayed far from God in this area of his life. A man who provokes others to anger by lying about them and ridiculing them, then blames their sin nature for their resistance to the Gospel, needs Brotherly counsel.
The spread of the Gospel in this country has thus far been an inspiring witness to God's power, but may become a victim of its own success. No church is perfect, and the Evangelical churches have no doubt, by now, alienated a fair number of people. It always happens — churches are human institutions, and the various power struggles and congregation-splits leave a trail of victims. If experience from the States is any guide, some of these people can be won over, or won back, by seeing Christ's love in action. Until then, they will be receptive to excuses for rejecting Christianity altogether.
Hovind's atrocious behavior, and the
approval of it shown by his audience, will provide the sort of excuse that the
alienated need. I expect that the more articulate and educated among them
will be spurred into action by seeing Christians call evolutionists tools of
Satan while sinfully mocking them and misrepresenting their beliefs. They
will be supported by outsiders aware of Christianity's past persecutions of
scientists, and fearful of government/religious “interference” in science (5).
The alienated will become an active and determined opposition to us, and they
will be at least partly in the right.
1. Although I was not, and am not now, competent to comment upon subjects such as what is proven by the fossil record, it was clear that Creationists were indeed guilty of out-of-context quotes and other intellectually dishonest behavior.
2. In one of the later
articles, on quantum mechanics, you'll find a different interpretation of pair
production.
3. Although the processes involved in metallurgy will certainly never produce life, matter has an astonishing ability to order itself through processes (e.g., chemical clocks and dissipative structures) that were once thought to violate the Second Law. Can life arise from such processes? I don't know, but they surely show us that our Creator is an awesome one.
4. How many of the 700
theses on Piltdown Man, mentioned repeatedly by Hovind, were actually ones that
pointed out the anomalies and other reasons for questioning the find?
Hovind doesn't say, but I suspect that a lot of them were.
5. See attached articles on Bruno, Lysenko, and Galileo [from Encyclopedia Britannica CD-ROM].