My previous post praising BBC documentaries wasn’t just brought on by having watched the fantastic Earth Story.
As part of my never-ending battle against the forces of darkness, I don’t just watch good television. I also get to watch a lot of seriously disturbing nonsense. As it happens, at the same time I was watching Earth Story, I was also watching a videotape of a “seminar†by Kent Hovind.
Kent a particular pet peeve of mine because he setup the Dinosaur Adventure Land in Florida. That was a “museum†aimed at children, which foisted a lot of really, really bad science on unsuspecting children brought in by their equally gullible parents about the Earth only being 6,000 years old and dinosaurs coexisting with mankind.
A federal judge saw fit to put him in jail for 10 years. Sadly it was just on tax charges, not for child abuse.
Anyway, despite Hovind being locked away, his videos are still making the rounds and I had the “opportunity†to watch a tape of him explaining the Hovind Theory to an audience.
It’s complete bullshit, of course, but I have to give the guy credit where it is due. He is an effective speaker to an audience and he can spout complete nonsense with authority. He peppers his narrative with enough scientific jargon that, if you didn’t bother research what he was actually claiming, you could (particularly if already inclined) walk away believing he had something meaningful to bring to the table.
…and so there’s the negative aspect of television/video: The convincing misinformer.
I’ve mentioned the major points of his theory before, but, I’ll just lift the current summary of the Hovind Theory right out of Wikipedia because, no matter how many times I hear it, it’s good for a both a laugh and a cry of righteous indignation.
From the Wikipedia entry on Kent Hovind (7/22/2007) [with a couple clarifications in brackets by me]
The theory includes a literal reading of the Biblical account of Noah: Noah’s family and two of every “kind†of animal (including dinosaurs) safely boarded the Ark before a minus 300° Fahrenheit (~-184°C) ice meteor came flying toward the earth and broke up in space.
Some of the meteor fragments became rings [around the outer planets] and others caused the impact craters on the moon and some of the planets. The remaining ice fragments fell to the north and south poles of the earth.
The resulting “super-cold snow†fell near the poles, burying the mammoths standing up. Ice on the North and South pole cracked the crust of the earth releasing the fountains of the deep [the mid-oceanic ridge], which in turn caused certain ice age effects, namely the glacier effects. Also this made “the earth wobble around†and it made the canopy [a whole lot of water that was in the Earth’s atmosphere in the pre-flood days] collapse that used to protect the earth.
During the first few months of the flood, the dead animals and plants were buried, and became oil and coal, respectively.
The last few months of the flood included geological instability, when the plates shifted. [Apparently the continents were not sitting on the mantle, but were floating upon water, which was forced out when the mid-oceanic ridge was formed, then the continents slipped away at 45 MPH until the ended up mostly where they are now and slowed down to their current speed of 4 or 5 cm per year.]
This period saw the formation of both ocean basins and mountain ranges and the resulting water run-off caused incredible erosion — Hovind says that the Grand Canyon was formed in a couple of weeks during this time.
After a few hundred years, the ice caps slowly melted back retreating to their current size and the ocean levels increased, creating the continental shelves. The deeper oceans absorbed much of the carbon dioxide in earth’s atmosphere and thus allowed greater amounts of radiation to reach the earth’s surface. As a result, human lifespans were shortened considerably in the days of Peleg.
There’s also some good stuff in there about plants not actually being alive, too. (And, insects may not be alive, either.)
Sick, Sick, Sick.
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