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/* Questionable Probabilities */ new section
Why not? [[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:12, 28 June 2010 (EDT)
== Questionable Probabilities ==
''If each of the 25 counterexamples provided here (as of June 28, 2010) has merely a 10% chance of being valid, which is certainly an underestimate, then the probability that the Earth is billions of years old is only 7%. From another perspective, these counterexamples demonstrate that the Earth must be young with 93% probability.''
This seems to be modeled after [[Counterexamples to Evolution]]:
''Moreover, if there is merely a 5% chance that each of these counterexamples is correct (and the odds are far higher than that), then the odds that these counterexamples are all incorrect and that evolution is true is infinitesimally small (only a 6% chance that evolution is true with 54 possible counterexamples).''
There are quite a few problems with these statements:
*Why 10% in the first case, but only 5% in the second? Is it that otherwise these counterexamples demonstrate that the Earth must be young with probability of 72% - and that value isn't convincing enough?
*Where do these probabilities come from? Is there a source which utters statements of which one in ten (or one in twenty) is correct?
*To assume that all these counterexamples are '''independent''' is ''very'' problematic!
*Generally, these counterexamples don't make predictions about unknowns, so, the validity of a statement like ''The moon is receding from the Earth at a rate that would have placed it too close to the Earth merely a billion years ago, causing tidal catastrophes and other problems, and colliding with the Earth before that'' can be calculated at this very moment: The probability that this counterexample is correct is ''zero'' as the statement is wrong.
I won't delete these ''"calculations"'', but I'll add <nowiki>{{fact}}</nowiki> tags to give the authors (or others) the opportunity to state their lines of reasoning: So, why are these probabilities reasonable estimates, and why are the ''odds far higher than that'' resp. why are these ''underestimates''?
[[User:FrankC|FrankC aka ComedyFan]] 11:03, 29 June 2010 (EDT)
