--- Short review ---

Utter, utter rubbish. This miserable and utterly laughable collection of nonsense might, perhaps, serve as the unedited collection of random notes of an eighth-grader, but as a PhD dissertation, it is beyond joke-level. It’s far worse than “so bad it’s good”. This text blasts right through that territory and comes out on the side of “hogwash”. The only reasons I can see for even considering reading this are a) mocking Hovind; and b) mindboggling purposes, for this text will leave you shaking your head in disbelief. You won't enjoy reading this, but you'll definitely remember having read it.

--- Extended review ---

Even leaving the tired old creationist ramblings aside -- I won't go into religion here -- this text has absolutely no redeemable features. Not a single one. Even the very first lines make it agonizingly clear that this "dissertation" is childlike and unacceptable beyond redemption.

This is how Hovind begins his "dissertation":

"Hello, my name is Kent Hovind. I am a creation/science evangelist. I live in Pensacola, Florida. I have been a high school science teacher since 1976. I've been very active in the creation/evolution controversy for quite some time."

That, right there, is clearer than a giant floating neon sign saying ROFL could be.

This puerile, conversational tone is sustained throughout the dissertation. Here's a random quote from a random page:

"Pride is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible as being one of the main things that God hates. I have noted several hundred references to pride that show God’s attitude toward it. He hates it!! Here are several."

The tone is intentionally simplistic and reductive. There are too many spelling mistakes and typos. There are almost no citations and no supporting literature (apart from the King James Bible, a book called GET BOOK TITLE, and an eleven-year-old issue of Newsweek). And as a final measure of the complete and utter FAIL that is this non-dissertation: only four chapters were completed, out of the projected sixteen, as mentioned in the introduction.

Content-wise, there is no room for reasoning or reflection. Arguments are stated, not defended; conclusions are assumed, not reasoned towards; suggestive rhetorical questions are used as sufficient evidence; and false dichotomies abound.

For example, here is how Hovind ends a paragraph on the age of the Earth, without ever revisiting the point, like this:

"Why don’t we have people writing about kings that lived fifty thousand years ago? Why is it that all of recorded history happened in the last four thousand years?"

This illustrates two points. One: Hovind's use of suggestive rhetorical questions as evidence in and of themselves; and two: his inability to grasp a notion such as "before the invention of writing".

Another example of the lack of reflection is this:

"The Bible has never been proven wrong yet, and I believe it never will be."

And this:

” We will be there [in heaven] forever, which is a totally new dimension. I cannot explain it, because I don’t understand it. I just have to believe it”

Hovind believes much, if not most things throughout this text. No effort goes into thinking, reasoning, dissecting ideas and criticisms; everything is reduced to absolutist black-and-white dichotomies which are resolved by “just having to believe” one extreme. This is intellectual laziness, and an unwillingness for leaving behind simplicity. For instance:

"There are basically two choices in this argument. Choice number one is that the material universe that we see made itself out of nothing for no reason. Then, through a long process of evolution the different animals and man developed as we see them today.
Choice number two is that there is an infinite, all-powerful, all-wise God who created this universe that we see for some special reasons. There are those who try to make a middle ground position called theistic-evolution. This says that God created the matter and helped evolution along at critical points like the origin of life and things like that. That is an indefensible position.
The choices are either the universe made itself or God made it. Both are in the realm of religion."

And then there's the repetitiveness! Ye gods, the repetitiveness. Hovind restates the same three or four shibboleths again and again, as if every chapter were a stream of consciousness flowing back and forth between them. "Evolution is a religion"; "the bible is true"; "science ignores the bible and is therefore dumb"; "it makes me feel sad/upset ". Absolutely every single statement in this text is directly linked to at least one of these. That, I think, goes a long way towards explaining the enforced shallowness of much of Hovind’s ramblings.

Consequently, there is no larger structure to speak of, (almost) no organisation above the paragraph. It seems as if Hovind was thinking out loud and just wrote down where the thought process led him. The text meanders on and on, touching upon successive points that are only tangentially related, or that are suggested by a word he just used. If you read between the lines, you can tell in some sections that Hovind intended there to be some background theme or some overarching notion, but the connection is rarely made explicit. Chapters start off dealing with the subject introduced in the title, but tangents, repetitions and asides take over as Hovind moves further away from the title.

And so the text bloats. It meanders aimlessly, not just through unrelated ideas, but also through random genres. At some point, Hovind includes a poem he wrote. No, really.

"As I was thinking on this subject [God transcends the five senses], I wrote a poem to try to explain this, comparing blind men and atheists.

Two blind men argued well into the night
about the great question, “Is there really sight?”
Said one to the other (and quite fervently)
”There cannot be colors or else we could see!”
So take red and green and blue off the list.
If I cannot see them, they must no exist
[... 46 lines...]
To deny His existence is really absurd.
You’ll have to believe Him and trust in His Word."

And that is not the only time Hovind pulls toe-cringing tricks like this. Earlier in the text he includes an indignant letter to the editor that he wrote himself as supporting evidence for his cause -- evidently it saves him the effort of reworking that material.

And finally: for a text claiming to deal with issues in Christian education, there is very little in the way of discussion of issues in Christian education. The text in effect is a loosely connected series of diatribes against evolution, and a litany of unfounded statements glorifying "creation science". What any of this has to offer in terms of insights into or discussion of "Christian education" is anyone's guess. But I'll chalk that one up to the text being unfinished, and I'll leave it at that.

In short: the only link between the notion of a dissertation and this incoherent mass of non-text and non-sense is the title. No-one who has the slightest experience with post-adolescent education will even want to deem Hovind’s unedited and unconsidered effort worthy of any serious attention. It won’t even serve as a new lowest standard for dissertations: there simply is nothing to warrant a connection with anything in the academic world. ( )