Going to prison will have done wonders for his credibility. There is nothing these folks love to do more than forgive people (as long as believe the exact same stuff as they do).

Why does God himself limit his own power? Everything he does is magic, so why all the fuss? It's impossible for the world to have flooded (it would have killed everything in the ocean for one, and the atmosphere would have been too thin for anything on the ark to have survived, among other problems), yet God supposedly rigged a bajillion impossibilities to have his flood when he could have (if his PR is to be believed) just killed all the wicked and been done with it.

God is apparently not aware of his own power. Or he's a fiction.

Take radiometric dating. Yahweh would have to interfere with every single laboratory test of something older than 4,000 years, and he'd have to do it in just the right way depending on the mix of isotopes being measured.

Or, he could have created the universe according to certain physical laws which cause those measurements to be true, even if in some supernatural sense they weren't.

This is actually what went on the days of the geocentric model. Those calculating star charts did so with the sun at the center, because it made the calculations more straightforward, while they continued to believe that "in reality" the sun went around the earth. Eventually Occam's razor caught up to them.

The truth is that most of the people who believe this stuff pretend radiometric dating doesn't exist, so they just put it out of mind. And guys like Hovind...well, who knows what he *actually* believes. He's apparently willing to cheat the government and his business partners as a matter of course.

Sorry for the length.

What is the Bible if not a bunch of gurus explaining something that would be too difficult for the average person to understand otherwise?

He just knows his audience, is all. Gotta love anti-intellectualism, though. USA! USA!

Ah, I mixed these two muppets up. I meant Hugh Ross is the classy one.

"something so blindingly obvious, I wonder why he and I are the only people I know of who mention it. "

there are three key words in there, dinkles

hint: you don't actually know very much

I would somewhat agree, I think to be an atheist takes the same amount of arrogance as being a theist. Who is anyone to say with any certainty whether or not there is some supreme being who helped form life as we know it? But I think most atheists aren't that sure and so are really agnostic.

But from the atheists I know and the Christians I know, the atheists are almost all more open-minded and well informed. They at least tend to have a larger array of sources of information, beyond just their church and fox news.

fatatty: I'm not going to spend time paraphrasing this badly so I'll just quote: "If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is an intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense." - Russell

BorrowedSolution: I think a lot of people believe that the Big Bang and Genesis 1 are the same thing. But you have to be okay with interpreting much of Genesis 1 as allegory, which obviously Hovind isn't willing to do.

And what about Genesis 2...is that evolution? :P

There's a simple test. Are you willing to say that you 'know' that something exists or doesn't exist? Even if you can't rule out the possibility of magic, delusion, or the laws of existence suddenly becoming optional? Then you should also be able to say you 'know' that God exists or doesn't exist. There's no reason to create special 'exceptions' for God or religion from the rules we use everyday. The only time evidence can't be weighed is if the definition of God is vague and changing on a whim, or if it's so broad as to be useless.

Of course if a person goes on about how we can't 'know' anything and reality is all subjective, then they'd better either be willing to walk into traffic, or cop to having some useful standard of knowledge they are selectively applying when it suits them.

Atheists simply don't have a belief in God. Whether they claim knowledge is possible makes them gnostic or agnostic atheist, but still atheist. I know people disagree on the terms, but any definition that requires absolute certainty as opposed to ordinary knowledge just leaves everyone agnostic (with religious people simply in denial about it), and so isn't useful.