Date: Sat Feb 26 1994 14:10:06
From: David rice
To: All
Subj: ICR Cult Sponsors Event

Tonight, Friday February 25, I attended the event with Mr. Kent Hovind. He is either one of the most incompetent wambly boggarts there is, or he is the most deliberately dishonest slubberdegullion to ever draw breath.

I went expecting to hear something new. Hovind's bold, unsupported assertions are 40 years old at least, wearysome and tedious, and pure nonsense. They have been demonstrated false dozens of times over the past several decades. He is lying for his God, Satan.

Mr. Hovind claims he taught science for fifteen years, though even the most basic of sciences he got grossly incorrect.

He attributed the "tell a lie often enough" quote to Hitler, which is not correct. He misstated the First Law of Thermodynamics. He said that the law states that "matter" cannot be created or destroyed, not energy. He got the Second Law wrong as well. He incorrectly stated that entropy always increases. This is wrong. The Law states that entropy in an isolated system within thermo-equilibrium will increase or stay the same.

Mr. Hovind also got conservation of angular momentum wrong, or was lying. Mr. Hovind said that bodies under centripetal force (in a circular orbit) will curve when released from their gravitational bonds. (He used a "merry-go-round" as an example.) He is wrong. Any body under acceleration, when they lose their gravity well, will fly off in a straight line, not a curve.

Mr. Hovind lied about the sun shrinking. It is variable, like all stars of its size, and second generation. He asserted, falsely, that the sun is steadily decreasing in size --- it is not.

He lied about population growth being geometric throughout world history; in fact, it is so only in the last 220 years, due to technology, medical sciences, and industry.

He lied about "prayer" being removed from schools --- it has not: only forced prayer. Students may pray in school as much as they please. How can one prevent another from praying?!?! It's asinine to say that is possible.

He lied about the end of coerced prayer in school being the reason for declining test scores and increasing ignorance and violence: America had Cuban missiles off her shores, the start of desegregation, extensive child population increase, economic problems, wars and protests of wars, heavily polluted air and water, and the invention of the transistor, which made TV a house-hold appliance. How does Mr. Hovind manage to dismiss all of these psychic drains on the nations' citizenry and come to his conclusion that the end of coerced prayer was responsible for increased crime, pregnancy, sexually transmitted disease, etc., when in fact America had hundreds of life-changing and life-threatening issues to deal with?

He lied about "no one knowing what evolution is." It is change in a population's gene pool over time. How a science teacher could get this wrong is utterly unfathomable.

Mr. Hovind said half-a-dozen times "How do you know the earth is 4.5 billion years old? Were you there?" One only wonders what he would say if one asked him "How do -YOU- know what you're saying about the distant past? Were YOU there?" Mr. Hovind's only recourse to that is his Bible; i.e. his personal faith. No one has seen the planet Pluto orbit the sun. Should we say it does not?

One of Hovind's most basic of arguments he presented was the appeal to authority. His basic method followed the same technique almost every time. He would #1: misstate something about science, #2: say it is wrong, #3: say that just because millions of people believe it doesn't make it true, #4: say that millions of people believe it is wrong, including him, so therefore it is wrong. In other words, he first sets up a straw-man --- a position or statement that science does not advocate -- and then start speaking "authoritatively" about his deception to burn down his mistated characterization.

I would deny him his honorarium, and lambast him for the damage he has done to Creationism and the Christian community.