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DanielLC comments on Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion

5 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 01 December 2012 05:00AM

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Comment author: DanielLC 01 December 2012 06:50:59PM 1 point [-]

He's not entirely wrong. Essentially, the more evidence you find of the Earth being more than 4000 years old, the more evidence you have against a non-deceiving god having created it 4000 years ago. If there's a 0.1% chance that a god will erase all evidence of his existence, then we can only get 20 bits of evidence against him.

The problem is most likely that he's overestimating the probability of a god being deceitful (conjunction fallacy), and that he's forgetting that it's equally impossible to find evidence for such a god (conservation of expected evidence).