I’m sorry, Richard, but this is where you lose me completely. When you start hand-waving away entire mathematical disciplines—statistics included—as irrelevant, you are descending deep into crackpot territory. I’ve made this point before already.
Yes, statistics can be abused. Yes, they can be distorted or twisted. But the correct response misuse is not disuse but proper use. The correct response to distortion and twisting of statistics is to point out, in mathematical terms, exactly where the distortion and twisting is taking place. To just hand-wave away the entire discipline as irrelevant is completely unwarranted.
And statistics can give you a degree of confidence so high that they are, to all intents and purposes, proving things. Especially when the probabilities you are talking about are far, far, far, far lower than one part in 10^{200,000}. To dismiss something such as that as not a fact is pedantic and unreasonable.
Yes Richard, you have. And I would respect your statement if I saw it in your actual posts. But you are arguing against far, far more than just specific aspects of the theory of evolution in practice.
You have objected to me pointing out that science has rules, as if that kind of line was some sort of childish playground talk. But every discipline has rules. Accountancy has rules. Law has rules. Modern languages have rules. Cooking has rules. Driving has rules. Medicine has rules. If science didn’t have rules, you would be able to claim that mermaids were evidence for a young earth, because treknobabble. Denouncing the fact that science has rules as “childish” is effectively demanding the right to make things up and invent your own alternative reality. In other words, it is demanding the right to tell lies.
And now you are objecting to the very concept of basic mathematics. Sorry, but when it gets to that point, I’m outta here.