Young Earth Creationists Whipsawed By IRS

When I write about some Tax Court decisions, the title “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up” seems to be called for. I don’t use it, because it would get old pretty quickly and I can’t have that. Speaking of things getting old, that is a behind the scenes question in the recent case of Jo Delia Hovind. She and her husband Kent E Hovind were interested in the age of the earth. I’m not a close student of this so forgive me if I use wikipedia here. Apparently radiometric evidence, whatever that is, puts the age of the earth at 4.54 billion years plus or minus 1 per cent. Scientists. They could be off by as much as 45 million years, by their own account, and they think they having given us an answer. Fortunately we have documentary evidence that narrows the range considerably. There are some issues with translation and the like that create a little bit of uncertainty, but when you add up all the begats in Genesis, you get to about 6,000 years. Might be off by a couple of centuries, but it is a much narrower range.

Six thousand years is a pretty long time, but not nearly enough for evolution to work. Also it means that people and dinosaurs must have been running around at the same time. Well everybody knows that. Don’t you remember Fred Flinstone’s pet Dino?

At any rate the Hovinds decided to teach people about this stuff. They started Creation Science Evangelism, a non-denominational ministry, which focused on the distribution of educational material. Then there was Dinosaur Adventure Land

Turns out there is money to made in promoting young earth creationism. The Hovinds became tax paying job creators. Only they had some trouble with the tax paying part. They found a way to formalize not paying taxes: