Just to let you know, the question was “someone explain Kent Hovind”, not give a full blow by blow account of everything he argues for. My background is in Data Analysis which includes Statistical analysis and Chemistry which is included in geological surveys. There have been numerous geological studies giving rates of rock erosion. I don’t think any of them were seriously arguing rocks don’t erode. The rates can be very low much lower than 1.4mm/yr. But still, the point is do you really believe that rocks covered footprint covered rocks for 250 million years? Not 250 years? Not since the time of Christ. But 250 million years? Really?
Fine if you do so. I just can’t. I have seen too many rock erosion warning signs in the last 30 years put up by governments to think rocks remain in place forever and too many academic papers which wrote that they do.
Atheists simply won’t allow anything to disturb their beliefs including and especially academics. Hovind is not the only one with a worldview.
I haven’t time to answer all your points Please think critically, yes of Hovind, but also of scientific claims which counter known proven facts.
There is a reason why such things are pretty rare, and not found all over the place. And that is because rocks erode, as you have said.
However, there are other places where rocks are forming, sediment is laid down, and slowly turns into sedimentary rock. In these places, things can be preserved for extensive periods of time.
Question, do you not believe in sedimentary rock? What do you believe is the basis of forming limestone?
But why do you suppose that people who are actual geologists, who have focused on this topic their whole lives, not as a side hobby, have not made this realization? Bear in mind we’re talking about geologists worldwide, including in countries where the age of the universe wouldn’t matter a damn either way.
It’s important to realize how we know things. We use our models to make predictions and then we test those predictions. If you’re interested, I can link you to lists of predictions made by geologists, astrophysicists, biologists etc. But first you have to be willing to listen.
Perhaps. As will I, and I’m most definitely not an atheist.
Did you know that there are plenty of scientists who are not atheists, and have no problem with observing a universe much older than you’re willing to allow for? For example, Georges Lemaitre, priest, mathematician and physicist, who came up with the Big Bang theory.
I’m not a fan of this kind of gotcha/hoist by your own petard argument, especially when applied to religion. It’s about as disingenuous as the Kent Hovind nonsense. Becket, and others with similar beliefs, are not saying that God had to, was bound to, create the universe according to Becket’s rules, he/she is saying that God created the universe more recently than science believes because He chose to do so, not because He is bound by the time scale of Becket’s choice.
Also, Becket, I don’t know in detail what your religious beliefs are, of course, and no disrespect is intended, but it’s odd that you’ve chosen the name of a Catholic saint and martyr, when the Catholic Church has no problem with an old universe (again, Georges Lemaitre was a Catholic priest) or evolution.
This is a shockingly disingenuous accusation given the recorded historic (and current) record of behavior of religious doctrine in theistic culture/societies around the world. It is precisely the creationists and religious zealots that have been dragged by academia, kicking and screaming, into the modern understanding of the world in which we live. And even in accepting new discoveries and evidence presented by the scientific method, those who persist in their hypothesis of intelligent design, continue to ride the coattails of scientific discovery by hiding their god (creator) in the ever shrinking gaps of the expanding compendium of human knowledge.
My background is in actual Geology.
Yes. Never mind 250 million years, I also believe in the dating of 500 million year -old trilobite tracks. And no argument from incredulity is going to counter that. Your complete ignorance of how fossils form, how they are preserved, how they are dated, how rocks differentially erode, none of that is going to be much of a challenge to the years of experience and study and training that lead me to trust the rocks over some bozo with a RE doctorate and zero science training.
The initial energy comes from the heat of compression. Once there is enough heat and pressure, additional energy comes from atomic fusion.
A phrase I don’t ever recall seeing in any reputable science journal.
I’m a Christian. I know that the Universe is billions of years old because God told me so. How did God tell me? By leaving all sorts of evidence all over the place. God placed stars at great distances from me, and gave me the means to measure their distance, and the speed at which their light travels. God laid down sediment on the Earth, and gave us means to determine the rate at which it’s laid down. God put radioactive isotopes like uranium 238 into the Earth, and gave us the means to measure their rate of decay.
If you are arguing that the world is actually much younger than the age that God tells us, then you are claiming that God is a liar. I refuse to believe that.
The question was “someone explain Kent Hovind” not give a full blow by blow account. Everyone else on this board did not do much more than merely mock him. So I just gave [scamartistry], the questioner, some of Hovind’s scientific arguments. I have written nothing that is unscientific.
But I see you don’t quite understand some of the points I made because I did write briefly. Protein molecules don’t come alive. You are quite right. I wasn’t suggesting they do. If a protein is not alive, and putting proteins together to make up a cell’s main functional parts but still doesn’t make them come alive, then where and how does life come into the cell? Remember we only have things reproducing and living if they start off already being alive. Embryos come from living sperms and living eggs, they don’t kick start off into life once formed. So how did life start all those years ago without a Powerful Deity giving life to the initial blocks of protein compounds which is what are said to be what makes cells work?
The argument which Kent Hovind gives is that just claiming it all just evolved is not essentially a scientific argument, it is a belief. Evolution is a matter of faith. It is also inherently problematic to explain the origins of known chemical reactions which have to occur in a very finely ordered sequence in our cells. Your attempt at mocking me won’t help answer Hovind’s points. I can only deduce that evolutionists are evolutionists because they simplify the complexity inherent in all living organisms far too much in their heads, which helps them to brush away the difficulties questions like these pose to their arguments. So again I say, ask the scientist to make the protein molecule come alive, because it it can’t have life inside it, how can a cell come alive; and if the cell can’t come alive, how can an organism? Because life has to start somewhere.
You can’t make up some of the sorts of arguments that Hovind and his crowd make, without knowing you are lying. In particular, the quote-mining - where they take a statement by someone else and deliberately edit and prune it to reverse the meaning.
@Becket, What is your opinion of scientists that aren’t atheists and still don’t believe in Creationism?
BTW-Providing the questions and our supposed answers didn’t turn out so well, did it?
To my understanding, evolution is a matter of observation.
Unlike creationists, we don’t presume to know.
Dammit where’s that “like” button? Oh well: 
No, it’s not. It simply isn’t. That’s just not what it is. You can’t just redefine something so that you can then dismiss it. That’s a non-starter in any kind of legitimate debate.
And I’m always surprised when YEC religious people say “evolution is just a faith like any other,” and imply that it can therefore just be dismissed.
If it can be dismissed as “faith,” well, so can your faith in a God who created the universe 6,000 years go. If one is invalid because it’s a matter of faith, so is the other.
One of the classic Creationist errors is conflating abiogenesis with evolution. Evolution does not speak at all to how life started, only on how life changes over time in response to its environment. We can take the assertion that God created life as uncontested fact, and no part of the theory of evolution would need to be changed at all.
Which segues into the thing I never got about Creationism. Why do y’all insist on making your God so small? On one hand, you have, say, the Catholic Church, which holds that the universe came into existence when God willed masses of matter and anti-matter to collide, creating an explosion of unimaginable magnitude, which would, over the course of billions and billions of years, eventually lead to the formation of stars and planets, the creation of self-replicating long-chain amino acids, and finally the evolution of human life, and all of this was part of his ineffable plan from the very beginning, almost 14,000,000,000 years ago. Or you can have the Creationist concept, where God was mucking about with some Play-Doh about six thousand years ago and made a person.
I mean, just on a purely aesthetic basis, the former is so clearly the better story. Plus, it actually has, y’know, facts and science supporting it.
That’s a great point! The God that’s consistent with evolution is a master planner, master craftsmen, and master engineer. His plan took eons, and was intricate, complex, and absolutely breathtaking to behold and study, with signs and evidence far beyond what even the smartest scientist could hope to understand in a lifetime.
The God of Creationism is just some big lazy guy in the sky who willed the Earth into existence without any intricate planning, crafting, and engineering, and just expects everyone to ignore the world around them and accept what his followers wrote about, and absolutely nothing else.
Not much more than a teenager with a copy of the Sims.
You mistake what the objective of the argument is. There isn’t a big audience of people who accept science, listen to Kent Hovind (or one of the other creation evangelists), and change their mind. The intended audience is people who already think like Kent Hovind, but are wavering.
Hearing that science is basically just a competing religion, like islam or hinduism, frames the discussion in a way that makes wavering creationists less likely to “defect”. The thought changes from, “here is some fact about the world that I can accept or not”, to “I could adopt this new faith that is no better than my current one”.
And then you say
Nope. As mentioned, evolution is based on observations, but more importantly, evolution makes predictions about what we should find in the fossil record, in the geological record, and in the genome.
I’ve seen plenty of Hovind videos, so I agree that you are accurately reporting on the bilge he says. Have you watched anything refuting what he says? There is plenty out there.
Creationists seem to imply that cells popped out of nothing. Not true. Cells were a later development. They also imply that current cells are too complex to have just popped into existence. Which is true, but they don’t seem to realize that current cells are the product of a billion years of evolution, and not what we’d have seen in the ancient earth.
So, I invite you to tell us of some predictions that the hypothesis of creation makes, without cheating by fiddling with them to reflect what science has found. Assuming you believe in the Flood, like Hovind, what should be the distribution of fossils laid down by a flood? How to explain the hyper-evolution the flood account requires? How to explain living things that have lived since before the Flood happened. How to explain the cultures with evidence that they lived right through the flood without noticing.
In the Metropolitan Museum of Art I saw a display of Chinese ceramics from various periods of time, both before and after the flood. There was a clear relationship among them. Why did the descendants of Noah, moving to China, pick up a tradition the evidence of which was buried in mud and the makers of which were all killed?
I await your response.