Darwin's Doubt: The Explosive Origin of Animal Life and the Case for Intelligent Design

by Stephen C. Meyer

If the conditional probability of the chance hypothesis, given the number of opportunities it has to occur, is less than ½, then it is more likely than not that the event will not happen by chance. It will be viewed as implausible—more likely to be false than true. Conversely, if the conditional probability of the chance hypothesis, given the number of opportunities it has to occur, is more than ½, then it is more likely than not that the event in question will occur by chance. It will be deemed plausible—more likely to be true than false. And, of course, the smaller the conditional probability associated with a hypothesis, the more implausible the hypothesis—the more likely the chance hypothesis is to be false than true.