Originally posted by googlefudge
Ack. That's not good.
I am more than willing to try again if my first post was unclear...
Could you give me a hint as to where it was I lost you?
It would help to know where to start in reformulating the argument.
Sorry for the delay in response.
Firstly, I owe you an apology. I forget that some peope really care about the quality of their posts, and my comment 'I don't understand a word' of what you said was not intended as a criticism, nor of course is it true.
I gave up maths and science at 16 and it was simply intended as an expression of the difficulty I have in following some of content in your posts. That does not mean your posts are unclear - just that I lack the knowledge to understand them easily sometimes.
So, for example, terms like 'probablilty mass', 'short scale', 'Bayesian theory' etc mean nothing to me and when I google these kind of terms, the explanation is usually even more complex. So when you are presented with a few of these in one post, you understand why I said 'What he said'.
Of course, it is possible to try and piece together the bones of the argument from context, so I thought I would try and rephrase it in my own terms to see if I have got the gist (with a due sense of trepidation):
The universe appears, according to the available scientific evidence, to be 13.77 billion years old.
OdBod’s contention, based on a ‘vision from God’, is that:
• the universe is, in fact, one hour old;
• it was created with the appearance of being 13.77bn years old; and
• such a contention cannot be refuted.
As no-one is arguing that the universe is older than 13.77bn years, the debate is about where within this period (‘potential creation period’ or PCP) the universe was or might have been created.
There is no evidence to support the view that OdBods ‘vision’ was anything more than a delusion.
There is therefore no evidence to support the view that the universe was created one hour ago, any more than any other particular hour in the PCP.
In the absence of such evidence, the chances of the universe actually having been created one hour ago is:
(1/number of hours in the PCP) * (Probability of universe created looking old)
However, for argument’s sake, I will accept that the universe was, indeed, created looking old.
This nonetheless means that the maximum chance of the universe having been created one hour ago is approximately 120,000 billion to one.
This means that evidence required to establish the premise in the OP must be sufficient to overcome a prior probability of 120,000 billion to one. No evidence has been offered that this is the case.
It is not possible to base one’s beliefs, or live one’s life, on something for which there is no evidence and which has a maximum probability of 120,000 billion to one of being correct.
As otherwise we would need to allow for the possibility that one of RJHinds’ postings on evolution is worth reading.
And then where would we be?
For this reason above all else, the contention in the OP is considered refuted.
Interested to know if this is basically correct.
Oh, and you will note that I have had the audacity to look at this in terms of hours. Not sure whether this is appropriate, but my logic was that it was unlikely that anyone saying the universe was created an hour ago means somewhere between 59-61 mins ago. But I may have missed the point.
But I didn't do it in terms of planck time units because, let's be honest, you were just showing off there.
😉
God created everything one hour ago!
11 Feb '13 22:46
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