Kent Hovind’s science is particularly poor. Let me give some examples.
First, in at least one of his videos, Kent Hovind talks about a water canopy surrounding the earth, filtering out radiation, and so on, and I believe he actually says it was ice at some point, and was around until about Noah’s time. According to AIG, the Flood was around 2304 BC, I don’t remember what date Hovind gives. So the shield was around (4000BC-2300BC=1700) about 1700 years. The sun can melt about half a meter of ice per day at the equator, so the shield must have been at least (.5 meters/day * 365 days/year * 1700 years *1600 meters/mile) 193.9 miles, which would block out ALL light and heat from the sun. That wouldn’t produce the ‘tropical temperatures’ or whatnot Kent Hovind says it would unless God was miraculously passing light and heat through the ice shield... but then why have it?
Second, in another one of his videos, he contradicts himself. I believe it’s in his dinosaurs and the Bible thing, he says the following contradictory things:
He believes the genes for largeness are gone.
If you let a lizard grow from long enough, it can be about the size of a triceratops.
They can’t both be true!
Another thing is his 6 ‘kinds’ of evolution. Kent Hovind has claimed that there are 6 types of evolution pushed by ‘evolutionists’, that only one of them has been observed, and that all the rest are unobserved, unevidenced hogwash. There are as follows:
1. Cosmic evolution- the origin of time, space and matter. Big Bang.
2. Chemical evolution- the origin of higher elements from hydrogen.
3. Stellar and planetary evolution- Origin of stars and planets.
4. Organic evolution- Origin of life from inanimate matter.
5. Macroevolution- Origin of major kinds.
6. Microevolution- Variations within kinds-- the only one observed.
Now, let’s dissect this list.
1-cosmic evolution. This has nothing to do with biology, or Darwin, or evolution. He doesn’t even give the correct definition. What is referred to as cosmic evolution encompasses much more than just the Big Bang.
2. Chemical evolution- there’s another name for this. It’s called nuclear fusion. We see it in stars. We see it in the Sun. We see it in experimental reactors, and we see it in bombs. Man not only has observed it, we have used it for destruction and are trying to harness it for power.
3. Stellar and planetary evolution- Stellar evolution is actually a term for the life cycle of stars, not how they got here. And accretion discs of stars forming and planets forming have been observed.
4. Organic evolution- actually the abiogenesis hypothesis, which is biochemistry, not biology. It is still a hypothesis, not claimed to be anything more, not a part of the theory of evolution, not related to Darwin, or anything.
5. Macro-evolution- The first thing on this list of ‘evolutions’ that has anything to do with biology, Hovind does the utterly unscientific thing and injects terms without definitions- kinds- that means no evidence can be brought against his position because the goalposts haven’t been planted yet.
6. Micro-evolution. This is the standard anti-science canard :if we’ve observed it directly, it’s microevolution, therefore it cannot be macro-evolution, because of that kinds word I haven’t defined.’
Another thing Kent Hovind has claimed is that a giant ice meteor is responsible for the ice caps, that when it hit, all the cold froze the mammoths standing up, because it was ice. This is ridiculous. Anything coming into the atmosphere - space shuttles, meteorites, satellites, whatever- heats up immensely. And then, from things that don’t fly under their own power, there’s an impact, where fist sized or smaller meteorites tear through buildings and cars and the like. A meteor large enough to contain all the ice caps just hitting the planet? That wouldn’t freeze anything, that would hit the ground and explode, or smash everything in its path like some cosmic bowling ball, not freeze mammoths standing up. Kinetic energy is (.5 * mass * velocity squared). According to the American Meteor Society, (
Meteor FAQs | American Meteor Society), they travel at slowest, about 11 km/sec. And googling ‘the mass of ice on earth’ leads to this site (
Quick Facts on Ice Sheets), where we find out that just the antarctic is 30 million cubic kilometers of ice. The density of ice is about 90% that of water, so about .9 g/cubic centimeter. I'm going to use 1 to make the math easier. You can just multiply the end result by .9 if you want.
Googling ‘cubic kilometer to cubic centimeter’ gives 10^15. So we have 30 million * 10^15 grams, or 30 million * 10^12 kilograms, which is the same as 3*10^19 kilograms. So, .5 * 11km/sec * 11km/sec *3*10^19 kilograms gives us 181.5*10^19 (kilometers squared kilograms per second squared). There are 1000 kilometers in a meter, so we have 181.5 *1000 * 1000 * 10^19 (meters squared kilograms per second), which is 1.815 * 10^27. That whole ‘meters squared kilograms per second) is a joule, so we have 1.815 * 10^27 joules. Giga- means ‘times 10^9’, so we have 1.815 * 10^18 gigajoules.
Why gigajoules? Because, according to wikipedia, we have that 1 ton of TNT gives off 4.184 gigajoules. Which means we have 4.3*1^17 tons of TNT. Thats 430,000,000,000,000,000 tons of TNT for an ice meteor hitting at low speed that holds all the ice in the Antarctic, not the whole planet. That wouldn’t freeze that mammoths standing up. That would obliterate a large part of Earth.
For the last part I will address in this post, I direct your attention to a Youtube video. I’m sorry that the name is ‘why do people laugh at creationists’, but it is the only copy on youtube I could find with this particular section, and I’ll tell you exactly what times to look at to only see the parts of Kent Hovind’s speech I’m looking at.
Now, from :48 through 2:55, there will be a bit of thunderf00t speaking from :58 to 1:44, with ‘buzzer beeps’ at wrong points until 2:00. But, if you just want to skip all that, watch from 2:00 to 2:55. That part is unadulterated, un-commentated-upon, un-subtitled, pure part of Kent Hovind trying to explain how reproduction works.
Why do people laugh at creationists? Part 12 (Made by ThunderF00t) - YouTube
I don’t care if you watch the rest or not, just that one to 2 minutes. And then compare it to how human reproduction ACTUALLY works.
No, between the whole impossible ice canopy that leaves the entire earth dark, the ice meteor completely ignoring how hard it should hit the planet and freezing mammoths, the getting what evolution is and is not evolution wrong, the getting how humans reproduce wrong, and more, I don’t think that Kent Hovind’s science is good. He gets many things that don’t have to do with the age of the earth wrong, implausible, et cetera.
Metherion
