Did I really need to spend an hour to hear Kent Hovind debunked?

No, I did not. It’s still a pretty good basic deconstruction of the man, by another person with the first name “Paul” who refuses to ever debate the clown.

If you’ve ever considered debating Hovind — he’s cheap and easy, he’ll do it with anyone — watch this to learn that he is godawfully repetitive and ignorant, and there is absolutely no point to engaging with him. He’s still using the same slides from 30 years ago, and always says exactly the same thing, right down to the cornpone dull jokes that were too old-fashioned for Hee Haw.

Doctrinal drift — are you for it or against it?

Drowning money concept. Computer generated image simulating sinking money.

We don’t usually talk about doctrinal drift within the sciences — it’s kind of an alien category. It certainly does occur, for example the acceptance of plate tectonics, or in biology the increasing awareness of the importance of nearly-neutral genetic drift. There were many people who resisted the concepts, but the inexorable accumulation of data tends to eventually stabilize on a new paradigm. And it’s a good thing! Scientists tend to welcome new ideas, as long as they’re backed up by evidence and are productive in generating new hypotheses.

Religion, though, is a different story. Doctrinal drift is a horror that must be stopped — we must be rigid and unwavering in our fixed beliefs now and forevermore! It seems to be giving Ken Ham nightmares. He has written a lengthy post about all the things Answers in Genesis does to prevent doctrinal drift. It’s a bit amusing, because his entire ministry is the product of a significant doctrinal shift that occurred (after decades of evolution in various sects) in the 1960s. His version of the Christian faith is transient and will change again in the future. All he has to maintain it is authoritarianism.

It seems to me from all I’ve read and observed that within two to three generations of their founding, the majority of Christian institutions move away from their intended beliefs, mission, and purpose. There are many and varied reasons for this, including: employing someone who is great in one area but doesn’t take the right stand in other areas; not having a detailed-enough statement of faith, resulting in it being interpreted in different ways; allowing too much so-called “academic freedom”; using textbooks that compromise God’s Word in many areas; having a weak leader who won’t enforce the right standards; and compromising one’s position for the sake of financial support.

Interesting justification for having a “strong leader” running his show…I’m sure he thinks of himself as the protector of his version of the faith. I wonder who he’s grooming to run the show after his inevitable death? His son-in-law, Bodie Hodge, who seems like an amiable doofus to me? Or Georgia Purdom, who is often mentioned in this document? It’s a bit like Kremlin-watching at this point, and it’s going to be a decision that is definitely important to the future of AiG. It’s something Ken Ham is clearly thinking about.

A few years ago, I considered the future for AiG and recognized we are now getting closer to the next generation leading this ministry in all its various components. I pondered this and thought about how many institutions go off the rails when the founders are gone. I have thought and prayed through what to do at AiG to implement as many levels of protection as possible. Also, I recognize a great responsibility to our supporters. You are a part of the AiG family. You have invested (or may be considering investing) in this ministry financially and in other ways, and it’s important that we steward your investment so it will continue to be used to boldly proclaim and defend the authority of God’s Word and the gospel from the very first verse, as you likely intended.

Wait, what was that earlier bit about compromising one’s position for the sake of financial support? Keeping donors happy is a major concern for this outfit.

Authoritarian groups have to plan for the succession as much as Roman emperors did. It’s clear that Ken Ham is the Brian Cox of AiG.

He lists the layers of rules that he uses to lock in his interpretation of the Bible.

Statement of Faith
Our Statement of Faith is very detailed, and every full-time employee must sign agreement to and adherence to this statement of faith which is included in our handbook (along with our mission and vision). Each year we require staff to re-sign this document to ensure they haven’t strayed from it in any way.

Is that creepy or what?

Then all their content is screened before publication.

Editorial Review Board (ERB)
The content we teach and disseminate is a key element in all we do at the ministry. To ensure we never waiver in regard to content, I set up the Editorial Review Board (ERB), headed by Dr. Georgia Purdom, who I know has a passion to ensure AiG will never drift in the wrong direction or compromise God’s Word.

Purdom is an unimpressive follower. We’ll have to see where she ends up — it’s often been the case that women end up heading evangelical organizations, but they’re usually rather more ferocious than Purdom. There could be a fanatic lurking under her weird hairdo, though.

AiG Oversight Council
I also set up the AiG Oversight Council chaired by Bodie Hodge, who also has a passion for ensuring the ministry never gets off track.

I find it hard to believe that Bodie Hodge could ever be the iron will behind AiG. He’s too goofy.

Answers Research Journal Editorial Review Committee
Now in its fourteenth year of publication, I have added a layer of protection to ARJ and AiG by the formation of the ARJ Editorial Review Committee. This committee will be chaired by Dr. Terry Mortenson, and members will include Dr. Snelling and all members of AiG’s research department.

Yeesh. Two of the most dull, uncharismatic pseudoscientists in the AiG stable. They’re also old. However, evolution into a gerontocracy is not uncommon, so maybe…

Here’s the bottom line for his explanation of how they will make sure no one drifts from the absolute truth of Young Earth creationism.

Would you prayerfully consider making a generous gift to our core ministry as we get ready for what we believe will be a very busy year ahead? I’m grateful for your partnership with us in ministry—it is vital to our ministry outreaches and their impact in reaching people for Christ!

It’s money. Money money money. What they have now works, and the goal is to make sure the money flows forever.

Unfortunately for them, doctrinal drift, like evolution, is inevitable. Unfortunately for the rest of us, it’s slow. I just hope I live long enough to watch the power struggle.

The Institute for Creation research has a new logo!

Good work, design team!

After 52 years of fruitful ministry, the Institute for Creation Research is renewing its commitment to rigorous scientific research that affirms the truth of Scripture. As a staff, we’re delighted to reveal a new logo that reflects our mission and highlights an exciting field of research.

It certainly does reflect their mission and their rigorous scientific research.

They’ve got it backwards. That’s a left-handed spiral, DNA has a right-handed spiral.

Kudos!

(This is a fairly common mistake in commercial art, but it’s a bit incongruous in an organization that’s bragging about their scientific rigor.)*

*(Which they lack, anyway.)

Don’t try to tell me creationism isn’t a science stopper

Oh boy, Answers in Genesis has published their assessment of the James Webb Space Telescope. They’ve already decided that it’ll be great for taking pretty pictures of stars, which they’ll no doubt use to illustrate their beliefs, but it’s bad, fallacious science. It’s secular, naturalistic, and saturated with evolutionary thinking!

So obviously, there are some awesome observational science aspects (observable, testable, repeatable) to this mission, such as observing and studying the farthest regions of the visible universe that were previously hidden to us. However, as seen from the many news reports published by the media (especially from NASA), the overall objectives for JWST are saturated in evolutionary (and really naturalistic) thinking. For example, NASA states on one of their websites, “The primary goals of Webb are to study galaxy, star and planet formation in the universe. To see the very first stars and galaxies that formed in the early universe, we have to look deep into space to look back in time (because it takes light time to travel from there to here, the farther out we look, the further we look back in time).”

You must understand the binary distinction that AiG makes about science. Good science is “observational” science: the work that just describes what you see right now, that doesn’t draw any inferences about cause and effect, past or future. It’s fixed and static. That leaf is green. That rock weighs 80 kilograms. The temperature right now is -24°C.

Bad science they lump into a category called “historical” science, because, as we all know, historians don’t draw any conclusions from the past, don’t make inferences about causes, don’t see any kind of links between historical events, ever. It’s all lists of dates and battles and kings, you know, kind of like what you see in the book of Genesis, which is good “observational” science. All that stuff about hypothesis testing, and induction, and experiment, and theory, and interpreting and predicting connections between events, the tools that scientists have relied on and found productive since at least the days of Francis Bacon…well, that’s just bad, with only occasional exceptions.

Note, these objectives fall into the category of science that’s called historical science (making assumptions about the past based on evidence in the present), which, by the way, can be useful in certain applications (like in forensic science when analyzing crime-scene evidence) but only when used through a biblical “lens” and logical worldview.

OK, so you’re allowed to use historical science, but only to solve murders. And all murders must be viewed through a biblical “lens”! I think that means they’re all committed by witches.

In case my sarcasm is obscuring this fact, no, these distinctions that AiG makes between observational and historical science are total bullshit. They make this bogus dichotomy all the time — it’s practically the first thing they tell you in the entranceway to their Creation “Museum” — but all it really is is a way for them to throw out otherwise totally unremarkable scientific ideas that they find objectionable because they reveal that their interpretation of the Bible is false. They don’t like that we can look at the universe and see that reality contradicts their biblical version of events.

Therefore, the JWST is a priori wicked and false.

However, in this instance, these statements for the JWST are clearly secular (and unbiblical), which inevitably means they’re also fallacious (this is the result of every unbiblical worldview). Notice the claim of “looking” back in time (when looking at objects deep in space) in order to see how everything in the universe began through cosmological evolution (i.e., the big bang). But note that when making this claim, they’ve already merely assumed cosmological evolution (by assuming star/planet formation occurred in the early stages of galaxies) in order to prove cosmological evolution (via “looking” back in time). This is a logical fallacy called begging the question.

Wrong. Science builds on prior observation and experiment to build models of how the world works, which are then continuously tested with further observation and experiment. The space telescope is built on a body of science and technology, driven by the fact that there are things we can’t observe now with existing technology. It was lofted into orbit to see phenomena that we were unable to see before, and that’s the entire point: if we could just assume that we already have all the answers, then there would be no need to spend $10 billion to make a better telescope. Astronomers will use this tool to test their predictions about what lies out there.

It may generate new theories, or it might provide further confirmation of cosmological evolution. That’s what the creationists actually fear, that this OBSERVATIONAL science will provide even more information showing that their HISTORICAL interpretation of biblical history is petty and silly, and that the “science” in their book of Genesis is nonexistent or false.

The great leaps and bounds of Intelligent Design creationism! Hoorah!

I was pumped to read the Discovery Institute’s summary of their three greatest achievements in 2021. Finally, the existing paradigm will be smashed! Evolution’s on the run now, boys! Get ready for the evidence! As the author, Brian Miller, says:

The situation resembles a poorly constructed dam holding back water that is continuously rising. Streams of water are breaking through at increasing numbers of locations, and the flow at each location is hastening. The key question is not if, but when the dam will collapse.

Here, I will discuss just three of the highlights from 2021 for the Center for Science & Culture. I will also describe how these successes are hastening the erosion of the materialistic philosophical assumptions hindering scientific progress. And I will assess their implications for the future of the intelligent design movement.

All right! I’ll put on my galoshes and get ready for the challenge of the rising flood…except, sorry, all we get is a fine mist that evaporates as fast as the Discovery Institute squirts it out.

Their first triumph is that Steven Meyer published another book. They all sound the same, and I’m afraid the only good point of it is that Meyer’s continuing exercises in masturbation are unlikely to result in incest…although seeing a fellow DI maggot fellating it does come close. Score: 0.

Their second victory is that a couple of DI lackwits published a bad paper on the waiting-time non-problem. It sunk without a trace. You might appreciate this review of the paper by Mikkel Nif Rasmussen.

It’s also another example of creationist papers focused on so-called “waiting time problems” with evolution, which are typically based on the entirely imaginary – and totally dubious premise – that there are “target sequences” that evolution must find and evolve towards without any input by natural selection, by mutating incrementally from some random ancestral sequence until the correct (or almost correct) “target” sequence is produced by the chance accumulation of mutations.

To nobody’s surprise, the longer the target sequence is, the longer it will take before chance mutations happen to produce it or something very near to it.

Oops? Is it raining yet? Score: still nada.

Their third devastating discovery is that there was a conference, sponsored by the Discovery Institute, that was attended by Dembski and Behe, that will have ripple effects…for years to come. No, it won’t, and a gang of creationists pandering to the presuppositions of a few engineers isn’t going to trouble our well-engineered, strongly-reinforced dam. The DI goes 0 for 3!

I’m putting away the boots and the caulk gun, and cancelling that bid on a canoe on eBay. Those highlights were…pathetic. I guess the creationists are truly desperate.

Meanwhile, here in the rational, evidence-based world, PLoS published a roundup of the top 7 discoveries in just human evolution (the list would be far too long if they included discoveries in bacteria, or even spiders). These stories include:

  • Morphological divergence with Paranthropus robustus
  • Burial practices revealed by a child buried 78,000 years ago
  • Neandertal genetic contributions to the earliest Homo sapiens in Europe
  • Ancient art from 45,500 years ago
  • New hominid species from China, Homo longi
  • New DNA specimens from modern humans, Denisovans, and Neandertals recovered from Denisova Cave
  • More human fossil footprints discovered

I think the gang at the Discovery Institute could have just opened any issue of the journal Evolution and seen far more substance backing up the science of evolution than the feeble gleanings they managed to scrape together for a whole year of creationist apologetics.

Hovind & Powell: rank incompetence!

As I predicted, Kent Hovind & Matt Powell were so stung by Emma Thorne’s video that she’s the subject of their “wack-an-atheist” video tonight.

What’s most hilarious, though, is that they’ve been flailing about for 20 minutes now, and their audio is totally fucked up. It’s unintelligible. Both Powell and Hovind are sitting there, and they haven’t once looked at their audience’s chat, where everyone is yelling at them to fix the audio.

Amazing. He’s done now. He streamed for 42 minutes and never once noticed all his fans screaming at him in the chat that the audio was broken.

Most of you missed it (lucky you), but we do have YouTube’s automated transcript of the whole show. It only includes the words the machine could make out, so it’s a bit…abbreviated. Savor the one time Kent Hovind made sense.

00:23 wednesday
00:42 oh
00:47 okay
01:23 is
01:35 them
01:49 [Music]
01:56 [Music]
02:02 okay
02:04 [Music]
02:11 [Music]
02:34 foreign
03:28 here we go
03:35 [Music]
03:57 okay
04:01 oh
04:26 thank you
04:51 something like that
05:04 hello people my name is evan welcome
05:06 back to my channel welcome
05:13 this is going to be
05:14 my
05:16 last video
05:36 is
06:01 oh
06:28 is
06:41 um
06:58 two weeks
07:42 but we took over shortly after
07:45 yeah
07:59 you have 13
08:01 600 subscribers and uh
08:16 what
08:27 [Music]
08:37 he’s right
08:47 but
08:47 you got a lot of them they’re in the 40
08:49 000s
09:12 [Music]
09:17 okay
09:31 is
09:46 [Music]
10:14 you are the most disengaged
10:58 you continue
11:03 okay
11:37 is
11:44 is
12:07 no
12:22 send me an email send it all over or
12:24 record by drnine.com
12:48 okay
13:28 now
13:42 okay
14:04 foreign
14:24 is
14:46 okay
14:58 foreign
15:50 oh
16:33 also
17:23 is
17:44 okay
17:57 um
18:21 [Music]
18:44 i’m professional
19:13 [Music]
19:18 oh
19:52 okay
20:23 [Music]
20:41 okay
21:28 anytime
22:23 correct
22:32 um
22:48 is
23:27 [Music]
23:34 huh
23:47 just not fine
23:57 foreign
24:14 okay
24:30 is
24:32 again
24:55 how many of you have never heard of my
24:58 voice is
25:27 foreign
26:06 is
26:26 is
26:44 legal systems
27:06 is
27:17 [Music]
27:30 they don’t believe in their marriage
27:56 [Music]
27:59 foreign
28:09 permissions
28:54 we came up here
29:22 i’m
29:32 pick up
29:53 we got married
30:42 okay
30:58 is
31:16 excuse me
31:31 what
31:51 themselves
31:53 at what they come up with
32:40 hey
32:51 foreign
33:04 uh
33:48 is
33:49 [Music]
33:58 foreign
34:06 is
34:22 [Music]
34:24 wonderful
34:42 oh
35:13 [Music]
35:22 recently
35:23 [Music]
35:47 um
35:55 [Music]
36:22 oh
36:38 and
36:51 sorry
36:55 it’s not the first time
37:33 oh
37:48 okay
38:16 i was
38:20 [Music]
38:24 my
38:44 is
39:26 okay
39:43 okay
40:03 [Music]
40:35 and you can find out the truth for
40:37 yourself
41:18 okay
41:32 you
41:43 exactly here
41:57 you want to go
42:05 uh
42:19 now
42:42 [Music]
42:44 okay

Kent Hovind’s nemesis

Kent Hovind has a few people he frequently complains about, two in particular: SciManDan, a guy with a physics background who mainly debunks flat earthers, and Emma Thorne, a YouTube personality (she’s very nice) who made a reputation debunking multi-level marketing schemes, and just generally being a pleasant conversationalist (funny, isn’t it, how he doesn’t focus on evolutionary biologists…or maybe it’s just that Hovind hates British people). They made the mistake of rolling their eyes at the stupidity of Kent Hovind and Matt Powell, though, and now he has featured them on several episodes of his inane “whack-an-atheist Wednesday”. He’s looking a little desperate, actually. I think his world is crashing down on him from several angles, so bullying people on the internet is just his hobby that lets him vent.

Anyway, Thorne just put out a video in which she lets Kent and Matt have it with both barrels, exposing their hypocrisy, lies, and hate-mongering. It’s very entertaining and highly recommended.

Kent Hovind and Matt Powell are going to be whining for weeks about this. Good.