Jeff Overbeck says he isn't convinced by any one piece of Kent Hovind's evidence that God created the world in six 24-hour days.

"I think it's the conglomeration of everything" that makes the presentation so compelling, Overbeck said Sunday as Hovind completed about two hours of lectures on creation science at Lakeside Baptist Church in Salem.

"It makes perfect sense with our beliefs and what the Bible teaches," Overbeck said, and Hovind "backed it up with facts and modern science."

Hovind, a Pensacola, Fla.-based evangelist, speaks hundreds of times a year on the subject of so-called young-Earth creationism. He heads the Creation Science Evangelism ministry and Web site (www.drdino.com), as well as the Dinosaur Adventure Land museum and park in Pensacola.

He continues his lectures at Lakeside Baptist today with a program for home schoolers at 10 a.m., then two public sessions at the church beginning at 7 p.m. That session, he said, will focus on "lies in the textbooks" typically used in public schools.

"I'm not anti-evolution," Hovind said after Sunday morning's sessions, "I'm anti-lies."

Hovind contends that most science texts are teaching children untruths when they contend that the world is 4.5 billion years old, that human beings have "vestigial" organs or structures that are no longer needed because of evolutionary change, and that dinosaurs roamed the Earth 200 million years before humans.

Instead, Hovind presented a machine-gunfire presentation of slides, graphics and quotes, as well as a healthy barrage of jokes to the 750 or so in attendance Sunday morning.

"Why did God make Adam first? Because he didn't want any advice on how to do it."

But while the congregation laughed, he kept up a steady stream of examples that he believes - and most in the audience seemed to agree - show that his literalistic reading of the Bible is correct.

According to that timetable, many ancient figures lived hundreds of years, beginning with Adam 6,000 years ago. All of us come from Adam and Eve, he said, whose children married each other to produce their offspring.

Some 2,000 years after Adam, Hovind said, came the flood survived by Noah and seven other humans, as well as all of the various "kinds" - not species - of animals that God had created. Hence, one pair of dogs was sufficient to have survived to produce all the various breeds of dogs, wolves and other doglike animals that live today.

Hovind believes there has been plenty of time to repopulate the Earth from those eight human beings to the present day's 6 billion - "The Earth is not overcrowded, by the way. If it's overcrowded where you are, move."

He noted a series of scientific and physical phenomena that he says are signs of a relatively young Earth. He believes, for instance, that because scientists date the age of the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the Sahara desert in Africa at about 4,000 years, that is evidence for the flood of Noah's day.

The evangelist unleashed some of his greatest scorn, however, for those who believe in the big-bang theory of the universe's creation and the resultant notion that all life on Earth has evolved from simple single-celled organisms.

That idea, he said, should have no more credibility than the story of a frog who turned into a prince when kissed by a woman. "When the frog turns into a prince quickly, it's a fairy tale. When a frog turns into a prince slowly, that's evolution."

He urged the children in attendance to challenge their teachers when they say that something happened millions of years ago. "Kids, ask your teacher, 'Were you there?'"

"The only way to know for sure" about the ages of the universe and the Earth, he said, "is to ask the guy who made it."

For him, that would be Jesus, who he believes endorsed the chronology Hovind preaches. "Jesus is either lying, stupid or right."

While some other creationists are willing to accept a theory of God-guided evolution after creating the universe billions of years ago, Hovind said such a God would be "cruel, wasteful and retarded."

Hovind contended after the lectures that creationism "is winning big-time at the grass-roots level" for popular acceptance. He says more than half the country believes that the Earth is less than 10,000 years old and that it was created in six days.

Among scientists, however, the reverse is true. Even a cursory search of the Internet yields hundreds of anti-Hovind Web sites, many of which attempt to refute or rebut each of the points raised in his lectures and on the video seminar series on which they are based.

There are numerous alternative explanations, for instance, for Hovind's theories, such as the moon would have orbited impossibly close to the Earth's surface hundreds of thousands of years ago; humans and dinosaurs co-existed; the Gulf of Mexico should be filled with silt if the Earth is really billions of years old.

Critics frequently also cite the fact that Hovind's doctorate is not in science and comes from an unaccredited Christian university.

Even among other creationists, some of Hovind's positions are occasionally seen as counterproductive and radical.

The evangelist doesn't let any of that faze him. "There are thousands of skeptics and scoffers," he said, whom he's always happy to debate.

He does that frequently, he said, but spends most of his time as he is this weekend, "strengthening the faithful, giving them armor to carry on the battle" against evolutionary theory.

Because he believes the public school curriculum is "not fixable in the short term," Hovind recommends home schooling.

That's advice Jeff Overbeck and his wife, Christie, have already taken. Their 7- and 11-year-old boys will be among those who attend Hovind's morning session today.

Hovind's view of creation "makes a lot more sense than the big bang and that we are all just here randomly," Christie Overbeck said.