Kent Hovind

Kent E. Hovind was born in 1953 and, after serving as a pastor and teaching science at several Christian schools in Illinois, moved to Pensacola, Florida, in 1989 and founded Creation Science Evangelism (CSE). He holds a legitimate bachelor's degree in education from Pensacola Christian College (1974) but his claim to a doctorate is fraudulent: his 'Ph.D.' was awarded by Patriot Bible University in Del Norte, Colorado, an unaccredited correspondence school whose degrees the state of Colorado does not recognize. His dissertation, portions of which were leaked to WikiLeaks in 2009, was described by academic reviewers as semi-literate, incomplete, plagiarism-adjacent, lacking page numbers, containing pages apparently cut from books with scissors, and presenting no original research.

Hovind built Dinosaur Adventure Land in Pensacola in 2001, a small creationist theme park teaching that humans and dinosaurs coexisted. His seminars became extremely popular in evangelical communities in the 1990s and 2000s, and his video series was one of the most widely distributed creationist materials in the world, spreading through churches and Christian schools before YouTube amplified his reach further.

In 2006, following a years-long IRS investigation, Hovind was convicted of 58 federal tax-related offenses — including structuring financial transactions to avoid reporting requirements and paying employees off the books — and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison and three years of probation, with over one million dollars in restitution ordered. His wife Jo was also convicted of related charges. He was released from federal custody on July 8, 2015.

After release, Hovind resumed his ministry, rebuilt Dinosaur Adventure Land in Lenox, Alabama, and continued producing YouTube content. In 2021 he was arrested on a domestic assault charge. Despite his criminal record and thoroughly discredited credentials, he maintains a substantial online following, and his original seminar videos continue to circulate and are used as educational materials in some Christian homeschooling networks.

“The Earth and universe are fewer than 10,000 years old.”

Radiometric dating, astronomy, geology, paleontology, and multiple independent lines of evidence establish the age of the Earth at approximately 4.5 billion years and the universe at approximately 13.8 billion years. Young Earth creationism has been rejected by the scientific community as inconsistent with all known physical evidence.

“Dinosaurs and humans coexisted, and Tyrannosaurus rex was a vegetarian before the biblical fall of man.”

The fossil record clearly places non-avian dinosaurs in the Mesozoic Era (252–66 million years ago), tens of millions of years before any hominid species. T. rex's morphology — serrated blade-like teeth, binocular vision, and bone-crushing jaw mechanics — is inconsistent with herbivory and is well-documented as an apex predator in the palaeontological literature.

“Evolution is a religion, not science, and has no supporting evidence.”

Evolution by natural selection is one of the most well-evidenced theories in all of science, supported by genetics, the fossil record, biogeography, comparative anatomy, and direct observation. It is not a religion and makes no claims about the existence of deities. Hovind's characterization misrepresents both science and religion.