Hovind: "I wish to re-emphasize that I believe the Bible is the infallible, inspired, inerrant Word of the living God. I taught high school science for fifteen years, and I can assure you that there are no conflicts with the Bible. It is Gods Word." Lie #202. It is the word of a bunch of primitive, ignorant, narrow perspective, undereducated writers, the names of whom we do not even know. How anyone, anyone at all, who claims to be a believer can put their faith in that book as opposed to seeking the answers directly from god is beyond me to comprehend. The Bible is provably errant:
Examine 2 Chronicles, 36. verse 23, the last verse, ends right in the middle of a sentence. The very next book in the standard Bible, Ezra, begins at verse one of course, but verse one of Ezra 1, is really verse 22 of 2 Chronicles, 36, and the two parallel each other from that point through verse 3 of Ezra 1, where Ezra actually continues the story broken abruptly at the end of Chronicles.
There is no arguing this, no debating it, no weaseling out of it as fundamentalists incessantly do when errors are brought to their attention. This is simply, plainly, clearly, unarguably a gross mistake in the Holy Bible. If this one, which shouts at you, which glares in your face, has survived down to us today uncorrected, how many other mistakes and misperceptions are there that are not so obvious? How many errors are there that we do not have any means of checking or verifying?
Precisely - we do not know. For someone like Hovind, or Duane Gish, or Henry Morris to pretend, even for an instant, that this book is the inspired and inerrant word of god is the most blasphemous insult to any god. To pretend that this ad hoc collection of writings, put together by ancient cardinals, none of whose veracity we can attest to, is patently insane. To hold sacred this anonymous scribble of primitive writers telling tales from even more primitive nomads, none of whom we know, is the act of an irresponsible idiot.
Everyone has heard of the game whereby a series of people whisper a few sentences to one another down the line, and then compare the beginning phrase with the final one. Imagine playing that same game, not down a short line of people at a party, but over decades, centuries even. After that, someone who speaks a different language writes the story down, and then it gets translated and retranslated for a few centuries more. Finally, a bunch of people get to sort through all these copies and without any reference whatsoever to the original storytellers, they compile these texts from multiple sources, in multiple languages.
Creationists are always whining about the odds against evolution happening. Well what are the odds that the Bible we have today accurately represents anything that might have happened five or six thousand years ago? Sure, it can come close on actual, major historical events - those would be well-known - but what about all those personal stories? What about those chats with god that happened when the writers were not even present? What about those miracles? Knowing what we know now about eyewitnesses and their complete unreliability, how can we begin to pretend the Bible is reliable? This is a matter of science, not of opinion.
Hovind is incessantly griping about how bones found here and there in the fossil record are put together and claimed to be from the same animal (case in point, his diatribe on horse evolution). Well what about his Bible, where texts found all over the place and not even in the same language were put together and claimed to be the word of one god? The man is a hypocritical numskull.