In His Own Words

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.

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.