| Birth Date: | 15 January 1953 |
| Known For: | Advocate of Young Earth creationism and anti-tax views |
| Nationality: | American |
| Alma Mater: | Midwestern Baptist College (BRE) |
Kent E. Hovind (born January 15, 1953) is an American Christian fundamentalist evangelist and tax protester. He is a controversial figure in the young Earth creationist movement whose ministry focuses on denial of scientific theories in the fields of biology (evolution and abiogenesis), geophysics, and cosmology in favor of a literalist interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative found in the Bible. Hovind's views, which combine elements of creation science and conspiracy theory, are dismissed by the scientific community as fringe theory and pseudo-scholarship. Answers in Genesis openly criticized him for continued use of discredited arguments abandoned by others in the movement.
Hovind established Creation Science Evangelism (CSE) in 1989 and Dinosaur Adventure Land in 2001 in Pensacola, Florida. He frequently spoke on Young Earth creationism in schools, churches, debates, and on radio and television broadcasts. His son Eric Hovind took over operation of CSE after Hovind began serving a ten-year prison sentence in January 2007 for federal convictions for failing to pay taxes, obstructing federal agents, and structuring cash transactions. In September 2021, Hovind was convicted of domestic violence against his estranged wife.
At the age of 16, Hovind became a born-again Christian within the Independent Fundamental Baptist church.[1]
In 1971, he graduated from East Peoria Community High School in East Peoria, Illinois. He entered Illinois Central College and then transferred to the unaccredited Midwestern Baptist College in 1972, attaining a Bachelor of Religious Education in 1974.
He married his wife Jo in 1973 and they had three children between 1977 and 1979. Between 1975 and 1988, Hovind served as an assistant pastor and teacher at three private Baptist schools, including one he started.[2]
In 1989, the family moved to Pensacola, Florida, where Jo attended (then unaccredited) Pensacola Christian College and earned a bachelor's degree in music and master's degrees in music and sacred music.[3] [4]
In 1998, Hovind created his Dr. Dino web site and began producing articles and selling video tapes, books, and fossil replicas.[3] Prior to his incarceration, Hovind had numerous speaking engagements (around 700 in 2004) at churches, private schools, and other venues each year, in addition to hosting a daily internet radio talk show and establishing Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola, Florida. In 1999, his son Eric Hovind began traveling to present his arguments and seminars.[5] [6] Kent and Jo divorced in 2016.[7]
In 1988 and 1991 respectively, Hovind received a master's degree and doctorate in Christian Education through correspondence from (also unaccredited) Patriot University, then in Colorado Springs, Colorado.[8] [9] [10] Patriot University is a diploma mill.[11]
Having a website called "Dr. Dino" has provoked some academics to look closely at how Hovind presents his education and credentials. All his known degrees are from unaccredited institutions, and he has no training in paleontology. Barbara Forrest, a professor of philosophy, expert on the history of creationism and activist in the creation–evolution controversy, wrote that Hovind's lack of training makes academic discussion impossible[10] and has said that his understanding of historical and scientific research is deficient.[12] Karen Bartelt, an organic chemistry professor who debated Hovind,[10] examined Hovind's dissertation and found it is incomplete,[13] contains numerous spelling errors, lacks references, shows flawed reasoning, and states that it does not present any original research.[14] [15]
Hovind established Creation Science Evangelism in 1989 to evangelize and teach creationism.[3] In May 1999, his son Eric joined Creation Science Evangelism as a speaker, and his daughter Marlissa began training to become Hovind's secretary.[6] That year, CSE merged with Faith Baptist Fellowship of Hawthorne, Florida, beginning a relationship that lasted until 2002. In 2003, with the aid of Glenn Stoll (a promoter of tax-avoidance schemes), Hovind set up a series of entities starting with "an unincorporated association of pure trust" on May 13, under which a corporation sole and several ministerial trusts were established starting on May 23. CSE properties were conveyed to the trusts which operated under business licenses from the "Kingdom of Heaven".
Hovind is associated with the Unregistered Baptist Fellowship (UBF), a loosely affiliated group of roughly 100 churches which share a "theology of Christian resistance" to civil governments. Because the UBF would consider it an acknowledgement of government authority over the church, they reject the highly favorable 501(c)(3) status, which makes donations tax deductible and exempts them from income tax, but not FICA taxes or employee income tax withholding.[16] [17] The UBF holds that governmental authority stops "at the threshold of the church",[18] and Hovind has likened his ministry's status to that of the Vatican City State. When the federal government obtained a search warrant in 2004, an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) criminal investigator made the sworn statement that the organization did not have a business license and did not have tax-exempt status.
Hovind was convicted of 58 felony counts in November 2006[19] and sentenced to ten years in prison in January 2007; Eric Hovind took over Creation Science Evangelism.[20] In July 2007, God Quest Inc. was incorporated with Eric Hovind as president,[21] and that November, God Quest Inc. filed in Florida to do business under the trade name Creation Science Evangelism.[22] In June 2008, Eric announced that the CSE website would incorporate the CSE blog and change format allowing for "only positive comments" about Hovind and CSE,[23] and in late 2011, Creation Science Evangelism's DrDino.com website was redirected to CreationToday.org.[24] The new website announced "Creation Today is a ministry of God Quest, Inc." with focus on "creation, apologetics and evangelism."[25]
In 2001 Hovind started Dinosaur Adventure Land, a young Earth creationist theme park located behind Hovind's home in Pensacola.[26] With the slogan, "Where Dinosaurs and the Bible meet!", the facility on roughly 7acres[27] had an indoor "Science Center" and an outdoor space with a variety of simple dinosaur-themed rides and activities, each of which was tied to some religious message. For example, the "Jumpasaurus" was a trampoline next to a basketball hoop; children would have one minute to make as many baskets as they could, and the message was that one has to be coordinated to do more for Jesus. Annual attendance was 38,000.[26] The park depicted humans and dinosaurs co-existing in the last 4,000–6,000 years and also contains a depiction of the Loch Ness Monster.[28] The Southern Poverty Law Center said the park also "claims that a few small dinosaurs still roam the planet".[29] A 2004 Skeptical Inquirer article discussed a visit to Hovind's dinosaur theme park and concluded that the park is "deceptive on many levels".[26] In Reports of the National Center for Science Education, George Allan Alderman described it as "essentially a playground with a few exhibits, several fiberglass dinosaurs, a climbing wall, and a couple of buildings." He summarized it as "shabby".[30]
The venture encountered legal issues when the owners did not get a building permit in 2002 (see below). In April 2006, Escambia County officials closed the building in question. In July 2009, the courts ruled that the properties could be seized and sold to satisfy Hovind's criminal penalties (see below).[31]
NCSE maintains an extensive list of statements
In April 2016, Hovind discussed plans for a new Dinosaur Adventure Land, which included an 80-foot-tall model dinosaur that would be the largest in the state, with commissioners in Conecuh County, Alabama.[35] A supporter donated a 140acres parcel of land in Lenox, Alabama, a former gravel pit.[36] Volunteers started work by June 2016,[37] and it opened in April 2018., total attendance had exceeded 1,000, according to Hovind. Dinosaur Adventure Land is operated by a 501(c)(3) organization, Creation Science Evangelism Ministries Inc. Its revenue streams are donations, book and DVD sales, and YouTube advertising. There is no admission charge and it operates without liability insurance. Facilities include a science center, a campground, a four-wheeler park, and church services including baptisms.
On March 15, 2020, a seven-year-old boy drowned at the park.[38]
Hovind presented a version of young Earth creationism he calls the "Hovind Theory" in lectures and in the book Unmasking the False Religion of Evolution.[39] [40] The Hovind Theory is entirely rejected in the scientific community, and its plausibility has even been criticized by other young Earth creationists.[41] [42]
In Hovind's narrative, dinosaurs and humans coexisted and Tyrannosaurus rex was a vegetarian prior to the fall of man. Hovind expands upon the late 19th- and early 20th-century vapor canopy concept of a protective shield that made Earth a relative paradise between the expulsion from Paradise and Noah's flood.[43] The flood is expressed as a function of natural rather than miraculous processes. Noah's family and two of every kind of animal[44] (including dinosaurs, which fit because babies were taken aboard and conditions allowed larger humans, making the ark's size, based on cubits, larger[45]) boarded Noah's Ark before an ice meteor impacted the Earth. Fragments from the meteor caused planetary rings and impact craters on the moon and other solar system bodies. The remainder were drawn to the North and South Poles by the Earth's magnetic field as cataclysmic snowfall which buried the mammoths standing up. The ice on the poles cracked the Earth's crust, releasing the "fountains of the deep". According to Hovind, these events caused an ice age, and made the Earth wobble around, collapsing the vapor canopy that protected it.[46]
In the next few months of the flood, the dead animals and plants were buried, and became oil, coal, and fossils.[47] The last months of the flood included geological instability, when the plates shifted, forming ocean basins and mountain ranges. The Grand Canyon was formed in a couple of weeks during this time.[48]
In a rare case of open dissent within the movement over the substance of creation science,[49] Answers in Genesis (AiG) published a 2002 position paper titled: "Arguments we think creationists should NOT use".[50] After Hovind issued a point-by-point rebuttal,[51] Carl Wieland, Ken Ham, and Jonathan Sarfati of AiG wrote that the claims made by Hovind were "fraudulent" and contained "mistakes in facts and logic which do the creationist cause no good."[52] In particular, AiG criticized Hovind for "persistently us[ing] discredited or false arguments" as well as "fraudulent claims" from Ron Wyatt, and described one of Hovind's claims as "self-refuting".[53] Rancorous disagreements resulted in AiG splitting into U.S. and Australian chapters in 2005. The Australian branch, renamed Creation Ministries International (CMI), maintained content critical of Hovind on their website, while the U.S. branch, led by Ken Ham, removed it.[54] In 2009, CMI said that they had relaxed their stance because CSE's revamped website had removed some of Hovind's claims to which they objected.
Greg Neyman, an old-Earth creationist who runs the Old Earth Ministries website[55] (renamed from Answers in Creation), writes that Hovind's articles about humans and dinosaurs coexisting are unsupported by evidence and that they "embarrass the young earth creation science community as a whole".[56] [57]
To the Orthodox Jewish creationist, Hovind's approach relies upon a strict literal reading of the King James translation. Where Jews interpret the Hebrew through Talmud and Midrash, Hovind relies on a direct reading of English. For example, Hovind claims that the word dinosaur, which was introduced to English in 1841, refers to what previously had been called dragon. Dragon is used where tannin (Hebrew: {{linktext|תנין) appears, but it means serpent or crocodile.
Hovind contends that "Darwinism" produced "Communism, Socialism, Nazism, abortion, liberalism and the New Age Movement". He blamed the forced Cherokee resettlement on a belief in evolution, although the Trail of Tears preceded On the Origin of Species, the book which first presents the theory of evolution by natural selection, by roughly two decades. Hovind maintains that biology textbooks are lying in order to brainwash youth.[58] [59] He said, "Satan is using evolution theory to make kids go to hell."[60] Hovind claims he is not trying to eliminate evolution from schools, but says "schools should teach both viewpoints." Hovind said that in order to forge "missing link" transitional fossils to support human evolution, the Smithsonian Institution has 33,000 sets of human remains in its basement, some taken alive (murder). In an interview prior to speaking at Kent State University, Hovind said "You should have another rebellion here at Kent State and do it for the right reason," the reason being protesting evolution and referred to the Kent State shootings when he added, "This time, don't get shot."[61]
In the pseudoscience of cryptozoology, Hovind published and co-authored Claws, Jaws, and Dinosaurs with William Gibbons, another Creationist who has searched for dinosaurs in the Congo under the belief that discovering a cryptid would somehow undermine evolutionary theory and that dinosaurs were dragons.[62] Dinosaur Adventure Land had displays about the existence of the Loch Ness Monster[63] and Beowulf as history rather than legend.
Prior to his convictions, Hovind was a prolific debater. While Hovind campaigns against evolution, the level of support for evolution is essentially universal within the scientific community and academia;[64] support for creationism is minimal among scientists in general, and virtually nonexistent among those in the following fields: biology, paleontology, geology, etc.[65] [66] C. A. Chinn and L. A. Buckland classify his debate style, common among Young Earth Creationists, as eristic: focused on winning by rhetoric rather than illuminating by careful examination of evidence.[67]
In 1993, Hovind announced that he would be debating the renowned evolutionary biologist, Stephen Jay Gould, who had a longstanding opposition to debating Creationists and had turned down numerous challenges. When contacted about the announcement, Gould said he had never heard of Hovind, much less agreed to debate.
In May 2004, Michael Shermer debated Hovind in front of a predominantly creationist audience. Shermer claimed the exchange was "not an intellectual exercise", but rather "an emotional drama", and concluded, "Unless there is a subject that is truly debatable with a format that is fair, in a forum that is balanced, it only serves to belittle both the magisterium of science and the magisterium of religion."[68] Massimo Pigliucci also debated Hovind, and expressed surprise at Hovind's ignorance of evolutionary theory. Pigliucci recalled Hovind tried "to convince the audience that evolutionists believe humans came from rocks" and subsequently "evolved from bananas."[69] William Reville, Director of Microscopy at University College Cork, wrote that Hovind's ideas are not rational or scientific because they are not testable. Hovind has repeatedly declined offers for written debates where his claims would be scrutinized by scientists, including his decline of a debate offer from Dave Thomas.[70]
During a debate with Farrell Till, Hovind said that Donald Johanson had uncovered the leg bones of Lucy at a different site over a mile away from the reported site, in a deeper stratum, quipping, "I would like to know how fast the train was going that hit that chimpanzee."[71] This was clearly contrary to the published statements by Johanson. After Hovind had been informed in 1993 that his statement was false, he agreed to stop using the claim. When he repeated the claim in 1995, he once more agreed he was in error.[72]
In 1990, Hovind made a $10,000 offer to anyone who could meet a set of requirements he said would prove evolution, and he later raised the amount to $250,000.[73] In 2007, Creation Science Evangelism removed the offer from its website.[74]