In His Own Words

In Part 6 of his Creation Seminar series, Hovind claims the Grand Canyon was carved in “a couple of weeks” by the receding floodwaters of Noah’s Flood. He also asks why scientists don’t explain how the river could flow “uphill” since the top of the canyon is 4,000 feet higher than where the river enters. Both claims reflect fundamental misunderstandings of geology.

The rock layers span nearly 2 billion years: The oldest rocks at the bottom of the Grand Canyon — the Vishnu Basement Rocks — are approximately 1.7 billion years old. The youngest layer at the rim, the Kaibab Limestone, is roughly 270 million years old. These layers were deposited incrementally over vast timescales, each containing distinct fossil assemblages corresponding to different geological eras.

The canyon was carved over 5–6 million years: Research by Karlstrom et al. (2014) in Nature Geoscience used apatite fission-track and uranium-thorium-helium dating to show the Colorado River integrated through older palaeocanyons beginning 5 to 6 million years ago. Some segments of the canyon system date back 50 to 70 million years.

The “uphill river” argument is fallacious: The Colorado Plateau was uplifted by tectonic forces 70 to 30 million years ago. The Colorado River maintained its course as the land rose beneath it — a well-documented geological process called superimposition. The river did not need to flow uphill; the land rose around it.

A single flood cannot explain the evidence: The canyon contains multiple unconformities — gaps in the rock record representing millions of years of erosion between depositional periods. A single catastrophic flood would produce a single, unsorted layer of sediment, not the dozens of distinct, well-ordered layers observed. The National Park Service describes the formation process as deposition, uplift, downcutting, and erosion — each operating over millions of years.

Hovind’s argument that his property “belongs to God” and therefore is not taxable is classified by the IRS as a frivolous tax argument. The IRS maintains a comprehensive list of these arguments and has prevailed in court against every variation.

Specifically, the law requires employers to withhold and pay federal income taxes and FICA taxes regardless of religious affiliation. Hovind employed dozens of people at Creation Science Evangelism and Dinosaur Adventure Land, paid them in cash, and failed to withhold or remit any taxes for 17 years.

The jury took less than three hours to convict on all 58 counts.

This claim requires ignoring virtually the entire geological and paleontological record:

The K-Pg extinction event (~66 Mya): The Chicxulub asteroid impact is supported by a global iridium anomaly layer, shocked quartz, tsunami deposits, and the 180-km impact crater in the Yucatán Peninsula. Above this layer, no non-avian dinosaur fossils have ever been found — anywhere on Earth.

The gap between dinosaurs and humans: Non-avian dinosaurs disappeared 66 million years before the earliest Homo sapiens fossils (~300,000 years ago). The gap is approximately 65.7 million years.

“Living dinosaurs” claims: Hovind references legends like Mokele-mbembe (a supposed sauropod in the Congo) as evidence. No expedition has produced physical evidence — no bones, no tissue, no verified photographs. Cryptozoological claims do not constitute scientific evidence.

The “physical evidence” Hovind cites has been debunked: The Ica Stones of Peru — carved stones depicting humans with dinosaurs — were exposed as forgeries. The farmer who supplied them, Basilio Uschuya, admitted in a 1977 BBC documentary to carving them himself using a dentist’s drill, baking them in cow dung to fake a patina, and drawing the designs from comic books and textbooks.

The Paluxy River “human tracks” in Texas — long cited alongside dinosaur prints as proof of coexistence — were investigated thoroughly by researcher Glen Kuban in the 1980s. The supposed human prints were elongated metatarsal dinosaur tracks, erosion features, or carvings. Even Answers in Genesis, a leading creationist organization, now advises against using the Paluxy tracks as evidence.

Birds are dinosaurs: Modern birds are the living descendants of theropod dinosaurs. In a sense, dinosaurs do live among us — but as sparrows and eagles, not as the creatures Hovind imagines on Noah’s ark.

The claim that evolution is a “religion” conflates two fundamentally different epistemological frameworks:

Science relies on observable evidence, testable hypotheses, peer review, and the willingness to revise conclusions when new evidence emerges. Evolution meets all of these criteria.

Religion relies on faith — belief without or beyond empirical evidence. Faith is considered a virtue in religious contexts precisely because it does not require proof.

Calling evolution a religion is a rhetorical strategy designed to place scientific evidence on the same epistemological footing as religious belief, thereby suggesting both are equally valid “worldviews.” This is the false equivalence fallacy.

The scientific consensus on evolution is comparable to the consensus on heliocentrism or germ theory. A 2015 Pew Research survey found that 98% of AAAS scientists accept that humans evolved over time.

Courts agree. In Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), federal Judge John E. Jones III ruled that intelligent design — the closest modern cousin to Hovind’s “evolution is religion” argument — is not science and cannot be taught in public school science classes. His 139-page ruling found that ID “cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.” The court’s own demarcation analysis confirmed that science and religion operate by fundamentally different rules — exactly the opposite of what Hovind claims.

Hovind frequently cites anomalous carbon-14 results — particularly the “living snails” example — to argue that all radiometric dating is unreliable. This is a textbook case of cherry-picking a known edge case and presenting it as though it invalidates an entire field of science.

The reservoir effect explains the snail anomaly: The snails in question lived in water containing dissolved carbon from ancient Paleozoic limestone that is depleted of carbon-14. When the snails incorporated this ancient carbon into their shells, the shells appeared artificially old. Scientists call this the “reservoir effect,” and it has been understood and accounted for since the early days of radiocarbon dating. Materials like wood, charcoal, and bone collagen are not affected by this issue because they derive their carbon from atmospheric CO₂.

Multiple independent methods converge on the same dates: G. Brent Dalrymple demonstrated that when four different radiometric methods — each using different parent-daughter isotope pairs with different decay rates — are applied to the same rock sample, they produce the same age. The USGS confirms that “where feasible, two or more methods of analysis are used on the same specimen of rock to confirm the results.” Independent agreement across methods that rely on entirely different physical processes makes systematic error implausible.

Decay rates are constant and well-understood: Radioactive decay is governed by quantum mechanics. Laboratory tests across extreme temperatures, pressures, and magnetic fields confirm that decay rates remain constant. Hovind’s implication that decay rates might have changed is contradicted by decades of experimental physics.

Radiometric dating has been verified against known historical events: The argon-argon (⁴⁰Ar/³⁹Ar) method dated the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius to 1,925 ± 94 years before the study — compared to the historically documented date of 79 CE. This kind of verification against independently known dates confirms that the methods work as described.

Carbon-14 is just one method among many: Hovind conflates carbon-14 dating, which is useful only for materials up to about 50,000 years old, with all radiometric dating. Other methods — uranium-lead, potassium-argon, rubidium-strontium — date materials billions of years old using completely different isotope systems. Discrediting one niche application of C-14 does not undermine the independent methods used to date the age of the Earth.

The opening line of Kent Hovind’s doctoral dissertation reads like a letter to a pen pal, not the introduction to a work of scholarship. This is not a minor stylistic quibble — it reflects the nature of the entire document.

The institution is a diploma mill: Patriot Bible University is not accredited by any agency recognized by the U.S. Department of Education. The state of Colorado grants it only “Religious Authorization,” which explicitly states that its degrees “have no state recognition.” At the time Hovind enrolled, the institution operated from a small residential building with no meaningful faculty. Degrees could be earned in weeks for approximately $37 per month.

The dissertation is incomplete and substandard: Hovind’s introduction claims the work contains 16 chapters totaling 250 pages. In reality, only 4 chapters exist — roughly 100 pages, with large sections repeated verbatim across chapters. The document has no title page, no table of contents, no proper bibliography, and no footnotes. It was printed on a dot-matrix printer. Placeholder text like “book title to be added” appears in citations. The first external reference does not appear until nine pages in, and it is to the Book of Isaiah.

No original research: The content recycles standard young-Earth creationist arguments from other sources. It was approved by a single reviewer — Wayne Knight, Patriot’s president — rather than a standard committee of three to five scholars. Organic chemistry professor Karen Bartelt, who debated Hovind in person, described the opening as “equivalent to ‘Hello, my name is Barney, the Big Purple Dinosaur.’”

Hovind tried to suppress access: Both Hovind and Patriot Bible University refused to make the dissertation publicly available, violating standard academic practice. WikiLeaks published it in 2009. Despite all of this, Hovind routinely introduces himself as “Dr. Hovind” to claim scientific authority on topics ranging from evolution to geology to cosmology — fields his degree does not even cover, as it is nominally in “Christian Education.”