Parable of the candle - should million/billion year dating be taught as fact?

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Like I've said before, and I'll say it a thousand times, if God made man a mature man instantly, He could make a mature earth (wilh all evidence pointing toward a mature earth) instantly.

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The evidence doesn't point to a simple functioning "mature" Earth. The Earth is full of evidence of events that have happened and evidence that it IS old that is not necessary for the Earth to be "mature" in a functional sense. It is not necessary for radiometric dating to work as it does. There is no need to plant fossils. There is no need to plant evidence of large meteor strikes and so on. Come to that God could make a planet that looks like the one described in Genesis 1 with a solid sky and with the sun and moon just lights in the sky. If God didn't create a world that looks like the one in Genesis 1 then why assume that the timescale of "creation" is the same as in Genesis 1 and all the physical evidence is just one of God's deceptions ?

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You misunderstand. The example you gave is used as induction through confirmation. If apples are true then we see apples but if we instead see oranges that doesn't mean apple-theory must be discarded

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You're relying on equivocation here, Mike. And that's logically invalid.If you disagree tell me how you can interpret the statement:"If the apple theory is true we must necessarily see apples" so that it is true AND so it can also be the case that the apple theory is true, yet we do not see apples.
(i.e. you need to show that A=>B, A and ~B can all be simultaneously true. And the truth table for implication shows that that is logically impossible).