Kent Hovind holds a very special place in my heart. It used to be a place of reverence, but now it's a place of pitied admiration. If you know who Kent Hovind is then you've probably already formed a negative opinion of me based on that last sentence. I'll ask you kindly to reserve judgment until you reach the end.
I became a Christian when I was twenty-three years old. It was a long process from my staunch atheism to Christianity full of flip-flopping and, as the Bible says, being blown in the wind like a reed. My absolute refusal to even imagine that there might be a God subsided a little bit when I was twenty or twenty-one. At that time I was living in squalor in a terrible neighborhood in Toronto, blowing my money on things like pot and ecstasy and eating mostly minute rice with salt and pepper to add flavor. My only exposure to Christ in that time was my roommate who, at the time I thought to be Christian. I've since learned that things he believes resemble on slightly Christianity as taught in the Bible, but he did and does still believe in a god loosely based on the God of the Bible.
If you've ever smoked pot then you know that often times it leads to philosophical/religious discussions. Our tiny apartment would be filled with our stoned friends and we would all be arguing against the possibility of God except for my roommate who would hold his on arguing for God. Eventually I began arguing for both sides. I would give my arguments against God, but I would also point out flaws I saw in arguments from my fellow atheists. It was a very confusing time as I realized that despite my desire to be against God, I was finding myself defending Him.
Eventually one of our friends from back home moved to Toronto to live in our apartment. He wasn't an atheist so much as a dabbler in different things, but one thing he definitely was not was a Christian, which worked for me. He would be another ally, and a good one I figured since he was the mountain top guru type who everyone went to for advice back home.
Arguments ensued as expected but I found him to be less of a useful ally than I had imagined. It's true that when it came to fact free imaginations of philosophy he was quite good at imagining possible alternate realities and various ultimate truths that made sense to those wanting to find sense, but when it came to arguing about Christianity, which true or not, involves facts about what the Bible does and doesn't claim, he wasn't so great. I found myself arguing against him from my very, very limited knowledge of the Bible because he so often said things about Christianity that I knew to be false. And an argument based on a false presumption isn't a lot of good. One day, at the end of my rope, I threw a Bible at him and told him to read it if he was going to argue against it. He went to a bedroom and emerged a day and a half later, threw the Bible on the couch and said, "I believe it." My jaw hit the floor. That wasn't supposed to happen. At that point I was by myself arguing against Christianity, and I was now being told that I too thought many things about the Bible that were unwarranted. But at that point I wasn't ready to read the Bible.
My friend didn't become a Christian that day. He believed what the Bible said, but he wasn't ready to devote his life to God. What caused him to become a Christian was an experience that borders on miraculous. One that no person who has no reason to trust my friend is likely to believe, so I'm keeping it a secret. Even I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen the absolute metamorphosis that it caused in him throughout the years. So great was the change in him that I often look at how little my life has changed in comparison and wonder if I have actually become a Christian.
But I have greatly digressed from my main point and by now my non-existent readers have likely forgotten that this entry is about Kent Hovind, a disgraced young earth creationist from Pensicola, Florida and the special place that he holds in my heart. I'm not quite ready to talk about him yet though, I'm just reminding you why we're here.
I left Toronto having come to believe, as best as I knew how, that Jesus Christ was God, and once again having rejected Him after reading the first chapter of "Farewell to God" by Charles Templeton. I had tired of living in shambles in Toronto and I was moving back in with my parents, and I was angry. Very angry.
It would be another year or so before I became a Christian. My parents had decided to start attending church while I was in Toronto and my mother prodded me constantly to join her for church. All I could do in response was to make fun of her and her beliefs with my brother who to this day remains agnostic/Buddhist/whatever. For some reason I still have a vivid and painful memory of promising my mother that I would attend the Christmas Eve church service with her, only to back out at the last minute to smoke pot with my brother (she didn't know about the pot.) I knew she was hurt by it, but I ignored it thinking, as most non-Christians seem to, that she didn't really believe that nonsense anyways, she just went because that's what people did.
I'd like to say that my conversion was due to some miraculous occurrence like my friends, but it wasn't. Mine was a result of coming into contact with the first real Christian I had seen since I was a child. I saw that being Christian was more than a claim to believe in God, it was a relationship and a lifestyle choice. And I saw that it made people truly happy. I did have an experience at church the Sunday after I met this person that solidified my belief, but I was converted at that point, so it was more of a confirmation.
I developed an insatiable appetite for Christian reading material. I read the Bible, C.S. Lewis, any and all Christian magazines, and a bunch of other things, some of which I probably should have left alone. I reeled at the mistaken ideas that I had held about Christianity and in my naive enthusiasm I began to talk excitedly to my friends about my new found faith expecting them to be happy for me. I felt like I had uncovered the lost city of Atlantis, and everything people had thought about it was wrong and it was my job to sort them out. I experienced my first tastes of anti-Christian bigotry from people I respected, even loved. And it hurt. It hurt knowing that these people had such darkness in them. I knew that they wouldn't believe, but I never thought that they would belittle me or my new faith. I lost a lot of friends in the early days. It was sad to realize that without pot or drinking, I had nothing in common with these people.
Things didn't get any better when I went to college either. I was taking General Arts and Science so I had a wide range of subjects from Children's Literature to Philosophy. It is easy to understand how Christianity would come up in philosophy class, but what I never expected was for it to come up nearly every day for the mere purpose of being ridiculed. Indeed my philosophy professor held Christianity in such contempt that he decided to skip the section on Thomas Aquinas because he had been a Christian philosopher and therefore, according to my professor, had nothing to offer us in this age of enlightened thinking.
It was also hard to understand what relevance Christians and the Bible had to the study of Children's Literature, when the stories studied were neither written by or about Christians or the Bible. Yet it did come up. And it did come up frequently.
So as my professors attacked my faith in every class (even music appreciation), in every case because evolution had, in their minds, proven it to be false, I began to have a crisis of faith. The experience I mentioned having at my first church service as a Christian had confirmed the reality of Christ to me, but my professors had a point. If evolution were true, and it had to be since it was taught to me as such ever since I can remember, and if the earth were very old, which again, it had to be because that's what I had been taught all my life, the the claims of the Bible could not also be true. What was I to trust? A personal experience or everything I had ever been taught in school? I wanted to trust the experience, but as time wore on, I found I couldn't. Then my faith started slipping away, and I soon stopped caring that it was.
It was by accident that I stumbled on to a website called God Said Man Said. It has a weekly webcast where a pastor "proves the veracity of the majority text King James Bible, again and again." The main point is to refute what man says and give evidence why what God says is true. While I no longer believe that it is a good source for creation/evolution information, I still respect it because it was the first place I had ever heard that there were people who believed in a Young Earth and literal creation, and that evolution wasn't the airtight fact that I had been led to believe.
There was a webcast on the site called "Evolution is Dead. They Just Forgot to Bury the Corpse." It was about fifteen or so minutes long and was quote after quote by scientists who said things that showed there were a lot of things to be desired about evolution. It's possible that some, maybe even most were taken out of context, but not all of them were as I have learned from years of further study. Suddenly I had a glimmer of hope. Maybe God was real, and maybe what he said was true. And if that was the case, it was possibly the most exciting discovery I would ever make.
I began to tell my Christian friends about this site. And I posted articles from it online in journals and blogs. I e-mailed people things. Once again I thought I had stumbled onto a huge story and I was going to blow it wide open. And once again I found I was late to the show and many people had already heard about this creation issue and developed a healthy animosity toward it and anyone who espoused it. But this time they didn't get to me. This time I was excited and I was staying that way.
My parents mentioned to some people at their church how I had taken an interest in creation science, and those people happened to have some of Kent Hovind's seminars on VHS. They loaned them to my parents who loaned them to me and I watched them over and over and over again, gobbling up everything he said and thoroughly enjoying his glib attitude toward the people who had made me so miserable in school with their evolutionary propaganda.
God Said Man Said had given me a taste of creation, but Hovind had given me an insatiable appetite. When I had watched and rewatched everything Hovind made that I could get my hands on I searched for others like him. I had a nagging feeling in my stomach about the fact that Hovind was only a high school science teacher, so I was hoping to find people with better credentials. This wasn't because I was uncomfortable with getting info from a high school science teacher, but because I knew the people who I would talk to about this would demand more. It wasn't long before I stumbled on to Answers in Genesis.
AiG was exactly what I was looking for. It wasn't pastors speaking entirely from an area outside the bounds of their expertise, nor was it science teachers speaking beyond their expertise; rather it was practicing scientists with indisputable credentials from major secular Universities speaking directly from their areas of expertise. AiG has thousands of web articles and new ones everyday except Sunday. They have DVDs and computer programs, books and audio tapes/CDs. debates and Seminars. Two quarterly magazines. These guys were exactly what I needed to combat years of public school programming.
I'm now twenty six and I've spent nearly everyday since discovering AiG studying creation and evolution from both sides. I've found other sites for creation including Creation Ministries International, the truth.origins archive, Apologetics Press, and Institute for Creation Research. I've collected a mass of secular science magazines and books which have given me a more even handed information base. I've even tried to read some Richard Dawkins, which is quite a feat if you can pull it off.
The point is, I've gotten to the point where I have made a well informed decision to be a creationist. I have come to believe the Bible without nagging doubts the whole time stemming from the heavy handed brainwashing I had been receiving since I was old enough to understand the spoken language. I've gotten to the point where evolutionary arguments no longer upset me because I can see the flaws in them on my own without having to run off and see what a wiser creationist has to say on the subject.
Am I sure that I am right beyond the faintest shadow of a doubt? No. Do I believe that a literal creation has been proven? No. Do I believe it can be proven? No. The most important thing that I have learned from my studies is that nothing at all can be known about history with absolute certainty. The best a person can hope for is that they will have a very well evidenced story, where everything seems to fall into place and fit snugly. But without having been there to witness it, you will never know for sure what happened. It comes down to trust and worldviews. And my worldview consists of a God who told us how creation happened. I believe that God was there and I believe He gave us the Bible to know what he wanted us to know. I trust him before people. I believe creation doesn't suffer from the problems evolution does. I believe every time evolutionists are forced to rethink how it happened, creationists sit back and say, we told you so. I believe that the evidence fits better with the creation model than with the evolution model and that all of reality is aptly explained by creation, whereas there is an awful lot about reality that doesn't make sense in the absence of God.
I should point out that I do not refer here to small scale biological evolution, but rather the general theory of evolution. It was a creationist who first proposed natural selection and natural selection or adaptation is an essential part of the creation model. If you believe that dogs, coyotes, and wolves have a common ancestor then we agree. If you believe that far enough back on the family tree you will find and ancestor common to these animals but also to bananas then we have a problem.
Without Kent Hovind, my interest in creation would likely have been a flash in the pan, and I would likely have slipped out of my faith. But thanks to his seminars I eventually found reputable creation resources which have allowed me to make a real and informed decision about what I believed about the origin of life and of species on the planet.
So, even though Kent Hovind believes things that I no longer believe about creation, and even though he is in jail for tax evasion, which is certainly not proper Christian behaviour, I still remember what he did for me, and probably countless others. I can see how God used his ministry to allow me to keep my faith and so I admire him and I pity him. I pity him for his beliefs about government conspiracies which ultimately landed him and his wife in jail, but I admire him for not bowing to the evolution machine. Yes, he is mistaken about many things, but then, so are the people he fights against.
