The fail factor of this is so very high it’s almost embarrassing. wikileaks.org have managed to get hold of creationist Kent Hovind’s dissertation for “Doctor of philosophy in Christian Education”.

For those who don’t already know Hovind—currently serving time in prison for failing to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s—he is the cause célèbre of the monumentally ignorant creationism movement, because he has the nerve to stand up and say publicly what normal people seek medical attention for thinking in private.

His paper, which unlike every single doctoral dissertation based on actual research was actively withheld from any kind of peer review process, reveals the mind of a man who has no concept of reality and a complete disinterest in understanding how wrong he has been proven to be time and time again.

Not content with equating Darwinian natural selection with fascism, mixing biblical literalism with the same tired non-arguments we’ve heard (and debunked) time and time again and admitting in the opening chapter that none of what you’re about to read is either original or scientifically falsifiable in any way shape or form, Hovind succeeds only in unintentionally exposing the gaping wide-open holes in the so-called theory of creation so-called science and with such effortless efficiency you’d be forgiven for thinking his secret double identity is writing satire for theonion.com and that the whole sorry business is really just a hoax gone way too far.

The paper begins with a near perfect description of what the first and second law of thermodynamics don’t say about entropy. It moves on to similarly ignorant pontifications on, yes you guessed it, the “incomplete fossil record” and finishes up (where else in a “science” paper) but why “Jesus would be a liar if evolution were true”.

The whole thing reads like a 10 year old’s rushed late on a Sunday night homework, for a class they’ve never payed much attention to because the teacher is a bit of a Monty Withnail. At one point he uses a sinusoidal graph showing the visible light spectrum, to explain why, “we are not able to understand what heaven is like because of our limitations”. Which is not even a little, but EXACTLY like saying, “I have no way of describing something to you that doesn’t exist”.

But perhaps the most troubling thing about it, is the repeated attempt to misquote Darwin himself, when he says that Darwin believed that people with black skin were lower down the evolutionary tree than people with white skin. Time and again this blatant misquoting of Darwin has been used as if Darwin believed this was indeed the case. In point of fact, he did no such thing.

If anything, Darwin was explaining why if there was any credible reason to suppose that skin colour had an advantage to selection, it would be those of us with darker skin who were the more evolved, not the other way around. Darwin, however, ultimately concluded that this was not the case—and that skin colour did not denote intelligence any more than sexual orientation.

Regardless, the Darwin quote which creationists are so keen to misrepresent, without including Darwin’s refrain that such a suggestion was ultimately baseless, never seems to make it into the many volumes of utter tripe written on the subject of creationism, by people even less interested in the facts than Kent Hovind—which on this evidence is no easy thing.

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Young-earth_creationist_Kent_Hovind’s_doctoral_dissertation

PDF Back-up:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=STERW274