Bex I don't have the time or the inclination to hunt around for who has offered to debate Hovind and whom he has declined to debate. I have certainly come across transcripts of debates in the past that he lost.

What's more, I spent far too much time hunting through SoSick's messages last night to want to carry on talking about things she's said. The logic from the statements from her seems to go as follows: People are successful because they have done nothing to offend God; because they have a good relationship with him. It follows that people are not successful, or are suffering, because they have done something to offend him or do not have a good relationship with him. These simplistic statements made me angry. If she honestly does not believe this, she can say so. I'm done with raking it over, but I have at least given the evidence for why I was saying what I was.

Bex please look at the reasons why I said that websites and links are not evidence in a debate. You continue to quote from creationist websites without citation. It takes a second to list the claims they make, and yet you expect your opponent to go to the trouble of researching the whole claim themselves and making a response. I've done this; it can take hours. You can then, in another second, post another claim from another website. These claims need to be in your own words and they need to be succinct enough to debate properly here. I'm not sure why I'm not getting through here; these are standard rules in a debate. By the way I've seen a Hovind video and I've seen his website and they were full of nonsense -- do you now expect me to write a 20-page expose dicussing every single point? Maybe I should ask you to do a critical analysis of The origin of Species? At least it would help you put the quote mines you have used here in their proper context.

Finally, until anyone here gives concrete evidence about what Hovind actually says (e.g. how he exactly he is supposed to have disproved horse evolution and how the scientists must somehow be covering it up), comments about him are hot air. The proof is in the actual things he is saying.

I am acquainted with a person in California who is active in campaigning to keep creationism/ID out of the schools' science curricula. He has spoken with Hovind a few times on the radio. This is what I am referring to when I say Hovind thinks the sun burns by combustion. Here is what he had to say:

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Ah yes, "Dr" Hovind, the self-proclaimed expert in science and math. "You don't understand any of that, but I understand it because I taught high school math and science for 15 years." He wouldn't clarify that it was in his own private Christian school -- oh those poor poor kids!

But wait, there's more! At this site, http://www.cuttingedge.org/NEWS/n1260.cfm, a Christian group revealed "EXACT ILLUMINIST TIMETABLE FOR PRODUCING ANTICHRIST HAS BEEN REVEALED TO CUTTING EDGE MINISTRIES!". The Illuminati plot was to create a second sun in the sky by crashing the Galileo probe into Jupiter and the resulting nuclear explosion would ignite Jupiter into a star.

When they asked astronomers how feasible this was, the astronomers tried to explain that it couldn't happen because Jupiter is not massive enough to trigger a fusion reaction in its core (it's about 1/10th the necessary mass, as I recall from astronomy class over 30 years ago). But Cutting Edge just could not understand what those astronomers told them, but they could understand the "scientific" answer that Hovind gave them:


quote:
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We were still not sure exactly why Jupiter could not ignite, especially if it were hit with the huge atomic explosion of 1,750 Megatons, as occult sources are saying will occur when the 49.7 pounds of plutonium in the spacecraft Galileo is turned into the planet on December 6. After all, the largest thermonuclear explosion on earth was the Russian test of only 100 megatons in 1961. The answer we received from a Christian scientist, Dr. Kent Hovind, [www.drdino.com] explained the science to us so we could understand. In the NASA excerpt, quoted above, we learned that "most" of the mass of Jupiter is Hydrogen and Helium, a most explosive mix, if it is mixed with sufficient oxygen in order to burn this mixture. Dr. Hovind says Jupiter does not contain enough oxygen in order to sustain the type of continuous burning that would be needed to produce a star. Now, we understand and now it all makes sense. No matter how large the initial explosion might be, the lack of sufficient quantities of oxygen would snuff out any resulting fire rather quickly.
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Talk about the blind leading the blind!
A related Hovind claim that I've tracked down is that at the rate that the sun is losing mass because it's "burning its fuel", 5 million tons per second, then 5 billion years ago the sun would have been so massive that it would have sucked the earth in. But if we do the math (gee, wasn't Hovind an "expert" in math?) we find that the sun's mass and gravity would have been only a few thousandths of a percent greater, sucking the earth in by less that 100,000 miles. When I emailed Hovind about this and asking for clarification, he did everything he could to avoid discussing or even supporting his own claim; he even tried, twice, to pick a fight with me over my AOL screenname (same as the one here).

Even if the sun were originally pure hydrogen and were allowed to fuse its entire mass into helium, the total mass lost by "burning its fuel" could not possibly exceed 0.7% of the original mass. Apparently, Hovind not only believes that the sun burns by combustion, but he also believes that combustion results in the mass of the fuel disappearing -- what, conservation of matter and basic chemistry is just an evolutionist conspiracy?

Oh those poor, poor former students of his!

Oh, and obviously, when Galileo did crash into Jupiter on 21 September 2003 there was no nuclear explosion. The craft's nuclear power modules were designed to be safe and could not have exploded.

Hence the source of my comments that the ignoramus, who claims to have taught high school physics, thinks the sun burns by combustion. I could cite over 100 other examples of where he's got his science wrong and why he is not the qualified expert he claims to be.