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DanielLC comments on Open Thread, December 1-15, 2012 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Someone smart recently argued that there's no empirical evidence young earth creationists are wrong because all the evidence we have of the Earth's age is consistent either hypothesis that God created the earth 4000 years ago but designed it to look like it was much older. Is there a good one-page explanation of the core LessWrong idea that your beliefs need to be shifted by evidence even when the evidence isn't dispositive as versus the standard scientific notion of devastating proof? Right now the idea seems smeared across the Sequences.
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).