Basically, Kent Hovind is about the lowest form of creationist that there is, though Ray Comfort is giving him a run for his money for that bottom slot. There is no false creationist claim too stupid for him to repeat.
Case in point: 01 April 1999, New Mexicans for Science and Reason published an April Fool's joke, Onyate Man --
http://www.nmsr.org/april_fool.html. Well, it was also a test to see how gullible creationists were. It was a report of scientists trying to suppress the discovery of a carniverous dinosaur skeleton with a human skeleton in its mouth, such that they were buried at the beginning of the dinosaur's lunch -- the human was missing one foot, which is why he was named after Juan de Oate (see first footnote). NMSR was pleasantly surprised at the great restraint displayed by creationists. Of course the creationists were excited by the "discovery", but they both advised and practiced caution wanting to verify the find before using it. Except for Kent Hovind who, within an hour of hearing the rumor about this find, used it in presentation; he stopped using it the next day when he learned that it was a hoax, but the damage had already been done.
In another case, in or around 2002 Answers in Genesis published an article listing false claims that AiG truly wished creationists would stop using; eg, men having one rib fewer than women because of how Eve was created, "Why are there still monkeys?", missing neutrinos from the sun, moon dust, Darwin's death-bed conversion (see second footnote). For their efforts, they got an angry feedback letter from Hovind since he routinely used a number of the false claims that AiG had listed. I picked up that story with Dr. Jonathan Sarfati's feedback column reply to Hovind on 02 Dec 2002 (no longer linked to, but I quote it at
http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/quotes.html#AiG and have a longer version in my notes) -- my emphasis added to point out reference to Hovind:
quote:
"As said in the original Don’t Use page, the harm is in using something which is not true, because the cause of the one who is ‘the truth’ cannot be helped thereby. And your own recent experience reinforces something else we saidthat using discredited arguments can backfire on the user. So our aim was to help Christians to avoid arguments that are likely to backfire, and return their focus to the Word of God not ‘evidence’."
...
"But more and more over the last few years, we have noticed tens of thousands of Christians excitedly using arguments over the Web, for instance, that are a plain embarrassment to those with scientific training. It was like watching your brother enter the ring thinking he had a killer punch, and watching him get cut to ribbons. Further, and most importantly, it had escalated to the point where it was a hindrance to soul winning, since it gave the hearers a ‘legitimate’ excuse to reject Christ. And all we did at that point was to publish an ‘advice’ article. The only time it became relevant to a specific creationist was when Kent [Hovind] himself decided to align himself publicly with a justification of false arguments. If it had been one or two minor points of disagreement, OK, but when it reinforces some of the most blatant fallacies, and even defends fraud, at what point does one NOT face one's responsibilities to the innocents being ‘slaughtered’ in the belief that they are getting sound ammunition?"
...
" ... , we actually do know people who say they almost gave the faith away when they found out that a particular argument was fallacious, and who say that finding Christians with the integrity to avoid falsehood, no matter what the cost, helped restore it. Also, in the last day or so, a leading atheistic anti-creationist organization said that while they disagreed with almost everything we stand for, they said we were ‘admirable’ and ‘showed integrity’ in trying to persuade other creationists not to use bad arguments. Who knows what sort of witness this could be? We know of many people, outside and inside of the church, who will no longer even look at or consider the authority of the Bible in Genesis, in its history, cosmology, etc. because of bad experiences with blatant pseudo-arguments applied by enthusiasts who had been fed creationist non-arguments."
A third case was my own personal experience with him. Basically, I had basic questions about a claim of his (solar mass loss), ones which any honest researcher would have no problem answering (eg, did you develop this claim or base it on another's, if so then a reference to that other source so that I can research it, what were your calculations to support your claims). On his own then-site, drdino, he boasted of answering his critics since that improved his claims (a verse about iron sharpening iron), but he refused to answer a second question since that's just their trick to get him to waste his time. Well, I learned that the reality of that boast was that he would evade your question the first time so when you had to ask it again he'd refuse for the flimsy excuse given above. That's what he pulled on me, even trying twice to pick a fight with me over my email name, dwise1, which has very mundane origins that he refused to hear (but which you can read at
http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/index.html#DWISE1). My page on his solar-mass-loss claim is at
http://cre-ev.dwise1.net/solar_mass_loss.html. For that matter, I have recently come to realize that that tired old false "shrinking sun" claim from 1980 has shifted from the sun still collapsing and getting some of its energy from the
Kelvin—Helmholtz mechanism to blaming the sun's loss of 4-5 million tons of mass per second for the sun's "shrinking", so this claim of Hovind's is much more pertinent than I had thought. In reality, the total mass lost at that rate (I took the worst case of 5 million tons per second) over five billion years (10
9 -- "billion" means something different in Europe, who actually have it right -- and yet again I took Hovind's own over-estimatation) amounts to only a few hundredths of one percent of the sun's total mass. IOW, very insignificant. For that matter, the effect that loss would have had on the sun's size, a very significant part of Hovind's claim, would have actually been virtually imperceptible.
Hovind's background appears to have been Baptist. After graduating high school, he apparently attended community college for about one year, which would have been all the opportunity he ever had to learn any science. He transferred to an unaccredited Baptist college where he earned a BA Religion. Later, he connected with Patriot University, an unaccredited diploma mill running out of a private residence (though more recently they seem to have acquired new digs), which only awards religious degrees. From them Hovind bought his MS Religious Education and PhD Religious Education. But his "PhD" has been challenged solely on the most basic academic standards implicit in a doctorate degree:
https://www.noanswersingenesis.org.au/...n_hovind_thesis.htm -- basically, there are certain fundamental requirements of a dissertation that it be published as a final product, whereas Hovind's "dissertation" has never been published but rather is an on-going project wrapped up in a rubber band.
In the meantime,
Mr. Hovind has used his fake "PhD" to the fullest extent for monetary gain -- just look at his old URL, drdino. He even insisted on being listed as "Dr Hovind" in the phone book. Many of his followers see that "Dr" and assume that he's a scientist, which I'm sure is his intent. He also boasts of having taught high school science and math classes for 15 years. Those were all in Christian private schools where the only qualification to teach was that your theology was right; he even founded and ran some of those private Christian high schools. For about 13 years by my reckoning, he taught math and science in his own high schools. Obviously, most of his exposure to science was through their textbooks (jr.high.school circa 1963: a teacher told us about an imposter (eg,
Catch Me If You Can (2002))) who found that the easiest one was to pose as a college professor; all you ever had to do was to read the textbook a few chapters ahead of your students.
Footnotes:
1. Onyate Man
Juan de Oate, a Spanish conquistador in New Mexico, was infamous for his brutality. Besides massacring indigenous tribes in order to pacify them, in one case he had one foot amputated from each male member of the tribe. In 1998, a statue to Oate had been erected despite public protests and during the night somebody had cut off the statue's foot. From what I've heard that has happened more than once, kind of like the defacing of Trump's star in Hollywood.
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2. Death bed conversion stories.
These are almost like opinions in that everybody has one (yes, that's a joke). The funniest one was about Bertrand Russell, a famous English philosopher, freethinker, and atheist. He was suffering from an infection and was in a delirium from the high infection (this was still before antibiotics where you just had to hope to survive an infection). In that delirium, he was cursing a blue streak. His nurse, a pious woman, mistook his cursing for pious utterances and reported that he had recanted his atheism, repented of it, and found Christ. Needless to say, he was extremely amused by the entire affair.
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