Hovind's Web, and Spiders

I went back to Kent Hovind's web site at www.drdino.com, just to see what on earth the shattered remnants of his ministry was up to these days. Interestingly, the blog which used to be on the website is conspicuously missing, and any reference to Hovind's plight, erased. In point of fact, it was never highlighted much to begin with, and you always had to look very hard to see anything regarding it, but now, there's nothing to find. His son, Eric Hovind, is still giving talks, but at a far less brisk pace than his father did. One has to wonder if this is the end for Hovind's ministry altogether.

Still, I can't help but kick a bad man when he's down. I guess it's the impish prankster side of me. His website does still feature articles from time to time, and one of them illustrated spiders. The title of the article was, "Things that make evolutionists look silly: Spiders," and talked at length about, what else, spiders' marvelous complexity.

Now, I'll admit, spiders, like many other things about our world, are marvelously complex. They're intricately colored, highly adapted, spin several different types of web (often all at the same time), and execute amazing feats of endurance, jumping, and acrobatics. All that is true and good, as pointed out by the article's author (who was not, I believe, Hovind). But spiders are, every single one of them, carnivores, perfectly suited for hunting and killing insect prey. What sort of role could spiders possibly have played in a world predating the Fall of Adam & Eve in the presumed Garden of Eden?

According to the fundie-set, animals did not turn carnivore until after the Fall, and this only because it was a perversion of sin and Satan. But if so, what did spiders eat back then, exactly? It's hard to imagine spiders even existing in a Garden of Eden, much less subsisting on a diet of fruits or plants. And if they had a diet of that sort, what would be the purpose of a web? All the arguments about how amazing Spiders' silk is totally ignores the purpose that it serves: namely, to be spun into a web-net to trap and kill wayward bugs. Would such silk have any reason or purpose if spiders weren't carnivores?

The author of that article on Hovind's site, whoever it was, didn't think things through very well. Spiders make sense in an evolutionary world, red in tooth and claw. They make no sense in a Creationist world, where God is red in tooth and claw, either through direct commission, or through creating a Satan capable of doing such perversion. Certainly God let Satan do his very worst, and for that, he is to be held accountable.

So here's to spiders! Useful to us chiefly for two things: defeating creationists, and getting radioactive so that they can bite us and imbue us with superpowers!

Eric