For the few of you who do not know who he is, Kent Hovind is one of the United States' most famous creationist speakers. Prior to imprisonment for tax evasion in 2007, he routinely toured the country to give seminars and debate scientists about the merits of evolution. In the process, he made millions off of home school parents, private schools, and anti-evolution evangelical activists who bought his tapes and visited his Creationist theme park. Like many of his colleagues, Mr. Hovind refers to himself as "Doctor" even though received a doctorate from an unaccredited Christian diploma mill (you can receive an equally valid diploma here for free).
Given how dishonest many of his arguments have been over the years, many skeptics and defenders of science were salivating in 2009 when Wikileaks released his dissertation from Patriot University. As you can imagine, the document is full of lulzy quotes, factual inaccuracies, and spelling errors. Rather than being 250 pages as Hovind had claimed over the years, the paper is about 100 pages of absolute fail. It also has no title, which is a first for me.
To commemorate the first Darwin Day (Feb 12th, which is his birthday) that this blog has been open, I thought I would share ten of the craziest and funniest quotes from Mr. Hovind's dissertation. Keep in mind that these quotes were written by someone who claims to have eight years of college education from a real university. Before you start reading, however, you probably need to brace yourselves for large amounts of fail (yes, #1 is actually the first line of a dissertation).
- Hello, my name is Kent Hovind. I am a creation/science evangelist. I live in Pensacola, Florida. I have been a high school science teacher since 1976. I’ve been very active in the creation/evolution controversy for quite some time.
- In the twentieth century the major attack Satan has launched has been against the first eleven chapters of Genesis.
- I believe that dinosaurs are not only in the Bible, but the have lived with man all through his six thousand year history.
- The idea that evolutionists try to get across today is that there is continual upward progression. They claim that everything is getting better, improving, all by itself as if there is an inner-drive toward more perfection and order.
- I personally believe that Satan fell from heaven about a hundred years after the creation of Adam and Eve… He had been God’s choir director since he was created… In his pride, Satan decided he would exalt himself and take over the throne of God. This is where evolution started.
- Adolf Hitler, for instance, was an avid evolutionist. In order to comprehend Hitler's reasoning, one must go back to evolution to understand why he did the things that he did, and thought the way he though.
- If a frog turns into a prince instantaneously, we call that miracle or a fairy tale. But, if that frog turns into a prince very slowly, taking three to four hundred million years to make the transition, we will teach that in our universities as scientific fact.
- People who have studied coral reefs say that they could have been formed in about four to five thousand years with no problem. If the earth is older than that, why aren'the coral reefs much larger?
- Some people say that me moon started as part of the Pacific Ocean and was pulled out of that area. That was taught for many years and is still believe by some. They try to use that to explain all of the volcanoes in Hawaii, saying that the crust is very thin because the moon was pulled out.
- The population of the earth today doubles regularly. If you were to draw up the population growth on a chart you would see that it goes back to zero about five thousand years ago.
