In case anyone has missed the news, Kent “Dr Dino” Hovind has been found guilty of tax evasion and is in prison awaiting sentencing. This is very good news. 
I do feel sorry for all his victims who have given him thousands of dollars over the years and swallowed his line in creationist claptrap. What’s worse some of them won’t even now realise that he was a conman, a crook and a liar and will see his conviction as part of the liberal-atheist conspiracy. 
Closer to home, for the benefit of everyone who hasn’t already asked, yes I did get the dinosaur stickers in yersterday’s Guardian.
There were dinosaur stickers in yesterdays Guardian?
Good ones or just the usual suspects?
Artwork looked like it might have been twenty or more years old - no feathers, tails down, etc.
Still, it was an nearly A3 sized sheet of stickers, some of them two or three inches across. So it made up in quantity what it lacked in quality.
I think you are the con-man. Come up with some proof, or real reasoning for saying these thimgs about a man of god. Speak for yourself Steve
Joe,
All the proof has already been seen in court.
P.S. I do speak for myself, unlike Dr Dino I don’t pretend to speak for an imaginary sky fairy.
how dare you you communist Dr.hovind is a great christian,patriot,family man your just glad he’s in jail because he wont shoot your Evoulutionist buddies down and I think your a communist liberal tofu farting idioat that whole “trial” is a load of bull crap
That’s too bad that you have been deceived as well as many others. I used to respect you until you knocked Dr. Hovind and all the work he has done for the Lord. Bashing Kent for tax evasion may be just, but you can’t discredit his proof against the lie of evolution. You may want to read the Bible before its too late for you and many others.
Bill Clinton - it’s an honour to have you posting here. Did someone steal your shift key in revenge for you stealing the ‘w’ key from the White House keyboards?
Rob R. - What had I done previously that earned your respect? As far as evolution goes, Hovind hasn’t presented any evidence against it, just bluster and misdirection. And as for reading the bible, I think that Hovind would have been better off doing that - “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” would have kept him out of prison.
someone show me the law that requires normal working americans to pay an income tax. please, i’m serious
Tom - I believe that http://evans-legal.com/dan/tpfaq.html will answer your questions.
[...] previously posted that Dr Dino was banged up and now his appeal has been denied so I’m going to gloat a bit [...]
What have you done to earn my respect you ask? I don’t think that that question even needs to be answered?
As far as evidence against evolution? You show me one example of evolution happening by observation that we may draw a conclusion from. Tiny changes do not make one thing turn into anything else. And we still have all of those supposed more primitive creatures that were supposed to evolve still alive today. There is not one spot of any kind of evidence to prove anything outside of micro-evolution. It is a dangerous religious belief.
Nevertheless, there is no need to argue. I have nothing against you or anyone who does believe in evolution. Take care.
Rob R - Thank you for your polite response. I asked the question because you said “I used to respect you” and as we’ve never met or interacted until now I think its a fair question.
You ask for “example of evolution happening by observation”, well as evolution is a process that takes place over millions of years and not a single event that happens “poof” in an instance (that would be creationism) the examples that we see all the time probably aren’t what you think of as evolution. But speciation has been observed in a few cases.
Then you say “Tiny changes do not make one thing turn into anything else”, and I have to ask “what stops them?”. If you are proposing some biological mechanism that stops the accumulation of small changes over millions of years from adding up to big changes then you’d better have some evidence that such a mechanism actually exists and how it works (i.e. what chemistry is actually involved?).
“All of those supposed more primitive creatures that were supposed to evolve still alive”. Yippee, the old “but why are there still monkeys?” argument. Take two populations of apes, one lives on the edges of a big forest and one lives deep in its heart. As the climate changes the forest slowly shrinks, those on the edge spend more time on the ground and over the generations start to adapt to the new way of life, those in the heart carry on as before and continue to evolve in ways that suit living the trees. After millions of years the two groups are so different that they are different species. Note that whilst the ones in the heart haven’t changed in such obvious ways they have been evolving as well.
“There is not one spot of any kind of evidence to prove anything outside of micro-evolution.” Micro- and Macro-evolution are the same thing. There’s nothing different between them except for millions of years. It’s up to anyone who thinks otherwise to prove that there is some barrier that stops small changes adding up to a big change.
“It is a dangerous religious belief.” As Evolution makes no claim at all about the supernatural it can not be religious, it says nothing at all about the gods, the afterlife, the spiritual realm at all, it is completely silent. And how is it dangerous?
Steve Pugh - I would like to comment on your ongoing correspondence with RobR. Since the subject of microevolution leading to macroevolution is at the heart of your discussion, I will start there. Perhaps you are aware of the scientific conference held in Chicago in 1980. This was a gathering of evolutionists from all over the world. As reported in ‘newsweek’ and ’science’ - “According to the professional survey, the central question of the Chicago conference was whether the mechanisms underlying microevolution can be extrapolated to explain the phenomena of macroevolution.” “At the risk of doing violence to the position of some of the people at the meeting, the answer can be given as a clear, No.” Let me also quote some prominent evolutionists that I’m sure you will be familiar with. The late Stephen J. Gould states “That theory,(micro leading to macro) as a general proposition, is effectively dead, despite its persistence as textbook orthodoxy.” Fransisco Ayala also stated “…but I am convinced from what the paleontologists say that small changes do not accumulate.”
Even evolutionists are finally having to admit that small changes do not lead to big changes. After all, why would they have to change their mind and appeal to mutations as the mechanism that brings about evolutionary change. But that idea is also invalid. Pierre Grasse says this about mutations. Mutations are “merely hereditary fluctuations around a median position; a swing to the right, a swing to the left, but no final evolutionary effect. And also,”(mutations) are not complementary, nor are they cumulative.” Neither of these suggested mechanisms are adequate to explain macroevolution according to evolutionists’ own statemaents. In fact, all real scientific observation shows that microevolution is going in the opposite direction. All we ever witness is either no gain of genetic information or a net loss. Never has there been an observation of an organism gaining information, which is what is required if evolution is true. Since there is not a valid mechanism for genetic information increasing, this favors creationism and therefore the burden of proof is on the side of evolution to come up with an acceptable mechanism, not on creationists as you suggest. I like this illustration: Evolutionists would liken slow and gradual evolution to a train that’s starting out in Chicago headed for Los Angeles. Since it is only moving an inch per day, we don’t really see it move, but if you give it millions of years, it will eventually reach its destination. The problem is that the train is now in Pittsburgh headed toward New York City.
I agree with Rob R that evolution is a religious belief, since anything that one believes about God is their religion, including the belief that there is no God.I believe it starts out like this: Someone says in their heart, “I want to do what I want to do. I don’t like the idea of a creator God because then He would have the authority to tell me what to do. The person then decides up front that there is no God and “then” looks at the evidence and interprets it in a way that justifies what he already wants to believe. I can give numerous examples of this application in evolutionary teaching. I will save that for a future comment as I need to tend to other things. If you would like documentation of the quotes I presented, I will provide it. I would like to leave you with this. Please consider what I said about what the person says in their heart. It is very easy for us to think that the things we believe are based on evidence only, but the reality is that we are heavily influenced by our biases. If your starting point is that you desire to be your own god, than naturally you are going to have a tendency to surround yourself with arguments to support your position and overlook that which is against it. I hope you will consider that and be honest with yourself. Thank you for taking the time to read this.
God bless you,
Andy.
AndyN - Some classic creationist quote mining. To pick just the Francisco Ayala example, that is a total distortion of what he actually said and has been refuted by the man himself:
cite.
In future please take this sort of nonsense to talk.origins or the Panda’s Thumb where people will happliy correct your misunderstandings about evolution.
Steve,
You would be wise to heed a bit of logic and spare your own soul. Andy N. has obviously done his research and has plenty of documentation to back it up with as well. Just because the majority of so-called scientists believe in a theory, does not make it true. Here is my take on this and then I will leave my peace or dust off my feet from your site permanently:
I am now given the classic spew on the evolution theory. In all honesty, I have heard all of this before. The classic evolutionist argument of the magic ingredient that makes evolution work to change one thing into something else called “millions and millions of years.” Obviously this can never be observed. But if we are talking ACTUAL science, and not faith (which is what macro, cosmic etc. evolution is–a set of beliefs simply because no-one can observe it which makes it a religion), than we need to talk about things that can be observed, tested, and demonstrated. The difference between what I believe (In the beginning GOD created the Heavens and the Earth) and what you believe–that things evolved over millions and millions of years of time both seem to have supernatural ingredients to me, since there was no-one around to see any of this happening. Wheres the real proof? Are we talking faith here? I think so.
Your scenario about apes that have to adapt to different climates/different stimuli, and different environments altogether still makes them apes. They haven’t changed into anything else. Millions and millions of years can’t be observed or proven any more than the theory of when God first spoke the Universe into existence can. Micro and macro-evolution do not go hand in hand. Small changes within a particular kind don’t produce anything else. A cat is still a cat, a dog is till a dog. People are still human, regardless of their color. There are obviously boundaries as to how far micro evolution can go. Anyone without any kind of bias could tell you that. There needs to be some real proof before anything can be claimed as a fact. Try presenting your so-called evidence about evolution in court once and see what they do with your “facts.”
Farwell Steve.
Science is not decided in a court, as science has considerably higher standards of evidence than the legal system. Fortunately, the evidence for evolution is plentiful and consistent.
That said, when science vs creationism has come up in court, creationism has lost.
In future please take this sort of nonsense to talk.origins or the Panda’s Thumb where people will happliy correct your misunderstandings about evolution.
Comments on this post are now closed, I’ve enjoyed reading your rants but all good things must come to an end.