Trin80ty (not a Chestertonian btw) has a video series "Kent Hovind is crazy".
One of these* - he has blocked me btw - he has Kent Hovind speaking on dinosaurs. Kent Hovind mentions a "real tendency" to each finder of a dinosaur bone to make it a "whole new species", so the finder can be famous. Trin80ty adds the text:
This ignorance and stupidity does not deserve a comment.
It seems Trin80ty sacralises science very much. But there is substance to what Kent Hovind says. Take a Brontosaurus - is that the only dino species of its kind? I think not. Or Tyrannosaurus Rex? Is that the same kind as Allosaurus or a different one? I would say the same.
Or again, in China they found a new species like T Rex but 100 times smaller (third root of hundred is between 4 and 5,** so it is between four or five times smaller than T Rex in all three dimensions of its volume). I would say it is the same kind as T Rex.
So would the people on Creation.com ... they would say the "new species" is really juvenile T Rex. I suspect the "juveniles" are the real species and T Rex and Allosaurus some creepy result of some genetic experiment conducted ... I used to say by Nodian scientists, but now my chief suspicion is Nephelim who "sinned against all living things in the heavens and earth and in the water"***. I even suspect all of these may be misshapen birds, like genetically manipulated ostriches. You see, one of the evolutionist arguments for birds having evolved from dinosaurs is that dinosaurian features are identic to fetal features of birds. There is also just two kinds of hips dinosaurs can have ... lizard hips, like the Brontosaurus, bird hips like the T Rex and the Allosaurus. You see my point? Bird hips but saurian features like teeth and solid bones might equal misbegotten birds.
But assuming T Rex (of which there are 30 fossiles, except if the Chinese smaller ones are juvenile T Rex') and Allosaurus are legitimate species rather than weird GMO's, they are very probably the same kind, and Kent Hovind has very probably hit the nail about why there are so many different dinosaur species in the catalogues.
Trin80ty would say, no doubt (except for his propensity to not comment at all, and then comment on that), something like "hold it, that is not how we were taught to do our research" ... he has a point, but who says Academicians' research and conclusions and stuff always follow the paradigm of good Academia? Who says their scientific paradigms follow the paradigm of good Academia? Even Trin80ty does not spell it out that specifically, he only wants to suggest something like it, by calling a direct assertion of the opposite - actually of the obvious truth - "this stupidity and ignorance" and claim it deserves no commenting on.
Now, there is a funny thing about Trin80ty's Kent Hovind series. It all begins (or most of the time) with quoting Kent Hovind's offer to use his material freely, and then goes on to state "do not take any legal advice from Kent Hovind" ... funny enough, he did that himself. The very one he quoted. He wants to have the cake and eat it. He wants Kent Hovind unable to stop him from using his material, but he wants no one else to use the material, he tells everyone else "do not take the advice I just took". In legal terms it is not an advice, it is a creative commons licence. And if Trin80ty is free to use it, so is anyone else. I would rather tell you not to take legal advice from Trin80ty.
Who shows all of his bias in a text comment saying:
Creationism is not part of the real debate. Science looks at evidence not wild, unprovable supernatural claims.
A supernatural claim is not by definition unprovable. A natural or naturalistic claim may very well be unprovable if it is too long ago or too far away or too hidden, so not all natural claims are provable or disprovable : neither are all supernatural claims unprovable, some are provable or disprovable. Claiming anything supernatural is unprovable (i e neither provable if true nor disprovable if false) is a kind of easy bailout for an atheist. That way he gets away without looking at the evidence - or at least without giving any comment that is to the point. Such a bailout is not ad rem, and calling Kent's astute observation on Academia as it is actually done stupidity and ignorance is not ad rem either. This is not an essay about proving any particular supernatural claim, it is just about proving this particular naturalistic claim not to the point, biassed, and an easy bailout.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton would have said the same thing.
I have another axe to grind than that with Trin80ty, and that is with todays semi-chestertonians. I suspect part of their rationale to be the same as that of Kent Hovind's adversary Trin80ty in the following video:
Kent Hovind is Crazy #12: Making Money
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pklj2rnSFBg
In the ingress, Trin80ty puts the text:
Example #12 : Life's purpose as making money
From Kent Hovind's uncopyrighted video:
"How to make money and spend it God's way"
Immediately afterwards we have Kent Hovind denying this, saying he wants students to get busy in ways that will pay off in a clearly non-monetary way - namely in eternity. He does however say that God is richer than we are and can provide for us. Which is completely true. In Alexander Ramati's book The Assisi Underground (nowadays it may be easier to get the film on video) there is a joke about three things "even God doesn't know": "What a Jesuit really thinks, how many nuns there are in Rome, and where the Franciscans get all their money from". So, in that respect, he agrees with Saint Francis. He is also saying that instead of saving up for a new jacket, serve the Lord and He will give you at least a used one when He thinks you can use it - which He knows better than you.
Now, summing this up as "serve the Lord for money's sake" is idiotic. And this is the idiocy Trin80ty commits:
Now you see the motivations behind Hovind's ministry. He doesn't promote education to these children. He doesn't promote being a doctor who helps people or being a scientist who finds cures for diseases.
Hovind is interested in getting something.
Curing diseases for free is certainly a work that will bring eternal rewards to a Christian doctor. Sts Cosmas and Damien were martyred by their colleagues - because they refused to take money for the cures. This was in a time when doctors were greedy. To hear Trin80ty's complaint about Hovind, either one might suppose he thinks it the teachers' duty to teach their pupils to make another life of Sts Cosmas and Damien (which is not what I find in doctors these days, and teachers are not dealing exclusively with future doctors either), or that Kent Hovind had given either advice or example of providing nothing (not even a cure against evolutionism) for free to anyone. If you remember the initial statement of the videos being uncopyrighted, you can see well that that is not quite the case.
Yet Trin80ty will gladly encourage his students (supposing he is a teacher) to think about gain in terms about serving humanity (notice how humanity takes the place of God in people who think that way, I do not claim to exactly quote Trin80ty verbatim, but I would not be surprised), and then to be hypocritical about it as if they had no thoughts at all about personal gain and needed no advice about it either. As if gaining something at all were to the normal student an unwelcome if alas necessary byproduct of doing some good work in medicine. Oh, and also as if medicine were more important than being farmers and providing bread or than being mothers and fathers and providing new people. Medicine will not keep a man alive if he dies from starvation - God can, as He showed with Alexandrina da Costa (recent medical history by the way, documented by very hostile medical doctors who thought she must be faking and were cruel). Medicine will not make a man live for more than a thousand years - but God can as he showed when taking up Henoch and Eliah.
How was it Queen Victoria put it? "We are not impressed". Or Shania Twain "That don't impressin' me much". I think, if Kent had not been married to Jo (he loves to introduce her picture by saying "that is not my wife" - pause - "it's a picture of her") his ability to fix and polish cars might have impressed her a bit more than Trin80ty's criticism of him. Actually don't know, have to ask her yourself, if you know her.
He gave the students a bit of very useful advice, to look where certain things need fixing and knock saying "I noticed ... I might fix that for 10 bucks an hour" rather than "have you got any work to do? I take 10 bucks an hour" - and that is part of the culture of self sufficiency that is so right about US - but for fixing things on the roof, alas I have vertigo and I am quicker at noticing where someone's argument fails (which he will usually not pay me for, that is why I expose it to the rest of the world hoping someone will) than where someone's house needs something done. I could probably walk by a lawn of grass half a metre high and not think about offering to mowe it for at least half an hour. Besides, mowing grass tires me faster than finding faults in Trin80ty's arguments or even PZM's° - that is why I am an intellectual, possibly incurable such.°° But saying Hovind's advice is not very much help for me is not saying it is not sound in itself.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
BpI, Georges Pompidou
Sunday and Our Lady of
the Seven Sorrows
15-IX-2013
PS, one can add that as all Protestants (or most anyway) Kent Hovind has a lack of grasp on distinction between monks and ordinary faithful. He is obviously not a Franciscan as St Francis, but closer to - if he were a Catholic - a Franciscan Tertiary like Christopher Columbus or St Louis IX. As you may see if you go to my haikus (see note°° below) I am not a monk myself./HGL
*Kent Hovind is Crazy #13: Legality of Creationism in Public School
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYSi6qiVkG4
**Cube of 4 is 64, cube of 5 is 125, 100 is between 64 and 125, so its cubit root is between their cubic roots. Actually 4.6415888 ... now that I have the luxury of seeing it in a calculator.
*** Quoting Book of Henoch from memory.
° Letter to Nature on Karyotype Evolution in Mammals
(dated 7-XI-2011 and still no answers forthcoming, except for Patrik Lindenfors' thoughtless support for PZM's explanation)
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2011/11/letter-to-nature-on-karyotype-evolution.html
°° haiku : Paresseux? Beaucoup.
(content warning is about the next and one of the previous and against small children or school children reading those, and it is in French, anyway)
http://hglhaiku.blogspot.com/2008/05/paresseux-beaucoup.html
