The Smug Baldy Speaks

There was a great little article by Adam Kisby in December’s s Skeptic, titled “Doubting Dr. Dino” which uses a logical argument to meet Dr. Dino’s (aka Kent Hovind) challenge to:

Prove beyond a resonable doubt that the process of evolution (option 3 … under “known options”) is the only possible way the observed pehomena could have come into existence.

given these three options:

1. The Universe was created by God
2. The Universe always existed
3. The universe came into being by itself by purely natural processes (known as evolution) so that no appeal to the supernatural is needed.

Kisby continues with a formal proof that options 1 and 2 lead to logically absurd conclusion that the Universe doesn’t exist. He goes on to prove that option 3 is the only available option that results in a Universe that winds up actually existing. That’s nice, at least, since this is what we tend to observe.

After walking through the proof, Kisby reports that it (as well as his claim on the $250,000 prize for completing the challenge) was summarily rejected by Kent Hovind with the explanation:

The Universe is proof of a Designer - not proof that there is no Designer

So Kisby now claims he is left in a lurch: either his proof is correct, and Hovind owes him $250,000, otherwise Hovind’s challenge is flawed, and it should be rmoved or modified.

Unfortunately, there’s a third option - Hovind is correct, and his claim that, “The Universe is proof of a Designer - not proof that there is no Designer” is factually correct and logically consistent.

So let’s look at this claim.

First Hypothesis: The Universe is proof of a Designer.

Since we all know that, in Hovind’s mind, the term Designer is synonymous with God, we’ll formalize this as simply U => G.

1. U => G

Wait a minute, this is the same as line 2 of Kisby’s proof that the claim that “God is the unique and necessary cause of the universe” is false (don’t believe me - you have to buy the Dec issue of Skeptic and read for yourself). This ultimately leads to the false conslusion that the universe doesn’t exist (which I suppose could be true if everything is really nothing, in which case, there really is no Universe, so the story of a creator going about creating it is, in fact, false).

Second Hypothesis: The Universe is not proof of no Designer.

This one is formalized as ~(U => ~G)

1. ~(U => ~G) : Given
2. ~U => G : By Complement
3. ~U = null : Logical contradiction, since the universe is observed to exist

My Conclusion: It turns out that both hypotheses in Hovind’s statement “The Universe is proof of a Designer, not proof that there is no Designer” are false. Since Hovind’s rejection of Kisby’s proof relies on Hypothesis 1 being true, which is not the case, I can only conclude that Hovind incorrectly rejects Kisby’s proof through an invalid argument. Since I’m a scientist, I vote that Hovind release the $250,000 to Kisby as the logic to reject his proof is flawed.

You can see how this plays out here