Thursday, December 22, 2005

A Bayesian argument against atheism

Since I don't believe there are any ways of getting objective antecedent probabilities, I guess I have to be counted among the skeptics concerning this argument. But it is interesting.

1 comment:

Andrew Staroscik said...

Ok so I won’t drone on and on about how silly this type of analysis is but 9% is a funny number to come up with. He did not really structure his question properly but isn’t one interpretation of his work that the null (life could not have arisen by chance) is rejected at the p<0.1 level? Those are pretty good odds. It reminds me that back in September Dembski gave less that 5% chance of the Dover decision coming down the way it did. Is there the slightest bit of irony here? The decision in the trial provides a real life demonstration of the fact that events Dr. ‘probability theory’ Dembski finds unlikely to happen, do in fact occur.

Of course Dembski’s statistical approach suffers from the same methodological flaws that this analysis does.

Have a great holiday everyone!