I had to look this guy up. He was talked about here in our Forum for many years but I never knew much about him.
Basically he's what you would call a real piece of work. While being the archetypical YEC evangelist, he also spins off into so much other weird and wacky. His primary presentation and debate tool is his PowerPoint files with about 1500 pages that he can call up at a moment's notice -- those came in handy for me by giving me the scientific reference being misrepresented by that particular claim (AISTR, it was the anomalous carbon-dating age for a living animal, either for fresh-water clams or for seals (actually due to the well-known "reservoir effect" since they weren't getting their carbon from the atmosphere as required for carbon-dating)).
His claims are classic YEC claims that he seems far more interested in recycling than in actually studying:
- For example, in 2002 Answers in Genesis (AiG) published an article listing really bad claims that AiG wished creationists would stop using (eg, men having one rib less than women because Adam, too few neutrinos being produced by the sun, Darwin's death-bed conversion -- the original article has scrolled off the site, but there have been several individual articles along the same vein). I read the "negative feedback" letter by Dr. Sarfati (which I quote on my site since he's saying the same things that I've been saying for decades) in which he responded to Hovind's angry rejection of the original Don’t Use page, apparently because Hovind routinely uses those bad claims.
- He also picks up and uses off-the-wall claims that he hears with no attempt at verification. In Q&A, an audience member will mention some rumor they'd heard and it becomes part of his presentation. On April Fools Day, New Mexicans for Science and Reason (NMSR -- No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.nmsr.org/onyatemn.htm) created as a prank a fossil human skeleton missing one foot (that being the Oate connection) and being eaten by a T.Rex the instant that they had been buried. Wanting to see how creationists would react, they were pleasantly surprised to find that, despite the creationists' great interest and excitement at this "discovery", they were also cautious and wanted to have the claim verified before they would use it. But not Kent Hovind, who used it at a presentation in Philadelphia the very same day that he heard the story. After hearing the truth the next day, he no longer used that claim, but he also never informed the previous night's audience of that correction.
I would also mention that a local YEC who's a Hovind wanna-be has admitted to me that a number of Hovind's claims are so bad that they make even his eyes roll.
Kent Hovind's stage name is "Dr. Dino" because of his "PhD". He's so emphatic about that title that he insisted that the phone company list him as "Dr. Kent Hovind" in the phone book. And because of that title of "Dr" and his frequent boasts of being an expert in science and mathematics because he taught both subjects for 15 years, most of his followers consider him to be a scientist.
First, there's his questionable education. After graduating from high school, he attended community college for a year before transferring to an
unaccredited private Baptist college, from which he received a bachelor's in
Religion. Then from another
unaccredited entity, Patriot University (basically a diploma mill running out of a double-wide, though I think they moved to an actual private residence at some point) he bought a master's degree in
Religious Education. Then also from Patriot he bought his "PhD", also in
Religious Education --
the irregularities with his "dissertation" are legendary. And please note that none of his degrees mention anything about science, though he might have had an introductory science course in community college.
As for his claim of having taught high school math and science for 15 years:
- That was in private Christian schools, where there are no requirements for the teachers to be qualified to teach; just that they have the "correct" beliefs.
- Those were in schools that Kent Hovind had either founded or was running.
- From the dates given on Wikipedia, it was only for about 13 years.
IOW, that experience doesn't make him an expert in those subjects.
And he knows full well that his claims are false, given how he avoids discussing them and how he actively attempts to cover them up. For example, there's his
solar mass loss claim (link is to my page on that claim) in which he claims:
quote:
All you got to do is step outside and look up. Obviously the Sun is burning. It's losing 5 million tons every second. You can't just keep losing 5 million tons a second, pretty soon you start to lose weight. And so the Sun is losing this mass -- 5 million tons every second -- which means it used to be larger. And it used to be more massive. If you increase the mass of the Sun, going backwards in time for several billion years, you start to create a problem with the gravitational balance between the earth and the Sun. It's going to suck the earth in and destroy everything.
When I contacted him to learn what his source and his calculations were, he went out of his way to avoid answering those legitimate questions, even to the point of twice trying to pick a fight with me over my AOL account name
DWise1 (follow the link for the origin story). It turns out that that claim is refuted simply by doing the math, so Kent Hovind has repeatedly on separate occasions specifically instructed his audience to
not do the math -- "I swear to God and three other white men" (Redd Foxx).
Im not sure why he felt that he had to protest being taxed.
That is more because of one of his several other wacky sidelines. He would frequently include both health and tax advice.
What Kent Hovind advocates is tied into what's called the
sovereign citizen movement:
quote:
The sovereign citizen movement is a loose grouping of American and Commonwealth litigants, commentators, tax protesters, and financial-scheme promoters. Self-described "sovereign citizens" see themselves as answerable only to their particular interpretations of the common law and as not subject to any government statutes or proceedings. In the United States, they do not recognize U.S. currency and maintain that they are "free of any legal constraints". They especially reject most forms of taxation as illegitimate. Participants in the movement argue this concept in opposition to the idea of "federal citizens", who, they say, have unknowingly forfeited their rights by accepting some aspect of federal law. The doctrines of the movement resemble those of the freemen on the land movement more commonly found in the Commonwealth, such as in Britain and in Canada.
Many members of the sovereign citizen movement believe that the United States government is illegitimate.
. . .
Sovereign legal theories reinterpret the Constitution of the United States through selective reading of law dictionaries, state court opinions, or specific capitalization, and incorporate other details from a variety of sources not limited to the Uniform Commercial Code, the Articles of Confederation, the Magna Carta, the Bible, and foreign treaties. They ignore the second clause of Article VI of the Constitution (the Supremacy Clause) which establishes the Constitution as the law of the land and it is the United State Supreme Court which has ultimate authority to interpret it.
So, creationists are not the only ones to live by quote-mining.
ABE:
The "Christian" connection comes through white-supremacists and their ilk:
quote:
The concept of a sovereign citizen originated in 1971 in the Posse Comitatus movement as a teaching of Christian Identity minister William P. Gale. The concept has influenced the tax protester movement, the Christian Patriot movement, and the redemption movementthe last of which claims that the U.S. government uses its citizens as collateral against foreign debt.
A number of the more radical "sovereign citizens" have been classified as "domestic terrorists."
Edited by dwise1, : ABE
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