Matt Powell gets a promotion

I wonder what Eric Hovind thinks of this?

That’s Kent Hovind on the left, soon to be committed to a jail sentence for spousal abuse. Who will preach to the deluded while he’s away? That’s Matt Powell on the right. Powell is now down in Alabama at Dinosaur Adventure Land, a guest of Mr Hovind, and is appearing in their regular “Wack-An-Atheist videos. He’s also saying that you may call him Professor Powell, despite lacking any degrees or affiliation with an institute of learning, which is kind of par for the course for these frauds.

The video is rather pathetic, with Hovind and Powell reciting the same old creationist nonsense over and over. Dinosaur soft tissue! Bent layers in mountains prove they formed in an instant (quite the opposite, actually)! Coal seams have negligible C-14, therefore they all formed at the same time in a flood! Don’t bother trying to rebut them, because they’ll just deny all the evidence.

I would not, however, say that Hovind is passing the torch. His ego won’t allow that to happen. I also don’t see Powell being very comfortable as an apprentice to Hovind, who has a lot of baggage (the tax-dodging, wife-beating, kiddie-diddler-enabling thing) and I’d love to know what he was promised to get him to move to a decrepit church camp in an Alabama wasteland. He has that deer-in-the-headlights look the whole time. I think Powell is perfectly comfortable with his ignorant line of cant, but doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about being paired with ol’ Kent.

I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that this association will end badly for both of them.

You’ll find his picture next to ‘disingenuous’ in the dictionary

How stupid can creationists get? I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure it’s even more stupid than they assume me to be.

A short while ago I mentioned this Indonesian creationist who was posing as an evolutionary biologist writing a book “for the science community”. He wrote to me Just Asking Questions.

He wasn’t very good at the pretense. His first question was about the Atlas of Creation.

I was not very nice in dismissing him.

Really, if you can’t explain what is wrong with the Atlas of Creation, you’ve got no business writing a book about evolution. It’s that simple.

Alas, he is persistent and has come back with more requests. Dude, you are obvious, go away.

Ray Comfort only asks questions that biologists can’t answer because they are based on his misconceptions. Have you seen a cat evolve into a dog? The first elephant to evolve would have had to wait for millions of years for the first female elephant to appear. How do you explain elephants, then?

Not to mention that if you do give an answer, he’ll cut it out of his video.

I’m not responding directly to Mr Arif — I don’t want to encourage him. But if Muhammad Arif wants to be exposed as a dishonest fool, I’m happy to help.

It’s the arrogance of creationists that gets me

Before my email went down, I was engaged in an exchange with an Indonesian student.

He wrote to me asking if he could ask me a few questions about evolution. All right, it’s an excess of manners to ask if you can ask, but OK, I told him to go ahead. For future reference, anyone, I’m not into formalities or deference — just put your questions up front, boldly. I’ll either answer or not. When someone is that cautious, though, it makes me suspicious.

His next email informs me that he is writing a book to correct misconceptions about evolution in the Indonesian community, and that he is an undergraduate. A bit presumptuous, don’t you think? Most undergraduates are just learning about evolution and lack the knowledge to write a book, but maybe he’s precocious, and maybe he’s exceptionally well educated, and maybe he’s going to narrow the focus of his book to something appropriate. There are undergraduates who are mature enough to do a good job presenting the scientific perspective, but you’re going to have to show me that you’ve got the chops.

His question, though, floored me. He tells me he’s been reading Harun Yahya’s “beautifully illustrated” Atlas of Creation, and that he wants to know if ‘living fossils’ that have been totally unchanged for hundreds of millions of years exist, and gosh, isn’t that a problem for evolution? And then, I knew he’s playing a disingenuous game and trying to trap me.

Yahya’s book is a transparent fraud full of stolen images that strikes one note over and over again: here’s a stolen photo of a fossil. Here’s another photo of a modern animal. See? They’re identical! Therefore evolution is false. Nobody with even a glimmering of an education in biology would fall for it. Stasis is part of evolutionary theory, and besides, a superficial photo of a fossil or animal with murky provenance, selected specifically for their similarity, is not evidence of much of anything. Creationists have no respect for the evidence, though, so anything that reinforces their faulty assumptions is acceptable, and it doesn’t matter whether they’re Islamic or Christian creationists.

So here’s a guy whose source of information about evolution is a creationist propaganda book, who claims that he has sufficient authority to write his own book about evolution, and he’s asking this fucking stupid question. It wouldn’t be stupid from a layman, but he’s making this obnoxious pretense of authority, and most offensive of all, he thinks I’m stupid enough to fall for it.

I see this over and over again. Creationists have this absurd confidence that they have discovered the great flaw in evolution that thousands of scientists who studied it for years have missed, and they love to spring ‘zingers’ on us that they’re sure will stagger us and send us reeling backwards, to quit in defeat like the professor in Big Daddy.

It’s not going to happen. Trotting out some poorly referenced factlet and your profound misconceptions about evolution aren’t going to shock me. I’m also not at all impressed when you’re the kind of weasely coward who can’t even be honest about your intentions.

This is how you advertise your Christian attraction?

With a Donald Trump impersonator?

That’s a disincentive. Also, they’re promoting a crappy movie by those Christian hacks, the Kendrick brothers. It’s not even original — it’s a re-edited release of a ten year old movie that you’re better off listening to the Godawful Movies review than wasting time on this one.

The creationist sawtooth function

If you combine creationist dishonesty and the limited, niche appeal of their subject, you get a predictable result. They hype some weird novelty, they get a surge of attention, and then it fades away until they have to come up with something new…but they lie constantly about how no, they are immensely popular and they will conquer all of science and evolution is on its last legs now!

Answers in Genesis is demonstrating the phenomenon now. Ken Ham keeps declaring that their premiere exhibit, the Ark Encounter, is thriving and has to deal with packed crowds…but are they, really? We’ve got the attendance figures.

And here’s what we see when it comes to Ark attendance (and note that we don’t have the numbers for 2016, which is the year the Ark opened):

Summer 2017 248,787 (note: these numbers are for July/August)
Summer 2018 347,929
Summer 2019 388,704
Summer 2020 144,628 (note: COVID impact)
Summer 2021 328,465
Aug 2017 106,161
Aug 2018 98,106
Aug 2019 104,350
Aug 2020 46,452 (note: COVID impact)
Aug 2021 83,826
One does not have to look very hard to see that, whatever the AiG fog machine might be spewing, Ark Encounter is not experiencing record crowds. In fact, this past August saw the lowest attendance in the Ark’s history (save for the COVID year).

They aren’t doing badly — a few hundred thousand every season, especially when the exhibit (and parking!) is grossly overpriced, is bringing them lots of money. I think the handwriting is on the wall, though. Early on, they had novelty and so much free advertising, with every newspaper printing articles about “Can you believe what kind of stupid shit they do in Kentucky?”, but that’s not happening any more, and further, only the fanatical Christian core is going to make repeat visits. The Ark Park is boring! It’s a big wooden box with static displays and hectoring pedantic signs full of words. They aren’t growing at all, figures are mostly static with, if anything, a slow decline since 2019.

But you can trust creationists to be cunning. They’re raking in the dough, because they charge a lot and operating costs are relatively low (unlike real museums, which charge fairly little and have big expenses in, for instance, paying for qualified expert staff and maintaining collections), and they can extrapolate. They did the same thing with the Creation “Museum”. When attention starts to fade, what do you do? Open a big new attraction, make a splash, perk up the reporters who’ll write about the yokels, and get another spike of attendees. And lie.

Ken Ham, founder and CEO of Answers in Genesis, owner and operator of the Ark Encounter and its sister attraction, the Creation Museum, noted: “Compared to other national attractions right now, we are blessed. We don’t know of any that are seeing numbers equivalent to or better than their 2019 attendance. Ark attendance will only increase as more international visitors resume traveling and as bus tours return to levels we’ve experienced before, such as up to 50 tour buses in a day. I believe this summer will be our best season ever, particularly with our 40 days and nights of gospel music, August 2–September 10.”

Nah, they aren’t having record attendance. They’re flat-lined, at best.

But don’t you worry, AiG is already talking about building a Tower of Babel to help people understand genetics research and, most importantly, generate more attention and more suckers. They aren’t going to go the way of failed Christian theme parks, at least not yet.

After the Tower of Babel peaks, they can always go on to build their Golden Calf exhibit. There is no end of Bible myths they can monetize.

They used those teeth to crack coconuts, don’t you know

Wow. It’s been years since I heard a creationist bring up this argument. I thought it was as dead as the dinosaurs! But the crack team of Christian apologists actually said this (around the 11 or 12 minute mark):

Let’s do this thought experiment. You need to cut up a big head of lettuce. What do you reach for? Probably a sharp serrated knife.

If I were to show you the skull of a fruit bat, you’d probably think it was a meat-eater. But it uses those teeth to rip and shred the fruit of a mango.

What were they talking about? This.

A new study of the creature’s jawbone — published in Royal Society Open — found that the dinosaur often measured 26 feet long and weighed close to 2,200 pounds.

That means it was longer than an African elephant and heavier than a bison, according to Science Alert. So that’s pretty big.

No word on whether the scientists have discovered giant Mesozoic lettuces or mangoes. Yet.

My true and honest feelings about the death of Bob Enyart

A decade ago I briefly tangled with Bob Enyart and his pal Fred Williams. They had a show called Real Science Radio where they preached nonsense about creationism — there’s no real science anywhere in it — where they constantly claimed to have disproven evolution and threw debate challenges at every nobody (like me) that they stumbled across. Even then, I was disgusted with creationist debates and wasn’t going to get into it with a kook like Enyart. He sent me a challenge anyway, to explain how a little connective tissue loop in the eye socket called the trochlea evolved. I answered honestly.

I don’t know.

I don’t see any obvious obstacle to an arrangement of muscles evolving, but I don’t know the details of this particular set.

I explained why. We don’t have any intermediate forms for this tendon, so any thing I might suggest would be pure speculation, although I really don’t see anything unevolvable about the feature. I should have added that an interesting approach to answer it would involve tracking its development in some model vertebrate, such as a zebrafish, but I knew that would be a difficult job, given that it had to develop at something like 10-16 hours post-fertilization, not a task I would want to jump into. This is a solvable problem, even if it hasn’t been solved yet, and we won’t get an answer by prayin’ on it.

As you might have predicted, slimy ol’ Enyart declared victory, because of course he did. To a creationist, saying “I don’t know” is the same as saying “God done did it”.

Well, now Fred Williams has announced that Enyart is dead.

It comes with an extremely heavy heart that my close friend and co-host of Real Science Radio has lost his battle with Covid. Bob Enyart was one of the smartest, and without question the wisest person I’ve known. All the while being exceedingly kind and humble, and always, always willing to listen and discuss anything you wanted. It was an honor beyond measure to have been alongside him for 15 years and over 750 science shows. I always marveled how Bob put up with me all those years together. 🙂 When we pre-recorded a show and he asked me to do a retake, I’m convinced that many times he would on purpose follow it with one of his own retakes just to make me feel better. The number of lives he touched is immeasurable and I’m sure Jesus has an extra special place for him in heaven. ‘Well done, good and faithful servant’.
I was with Bob at his last public appearance in mid August in San Antonio Texas for an ex-JW conference. What an incredible honor and great time we had! I fondly reflect on my journey with Bob, from watching his eye-opening TV show in the 90s, to meeting Bob at St John’s church for an Age of the Earth debate (RSR sells that debate and the old earth group doesn’t, in case you are wondering who won), to Bob asking me to join him in doing Real Science Radio, then 15 years of weekly radio shows, culminating in the conference in San Antonio. In between we had many lunches and dinners together, some Nuggets games tossed in, and so many other good times and fond memories. I also really loved Bob’s sense of humor! As an example, the theme of our presentation at the ex-JW conference was “dinosaur blood”, perhaps the greatest discovery of the century that destroys millions of years. During Q&A, Bob responded to a question and asked “what two words do you say when someone says the Earth is billions of years old?”. No one answered, including myself, so Bob turned to me and said “Fred, you’re fired!” (you can see this at 1:12:50 here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/live/?v=4518764224820454&ref=watch_permalink).
Heaven’s gain has left an enormous hole here on earth. Bob’s enduring legacy will live on with the treasure trove he leaves behind, including an amazing website which many have recognized as the best online resource of science confirming the Genesis record, his captivating Bible study MP3s, science DVDs, YouTube videos, etc.
I miss my best friend and mentor. Please especially pray for Bob’s family.

It’s good that he admits that it was COVID-19 that killed him, but he doesn’t mention that part of their real science show, and a view held by the wisest person Williams knew, was actively, fanatically anti-vaccination and COVID-denialism from a guy who also taunted AIDS victims.

So Bob Enyart is dead. Fuck that guy.