A debate between Hovind and Dr. Hugh Ross...

This is from an episode of The John Ankerberg Show, which airs on satellite and Christian radio stations across the country.

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I found this fascinating!

I also found Hovind to be grasping at straws from the second he opens his mouth as he essentially says, “All that gunk you (the so-called “old-earth Creationist” Dr. Ross, who is debating him) say is so complicated… Isn’t it GREAT that this book is so much simpler?”

I also found him to be argumentative personally.

I don’t necessarily agree with everything Ross says, but he at least he seems to be using real science in what he says.

Anyone got 30 minutes to listen or look at this show wanna give some feedback?


Yer pal,
Satan - Commissioner, The Teeming Minions

*I HAVE BEEN SMOKE-FREE FOR:
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*“I’m a big Genesis fan.”-David B. (Amen, brother!) **

I don’t think I could stomache it. I went to two of Hovind’s shows when he was in the area, and he was very clueless and yet extraordinarily slippery. He claims to have been a science teacher for 8 (?) years and yet didn’t acknowledge the forces that make/raise mountains until I pressed the issue.

I’ve posted before about Hovind’s lies. I always say I ought to make a text file of it so I can repost whenever I need to, and I never get around to doing so. Dangit!

I respect Dr. Ross; he’s misguided, but he’s trying, and he avoids most of the errors of “creation scientists”.

Hovind, now …

Real Networks has insisted that I download the updated version of RealPlayer before I can listen, so I’ll have to wait. I may have just enough time for a beer run.

I heard Hovind on the former Art Bell show a couple of weeks ago. I found him to be one of the more rational proponents of creation science, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. I’ll give this a listen, though.

I’ve watched about 15 minutes of it. I stopped when the plea for money began. I’ll try to get through the rest of it, but not tonight.

When Hovid mentioned “tired light” to explain red shift, I had to pause the play-back to compose myself before continuing.

While the whole debate was amusing, it was at the same time profoundly disturbing for me. I am from Louisiana where creationism was seriously considered as part of the school curriculum.

Hugh Ross is a stud.

agisofia said:

Ugh! You need to hear more about him, then. :frowning: He makes all sorts of crap up, tells bogus stories, etc. Like I said, I wish I’d kept a copy of the bit I posted before about him. Maybe I’ll try to dig it up.

OK, found it:

The Peoria Journal Star (June 25, 1993) had an article about Kent Hovind, (who at that time was offering $10,000). The article stated that Hovind was scheduled to debate “paleontologist Steven (sic) Jay Gould, a Harvard University professor.” Hovind went on to state, “I suspect Gould will back out.”

Hovind apparently had good reason to expect that Gould won’t be there. Gould responded to this claim by saying, “I have never heard of the man and therefore cannot have agreed to anything with him.” Gould went on to comment about “the obvious phony tactic of claiming that he challenged me to a debate when he didn’t, and then claiming that I backed out when I didn’t appear.”

And that’s just the most easily documented of his lies. He has all sorts of tall tales in his video series – and either he is lying about science in them or he is quite ignorant. I’m not sure which is worse.

You can also find Hovind on the list of suspicious creationist credentials here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/credentials.html

You can read an extensive debunking of many of Hovind’s claims here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/matson-vs-hovind.html

Another interesting link in re Hovind:

Kent Hovind’s Challenge to Evolutionists

OK, listened. Lost the audio about twenty minutes into it, but I think Hugh Ross definitely had the upper hand. Of course, I may be biased, teetering on the fence between Old Earth Creationism and Theistic Evolutionism (is that a real ism?)

Hovind did come off as a bit of a putz. He sounded better on the former Art Bell show…

thanks for the links, David B.

No prob. Always happy to help people find out the truth about Hovind.

um, davidb, they don’t work. i keep getting “page cannot be displayed.” refresh tag does’t help. What to do, what to do?

The talkorigins.org server has been really flaky recently. I wish I knew why, or if it will improve.

I just tried and couldn’t get thru either. I think tracer is probably right. Give it a couple days and try again.

I thought that Hovind would be a better debater than that.
It drove me crazy when he says " I was born at night, but it wasn’t last night". Anyone else notice how his little “jokes” like that brought not one laugh from the audience?
Mostly, his arguments boiked down to “I don’t believe you”, which is another way of saying “I don’t WANT to believe you.”

Hovind reminds me of those old-time tent-revival ministers that pronounce “Bible” with 4 syllables…

Oh well…
Stupendous Man!

A real fast comment on Ross and “old earth” creationism: We don’t know whether he’s “misguided but trying to do it right,” (to paraphrase a previous poster) not having any witness to the events in question. Certainly speciation has occurred without evident divine intervention; it’s been observed (check old evolution threads for some links David B came up with). And the application of Occam’s Razor and the Cosmological Principle would suggest that contra-natural intervention (by God or anyone else) did not occur in history either.

For a theist, the idea of Providence and Omniscience would suggest that creation can occur in accordance with a Divine Plan through purely natural means – the God who created the world planning enough ahead not to require miracles every time He wants a new species to come into existence.

But whether any such intervention (to create a new Creationist “kind”) occurred is a mystery left in the depths of time. Natural processes are sufficient, IMHO, to explain the diversity of life without it. But if one allows for the possibility of an active God, one must give interventionism an outside possibility of occurring.

That is about as far as I want to go in “buying into Creationism.” Note that it is an if-then proposition: If there is an active Creator God, and if He chooses not to work through the mechanism He set up to run the world generally, then interventionism is a possible explanation. But to me it sounds suspiciously like a Gnostic idea: you have a “good” God other than the world, and a “bad” or “neutral” world that operates by “natural” rules unless He works a miracle. The vehicle I’d set up is a God with a good world that operates according to His rules.

Sorry … I should have attached an “in my opinion” to that “misguided” clause.

The talkorigins.org server has moved recently, and there are some teething pains associated with the move, and the webmaster no longer has direct physical access to the system. So when something goes wrong, it takes longer to fix. Still down as I write …

[HIJACK]
Polycarp:
[QUOTEAnd the application of Occam’s Razor and the Cosmological Principle would suggest that contra-natural intervention (by God or anyone else) did not occur in history either.[/QUOTE]

Except in the case of Joan of Arc, right, Polycarp?

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

[/HIJACK]

“The facts speak for themselves.” – various people down through history

I happen to have sincere religious beliefs. I don’t think that I have any business “coloring” any reportage of facts by them. (For example, the textual-criticism evidence that indicates that St. Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus evidently werent – his, that is. And I have no clue why God might ever have chosen to have wasps or ichneumon flies paralyze living caterpillars so their larvae can survive by eating their way out. It’s not what we think of as his style! But discussing that biological phenomenon should not bring “what God must have done” into play.)

The evidence of history indicates that Joan of Arc led the forces of France to near-victory on the basis of voices that she heard claiming to be deceased saints speaking to her from heaven. There are all manner of “natural” explanations for this, and also a supernatural one… which fits Occam’s Razor – once you allow the rather major assumption of the Christian worldview, where a loving God takes deceased saints into heaven and occasionally has/allows them to perform apparitions to further his purposes.

The facts are not in dispute. Joan heard voices. The explanation of what she heard is, that I grant you. I raised it as one possible historical intervention of God, for whatever reasons he may have had for doing so. I did so in response to the tangential question raised in that thread of whether there was any good historical evidence for God actively intervening in the world. The Joan story is one such incident. Yeah, you can explain it away in terms of hallucinatory effects and Joan’s natural strategic skills. (There have been few generals who combined good strategic skills and a belief in the reality of hallucinatory guides, but still…)

Hey, if somebody reports moose tracks in downtown Detroit, it’s possible a hoax is being perpetrated. It’s possible that someone misinterpreted something he saw. It’s possible Woody Allen is including the Moose Story in a movie set there.

And it’s possible that a moose has wandered into downtown Detroit.

Don’t exclude a possible explanation because it seems unlikely. It may be the truth. Certainly its unlikeliness should keep it from being your hypothesis of choice, but it deserves space among multiple working hypotheses, because it is possible.

David B. once outlined briefly the sort of proof that would convince him of the reality of the Christian God. (And I’m sure he’d do it relative to other hypothetical gods, or other supernatural or occult phenomena, if it became appropriate in a given thread.) He is a pragmatic atheist – not having adequate proof (in his view, any proof) of the existence of God, he considers the idea fictitious. But he’s open minded enough to allow for the possibility. I have evidence sufficient for my belief. But I try to emulate him from the opposite direction – not holding to some absurdity because it’s a traditional element of faith. (I happen to accept the Virgin Birth because the circumstantial accounts seem to have some sense to them – both Joseph and Mary are skeptical of what’s supposed to happen; they know very well where babies come from, and they hadn’t done it – and because there is a possible if statistically unlikely mechanism involving parthenogenesis and a flaw in standard meiosis – which might have combined to happen once in the 10-12 billion human births since the beginning of history. But I don’t consider it an article of my faith, and if a peeping-Tom time traveler brought back evidence of Joe and Mary doing the dirty, it wouldn’t offend or upset me nor would it injure my beliefs.)

I trust this rambling post makes clear how I operate as regards open-mindedness and factual or scientific evidence, and relate them to my faith.