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Author | Topic: Defeating "Dr" Kent Hovinds' claims. | |||||||||||||||||||||||
dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
quote: The scientific method is incompatible with supernaturalistic explanations for the simple reason that the supernatural cannot be observed, measured, nor tested. Here's an illustrative story:
quote: Science cannot deal with the supernatural and trying to resort to supernaturalistic explanations can only damage science. Therefore, science must restrict itself to working with naturalistic explanations and, as a result, it can only offer naturalistic answers about the natural world. Science can say and does not say anything about the supernatural. It seems obvious that you follow the false theology of The God of the Gaps, in which you believe in a puny impotent god who only exists and works within the gaps of our knowledge. That god is incapable of using natural processes and must live forever fearful of science as science closes those gaps and that god becomes ever smaller and punier. This is the theology I repeatedly see being used by ID and even by "creation science". OTOH, most Christians' God is Sovereign over Nature, Who is fully capable of using natural processes to do His Work and Who has nothing at all to fear from science. Sorry to hear that your god is so puny and impotent. You should consider switching to the Christian God instead. Recommended reading: Dr. Allan Harvey's essays, "A Personal View of the Evolution Issue" at No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/steamdoc/writings/evolution.html and "Science and Christian Apologetics" at No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/steamdoc/writings/apologetics.html.
quote: And yet you would rejoice when Christians resort to lies and deception in order to serve their god? With all the damage that does? (eg, driving more people away from Christ than you attract, thoroughly discrediting Christianity, making it impossible for most people to be able to ever consider becoming a Christian, proving Christianity to be a false religion (Matthew 7:20), doing the anti-religion atheists' work for them by disproving the existence of God yourself, destroying the faith of creationists when they discover that they'd been taught lies) That goes beyond sad and even beyond tragic.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
What you say may well be true of Muhd. But complaining that naturalistic explanations "remove God out of the picture" do display basic God-of-the-Gaps (GOTG) mentality, whether or not he has carried that GOTG theology to its logical conclusions. And, I believe, it is that GOTG mentality that has largely created and perpetuates the fiction that science attacks religion.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
Fork, let your friend explain how well the math works out on this Hovind claim:
quote: So how much more massive would the sun have been 5 billion years ago?At 5 million tons lost a second, that would amount to about 1.5779216 x 1017 tons. The sun's current mass is about 1.9891 x 1027 metric tonnes, or 2.1926 x 1027 short tons (somehow, I just can't see Hovind using the metric system). So the total mass lost in 5 billion years is only about 0.03598%, less than 4 hundredths of one percent, of the sun's current mass. So the ancient sun would have been only marginally more massive than it is now, "sucking" the earth in by less than 100,000 miles. BTW, that figure of 5 million tons per second is about right and Hovind says that he got it from a textbook. In his seminar tape (no long on-line), he said:
quote:Hovind has indicated elsewhere that he doesn't accept the nuclear fusion explanation and seems to prefer gravitational contraction (he does offer this claim to support the "shrinking sun") and combustion. Though combustion would result in near-zero mass loss, not the 5 million tons per second that he cites. Part of the irony here is that that rate of 5 million tons per second is based entirely on nuclear fusion producing the sun's entire energy output. From the sun's perspective, 5 million tons per second is "a small amount of matter [that] produces an enormous amount of heat". So he's basing his claim on something that he doesn't want to accept.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
quote: Hey, he's a real expert on science and math. That's what he keeps saying on his seminar tapes and brags about how well he understands that stuff. After all, he taught high school math and science for 15 years -- what he doesn't add is that, as I understand it, it was at his own private Christian high school that he did that teaching. As for his understanding of how the sun burns, I've found two sources: kent-hovind.com - , "Quacky Quotes", Basic Science I:
quote: Then there was a ... er, religious-fringe site going on about ... oh, go look at it yourself, because you wouldn't believe me if I told you:
quote:at No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.cuttingedge.org/NEWS/n1260.cfm The pertinent part was that the occultists were planning on igniting Jupiter into a star by having the Galileo probe crash into the planet whereupon its nuclear reactor would cause a nuclear explosion. [BTW, no, it never could have exploded and, no, it never did] They checked out some sites and asked astronomers about the likelihood. The astronomers explained to them that Jupiter has far too little mass for the core to get a fusion reaction started. These guys simply could not understand what the astronomers were talking about -- and they admit that they couldn't understand -- , but then Kent Hovind gave them an answer they could understand:
quote: I swear, I am not making any of this up. I've emailed that site asking whether they were quoting Hovind accurately, but have never received any answer. I haven't gotten around to asking Hovind. The last time I wrote him it was to ask him what mass he had come up with for the ancient sun. He "responded" by avoiding that question any way he could, including twice trying to pick a fight with me over my AOL screenname. Besides, I'd think that he's probably a bit preoccupied right now with his legal problems.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
Well of course, you could use self-replicating monoliths to either increase Jupiter's mass (though if they're not compressible, you still might not enough pressure at the core, plus I'm not sure what effect that increased mass would have on the orbits of the other planets) or to artificially compress Jupiter's existing mass to compress the core enough to fuse.
But these "Illuminati" don't have such monoliths at their disposal, the plutonium dioxide fuel pellets on Galileo wouldn't have exploded (for that, you would need weapons-grade plutonium and you would need some mechanism to compress it to achieve critical mass -- as I recall, Little Man was a high velocity gun that shot one piece of nuclear material into another and Fat Boy was a piece of nuclear material completely surrounded by shaped charges, the kind of design depicted in The Peacemaker), and it still looks very much like Hovind thinks the sun burns by combustion. Even though he uses a mass-loss rate that depends on the sun's entire energy output coming from hydrogen fusion; from a draft web page:
quote: From Hovind's seminar tape:
quote: Edited by dwise1, : No reason given. Edited by dwise1, : No reason given. Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
Fire (ie, combustion) is chemical, not nuclear.
But we knew that even before high school (reference to Hovind's boast that he taught high school science for 15 years). BTW, while many of his followers I've had the [dubious] pleasure of corresponding with cite his doctorate degree to show that he is indeed a scientist, it should be noted that that degree is in religious education. And as I recall, his masters is in education and his bachelor in religion (or the other way around). And that is ignoring the question of whether his masters and doctorate are even legitimate or simply purchased from a degree mill -- different subject.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
quote: I think it's more a matter of them telling people what they want to hear. As a fundamentalist friend had told me years ago about prophets, true prophets were reviled and rejected because the people didn't want to hear the truth, whereas the false prophets were loved because they were telling the people those lies that the people wanted to hear. Is it any wonder that Hovind is so revered by his followers? Indeed, in one forum when I pointed out that one of Hovind's claims was factually incorrect, the creationist accused me of having viciously attacked Christianity itself. Hovind didn't create "creation science" nor did he create the vast majority of claims that he makes, but rather recycles other creationists' claims. Who had recycled others' claims, etc, like the constant recycling and circulation of urban legends. Nor did he initiate the deception of most of his audiences, but rather they seek him out because he's telling them the lies that they want to hear. Starting around WWI and afterwards (ie, going into and through the Twenties), the anti-evolution movement grew because more kids were attending high school and they were being taught things in biology class that their parents didn't understand and that they feared contradicted their religion. These people needed to hear that science was wrong and they flocked to anyone who would tell them that. They still do. Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.
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dwise1 Member Posts: 5949 Joined: Member Rating: 5.5 |
Wo cares what kind of claim this dishonest criminal makes? You'd have to be a certified ignoramus to give any sort credibility to his farcical claims and argument. I agree. However, it does seem that the vast majority of YECs do believe Hovind to be one of the greatest living scientific authorities. Casey Powell's statements here are very rare, a YEC who denounces Hovind. YECs' veneration of Hovind can be surprisingly extreme. In a Yahoo discussion group, a YEC repeated some Hovind claims so I pointed out that they were wrong and preceisely why they were wrong. In response, the YEC vehmently denounced me for having "made a vicious attack against Christianity". WTFO? This YEC had elevated Hovind to a level equal to the Christ and Christianity. So we care about what that charlatan does and says because he has so many YECs completely hoodwinked. But the good news is that it's so easy to refute his ridiculous claims. The bad news is that the YECS have been hoodwinked into believing that if Hovind's claims are false, then the Bible itself is false and they must become hedonist atheists. Or worse. And I have so far found it virtually impossible to convince one of them that their faith does not depend on Hovind's claims being true.
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