Defeating "Dr" Kent Hovinds' claims.

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However I will say that evolution and other naturalistic theories are perpetuated in an effort to remove God out of the picture.

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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:

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The Physicist and the Metaphysicist

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In the 1920s, there was a dinner at which the physicist Robert W. Wood was asked to respond to a toast. This was a time when people stood up, made a toast, and then selected someone to respond. Nobody knew what toast they'd be asked to reply to, so it was a challenge for the quick-witted. In this case the toast was: "To physics and metaphysics." Now by metaphysics was meant something like philosophy -- truths that you could get to just by thinking about them. Wood took a second, glanced about him, and answered along these lines: The physicist has an idea, he said. The more he thinks it through, the more sense it makes to him. He goes to the scientific literature, and the more he reads, the more promising the idea seems. Thus prepared, he devises an experiment to test the idea. The experiment is painstaking. Many possibilities are eliminated or taken into account; the accuracy of the measurement is refined. At the end of all this work, the experiment is completed and ... the idea is shown to be worthless. The physicist then discards the idea, frees his mind (as I was saying a moment ago) from the clutter of error, and moves on to something else.

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The difference between physics and metaphysics, Wood concluded, is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

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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.

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It saddens me when Christians show support for this kind of godless science.

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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.

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.

Fork, let your friend explain how well the math works out on this Hovind claim:

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For instance, the sun is burning, of course, and it's burning an enormous amount of fuel. It's losing about 5 million tons every second. Well, if the earth is billions of years old that creates a problem, because you couldn't go back 5 billion or 20 billion years like they say with the sun constantly getting larger and larger and heavier and heavier. The sun's gravity would of course become real great and would suck the earth in. Plus the sun would be bigger and burn the earth up. It can't possibly be true that it's billions of years old.
[Hovind in radio interview on Southwest Radio Church, 13 Sep 2002 (my transcription taken from the audio at Page not found - SWRC at 8 minutes]

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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:

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The problem is nobody is positive of what's causing the sun to burn. There are two theories about what causes the sun to burn. One theory says the sun is burning by nuclear fusion, in which case it could burn for billions of years and you wouldn't see much change in the diameter, because a small amount of matter produces an enormous amount of heat. The other theory says the sun is burning by gravitational collapse and is just, you know, burning up -- OK, the pressure produces the heat to keep it burning.

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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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[Hovind] seems to draw strength from people' ignorance.

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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:

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Listener's letter: [.....] It is said the Sun is a burning ball of gas, in other words fire. What is the one thing that fire needs to burn? Oxygen. How come that stars continue to burn if they have no oxygen to keep them burning? [.....]

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Hovind: Excellent question, Andres. I'm sorry but I don't know that I have a positive answer. [....] As far as the oxygen required, I'll have to pass on that one too and do some more study on that one. I don't know that I could prove one way or the other. I think there are different types of burning though - some do not require oxygen. Sorry about that, Andres. I'll have to do some research and check back with you on that one.

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Source: Truth Radio 5 August 2003 @ 37:50

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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:

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TITLE: EXACT ILLUMINIST TIMETABLE FOR PRODUCING ANTICHRIST HAS BEEN REVEALED TO CUTTING EDGE MINISTRIES!

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Subtitle: We have been given the exact timetable for producing Antichrist, including the exact date he is planned to arise. We have also been given the precise occult thinking by which this timetable was produced. If God does not act to prevent the Illuminati from carrying out this Plan, Antichrist will likely arise as the Illuminati has scheduled.

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at No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.cuttingedge.org/NEWS/n1260.cfmThe 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:

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These comments from NASA, and this astronomy research group, seem to be clear that Jupiter could never ignite on its own. We then posed the following question to the Arizona Space Exploration and Astronomy research group "Could Jupiter be ignited by a huge nuclear device ?" The answer we got back was:

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"Jupiter could not be ignited. The central temperature is the determining factor. A self-gravitating mass of hydrogen 20% the size of the Sun, or smaller, does not have a high enough central temperature to induce nuclear fusion. Temperature equates to average kinetic energy of particles; it takes a very high temperature to get even a small fraction of hydrogen ions to overcome their electrical repulsion and fuse." [Guy Smiley dated 2/2/99]

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We were still not sure exactly why Jupiter could not ignite, especially if it were hit with the huge atomic explosion of 1,750 Megatons, as occult sources are saying will occur when the 49.7 pounds of plutonium in the spacecraft Galileo is turned into the planet on December 6. After all, the largest thermonuclear explosion on earth was the Russian test of only 100 megatons in 1961. The answer we received from a Christian scientist, Dr. Kent Hovind, [ Dinosaur Adventure Land ] explained the science to us so we could understand. In the NASA excerpt, quoted above, we learned that "most" of the mass of Jupiter is Hydrogen and Helium, a most explosive mix, if it is mixed with sufficient oxygen in order to burn this mixture. Dr. Hovind says Jupiter does not contain enough oxygen in order to sustain the type of continuous burning that would be needed to produce a star. Now, we understand and now it all makes sense. No matter how large the initial explosion might be, the lack of sufficient quantities of oxygen would snuff out any resulting fire rather quickly.

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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.

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:

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To determine how much mass is being converted to energy, we measure how much energy the sun is outputting and apply Einstein's equation,
E = mc²:

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Sun's energy output (E) = 3.86x10³³ ergs / second
Speed of light (c) = 2.99x10¹⁰ cm / second
Mass (m) = E / c²
m = 3.86x10³³ / (2.99x10¹⁰)² grams / second
m = 4.318x10¹² grams / second
m = 4.318 million metric tons / second
m = 4.76 million short tons / second
(1 short ton = 2000 pounds = 0.9072 metric tonnes)

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It appears that either Hovind or Hovind's source had rounded that rate up to 5 million tons. Most other sources round down to 4 million tons, although it is never clear what kind of "ton" they are using. Therefore, Hovind's cited rate appears to be legitimate and quite close enough to the scientifically accepted value. I will use Hovind's cited value for the rate of mass loss in all my calculations on this page.

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From Hovind's seminar tape:

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All you got to do is step outside and look up. Obviously the sun is burning.

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Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.

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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Kinda tells you something about us in the US--we'll accept anything a dumb-ass tells us--whether it be Hovind or about NATO.

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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.

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.