The flaws in such an example should be obvious:
1. The reason why it is foolish to suggest that the next marble would be red is because it is massively improbable for a red marble not to show up in the first 990 000 outcomes if there are any red marbles in the barrel. but what does that correspond to when we come back to the case of Adam and Eve?? That if they existed there is almost 100% probability that we should have discovered their bones or something by now? That's just nonsense. People who claim that Adam and Eve existed are not clinging to a remote probability that out of a 'barrel' of scientific evidence we have nearly exhausted there must be a single piece establishing the existed of Adam and Eve - on the contrary we're making an assertion about a time period for which we have no scientific evidence.
2. The other problem with your analogy is that, as I alluded to in the first point, you are hinting that there is a finite quantity of ALL scientific evidence which we have almost exhausted. If there are a billion marble in the barrel then we haven't even scratched the surface of a single one. It's like if someone asserts that there was a unique golden fish somewhere in the world a million years ago, and a fisherman says, "I go fishing everyday and I haven't come across anything like that".
3. There is also the implict notion in your analogy that scientists never cling to remote probabilities. That's also incorrect. Just consider the project of the University of California, called Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI); they attempt to analyze the radio telescope data coming in from space to detect signals from extraterrestrial life forms. The probability of detecting such signals out of the massive, vast universe of signals is next to nothing, and yet they engage in this project. How about a more familiar example? Evolutionists agree that the mathematical probabilities involved in abiogenesis are also next to nothing, yet most assert that it happened.
4. Lastly, you've provided me with an example of probability whereas it doesn't apply at all to the case of belief in Adam and Eve. Is there any conceivable way for us to assess the probability of their existence? No, there is not. There are an infinite number of possibilities, we have no way of knowing what is the reality solely on the basis of scientific evidence. In this regard especially, my example was a dozen times more accurate as there is no way for us to asses the probability of whether the sequence we have been presented with is the fibonacci sequence or an arithmetic sequence or perhaps any of a number of more complex sequences or series. Here's another: {1, 2, 3, 3.75, 4.21875, 4.482421875...}. This is a much better analogy because for each piece of evidence (numerical term) there are an infinite number of possibilties as opposed to two (red and black) and there are a number of possible patterns, in science we would incline towards the most parsimonious of them.
Would it make a difference if you knew 1000 terms of a sequence and yet there were still dozens of possibilties? Consider this example:
If I say that the expression n^2 +n + 41 generates a prime number when n is the set of positive integers, you could start testing the formula out and you woud find out that it works flawlessly.. until you get to 41, at which point it fails. One might be inclined to think that if an expression works for forty terms it is most probable that it will continue to work, but that's not applicable here since this isn't an issue of probability.
And that is why the example I gave with the fibonacci sequence was a suitable example. And consider that compared to the ocean of scientific evidence awaiting us, we have barely scratched the surface - comparable to knowing three terms out of a sequence.
Do genetic simmilarities mean that it is any more probable that creation is false? No they do not. What then is the position on the theory of evolution? Consider another example; Suppose we know that the following ordered pairs are generated by a function: (1,1), (9,1), (13,1), (17,1), (29,1), (41,1), (101,1). One may make a fair conclusion that the function in question is simply f(x)=1. We would find numerous more points to support this and it would seem to work very well, but the reality of the matter might be that the function is f(x)=sin(90x) [degrees]. Just like the first function, the theory of evolution can be very helpful to explain many aspects of biology and allow us to analyse others with greater precision. It should be taken for what it is - a scientific tool, not a statement in the interest of truth. Scientists know now that classical physics is flawed and contradicts experimental evidence - but it is still used everywhere and still taught in the education system. We trust it enough for the construction of all modern architecture, the design of all new innovative technologies, the latest plans for space exploration, and so on. Why? because on the macroscopic level
it works. It is a scientific tool. Currently scientists are racing to discover a 'grand unifying theory' which will put all these tools together in a coherent fashion.
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