"It is no more likely that the tenth marble will be blue than it is that it will be red."

Thank you, Mongeese, for this wonderful debate. The best of luck! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ I. To begin by introducing the Black Swan problem. This refutes many of my opponent's points: If all of the swans a watcher of these birds has ever observed are white, they might make the conclusion that all swans are white. But of course, this form of induction (which is the exact course my opponent is also taking) and is clearly unfalsifiable. Inductive inferences have the unfortunate problem of making a general claim from a couple of individual cases. This, of course, is a slap in the face to logic. In fact, shockingly to our swan watcher, there are black swans (in Australia), and finding just one of them will falsify this claim. II. My opponent can not make the claim, "In any event, the number of blue marbles and red marbles in the world are different. Therefore, an equal chance of pulling either one out of a bag is highly unlikely," because my opponent can not prove that there are not equal amounts of blue and red marbles in the world. Unbeknownst to him, there may be millions and millions of red marbles in the world, and only 9 blue marbles. III. Also, my opponent can not use bags of blue marbles he finds online as his proof that bags of blue marbles exist while still claiming that I can not prove that red marbles exist. In similar fashion to my opponent, proof of red marbles existence: http://www.photoradar.com... If my opponent wishes to deny this evidence of the existence of red marbles, he must deny his evidence of the existence of bags of solely blue marbles. IV. The repetition of an event does not guarantee that the same thing will happen again. This is quite evident in the real world and even at the base level of all reality (like quantum physics). Reality has so many factors bumping into one another that one can not guarantee anything, but only hope to apply the scientific concept of falsifiability to a problem. Until falsified, the probability of there being a red marble, and the probability of there being a blue marble, are equally likely if one is properly using scientific theory. V. An example of there being one red marble while there being nine blue marbles would be for a type of game (much like billiards has a single un-numbered ball). My opponent can't rule out this suggestion. VI. I do completely agree with my opponent when he says that the last marble could be green, or yellow, or any other color. I believe that it is equally likely that the last marble is red, blue, yellow, green, or multi-colored. This doesn't disprove my claim at all. Just because it is equally likely that the last marble may be yellow does not mean that it is not equally likely that it might be red as well! VII. My opponent's probabilities point doesn't disprove my suggestion what so ever. He claims, "Therefore, even if you were to assume that there is an equal chance of a given bag having ten blue marbles or nine blue marbles and one red marble, if a red marble existed in the bag, it most likely would have been revealed by now." But, just because it is "most likely" to have come out by now, it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Say you really did have a bag of 9 blue marbles and 1 red. And say, as you pull the marbles out, you, by chance, don't pull out the red marble until the very end. Just because you pulled out the red marble at the end does not mean that it doesn't exist! It's still in the bag, but unfortunately for it, chance just happened to have the person pulling marbles grabbing a blue one until the very end. VIII. My opponent does not know who put the bag of marbles together, what their intentions were, and what marbles they had at hand. It is impossible for my opponent to prove that the maker of the bag of marbles had only blue marbles. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ To conclude, my opponent has not successfully refuted that the likeliness of the marble being red (or green, or yellow, or purple for that matter!) is equal to the likeliness of there being a final blue marble in the bag. The problem of induction and the concept of falsifiability are on the side of equal chance.