However, I’ve listened to a few of his lectures, and it got me curious as to what the answer is to some of the questions he raised:
The moon is gradually moving away from the earth. Based on the speed in which it is currently moving away from the earth, Hovind alleges we can work backwards to determine how close the moon was to the earth at various points in history. If the earth is billions of years old, the moon would have been so close at one point as to have burned up in the earth’s atmosphere.
At the rate in which the sun is shrinking, Hovind alleges we can work backwards to determine how big the sun would have been in various stages of its history, if indeed it is billions of years old. And if it is billions of years old, it would have, at one stage, occupied the space that Mercury and Venus currently do.
Would be interested in hearing some rebuttals on these two points.
Let’s assume that both of those assertions are correct: the moon is moving away, the sun is shrinking. But what are the equations? What are the figures? How fast is it moving away, how fast is the sun shrinking? You can “allege” things, but without solid figures, there’s nothing to really rebut.
Here’s a simple one: just because something is doing something now, does not mean it was always doing this, or always will in the future. When the Sun starts to expand into a red giant this will not mean that it has always been expanding at that rate, and when it shrinks into a white dwarf this will not mean it has always been shrinking at the same rate.
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Even if it were, there would be no reason to think that, because it’s shrinking at a certain rate now, it has always been shrinking at that rate. It could be in a cycle of expanding and shrinking, and happen to be in the shrinking phase of that cycle right now.
They do the same thing with the strength of the Earth’s magnetic field. It’s decreasing now, so if you project that into the past, a few million years ago you could have gotten an MRI without extra magnets.
I’ve heard enough of Kent Hovind to know that he’s not just innocently ignorant, he’s dishonest. It goes even beyond what could be attributed to willful ignorance, which also is dishonest.
I always thought this was the creationists real argument with these things. We age the earth to be billions of year by assuming things have been going at the same rate, but we do not know that those things happened at the same rate. I may be wrong about him but I know there are creationists who bring that type of thing up not arguing that their proof of creationism but just to counter the belief that things have happened at the same rate in the past, thus they believe they have shown a problem with the theory of evolution.
The problem with the theoryof evolution is it is based on a lot of guess work that is put out as truth. And when an error is found the responce is Oh that does not really matter, but they keep teaching it. Example just a simple one how long does it take to make a pretrified tree? Hundreds of thousands years. I am not going to argue this here but realise both sides have errors to their “theroy” And a theroy is not always correct, I learned that in geomerty.
Virtually none of this is true. Evolution is not based on guesswork, the reply to finding a mistake is not “shut up”, even supposing that your petrified tree quote is correct, what does that prove, there is no theory on the other side, and geometry is irrelevant to this.
I think you’re right. I was hoping to christen it a “Hovind”, but that would just cause confusion. People would never be able to work out which logical fallacy a “Hovind” referred to.