I think we can safely say that nine years in prison didn’t make Kent Hovind any more rational. Indeed, it may have made him even worse. He’s made some spectacularly stupid arguments throughout his career, but this one may take the cake. He says that God left apparently contradictions all over the Bible in order to “weed out” those who don’t really want to believe in him.



“If I was God,” Hovind explains, “I would write the book in such a way that those who don’t want to believe in me anyway would think they found something. ‘Aha, here’s why I don’t believe.’” “And then they could go on with their own life because they don’t want to believe God anyways,” he continues. “I would put things in there that would appear without digging to be contradictions. I don’t think that’s deceptive, I think that’s wise for the Heavenly Father to weed out those who are really serious.” Hovind says that he made a choice to “believe the Bible until it’s proven wrong.” “I know others who have decided, ‘I’m not going to believe it until you prove everything is right,’” he notes. “Okay, you do whatever you want to do, but I made the opposite decision.”

This is right up there with “God planted fake fossils in the ground to fool us or to test our faith.” It’s incredibly stupid and ridiculous. Then again, this is Kent Hovind, so that’s about par for the course. Especially ridiculous is the notion that people don’t believe in God merely because they don’t want to. This is a very common belief among Christians, that everyone really believes in God because it was “written on our hearts” (whatever the hell that means), but some of us suppress that belief so that we can continue to sin.