I guess I'm just wondering whether, in the DC Comics adaptation of the Amazing Adventures of Behe and Dembski, there's a parallel universe where their arguments make some kind of sense — a universe where certain biochemical structures really couldn't have evolved, and this could be shown mathematically. Otherwise it feels like the epistemological deck is already stacked in Darwin's favor, with nothing too unlikely for it.

(Of course, even if that is the case, that doesn't mean that evolution is unfairly unfalsifiable, or ID unfairly impossible to prove — just show us a Designer designing things, darn it! Proponentistism has been a movement in intellectual retreat for over a hundred years, not something that's been exponentially increasing its knowledge of the world the way actual biology has.)

Intelligent Design was conceived as a political strategy... a Trojan Horse... a red herring... a stalking horse... whose aim was/is to undermine science education and (ultimately) science itself via deception and the bamboozlement of school boards, legislators and their stupid, gullible, scientifically-ignorant constituency... i.e., Christians. Its claims are not scientific... they are merely sciencey-sounding bullshit.

Look up: 'wedge document'

What I'm starting to wonder is this: is there a "possible world" where a probability argument would hold up? In other words, is "true" irreducible complexity at least logically possible?

If not, then it's starting to seem like the counter to the probability argument isn't falsifiable. In other words, no matter what the genome of a given organism was, biologists could declare it perfectly feasible to have developed by chance.

Or to put it another way, at what point do you determine a poker player is in fact cheating — can this determination be made on the basis of extremely low probabilities?

I'm just saying this because that's usually the counter-counter argument — that life evolving by chance is like the same guy winning with exactly the same hand (down to the suit and rank) five games in a row. (Or the image, I don't know whose it is, of someone blindfolded before a firing squad, everyone shoots, and not a single bullet hits the guy.)

It would seem that there needs to be an imaginable point at which the IC argument holds water, even if that point is never actually reached.

[link] "Shuffle a deck of playing cards, and lay them out on a table. The probability of the sequence you see appearing is 1/52 for the first card, 1/52 x 1/51 at the second card, 1/52 x 1/51 x 1/50 by the third card and so on. The probability that you produced the sequence you just did is 1/52 x 1/51 x 1/50......x 1/3 x 1/2 x 1/1 ( more simply, 1/(52!) ), or 1.2398e-68 (which is an incredible 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000012398). How can this be?!? Maybe you are hallucinating and it did not actually occur?
You have just done something statistically impossible, trillions of times more unlikely than the formation of life (some say 1e-50 is the "impossibility threshold" instead, but we've beaten that as well). You could even do it six times before breakfast every day!"

Besides, there are so many things that indicate that they don't really believe.
If you put a gun to a Christian's head, if he really, truly believed he was going to heaven to be with his god, he should be thrilled, but that's not what they tend to do in those situations. They're scared just like the rest of us.
Likewise, if they fully believed the Bible, why are they unwilling to drink poison as Mark 16:18 says they can? Not to mention, why do they look before crossing a street? If it's all God's will, why try to preserve yourself? Suicide may be forbidden, but being murdered or dying of carelessness should be a good thing.

No matter how much I think about it, I can only conclude that nobody, or at least only the clinically insane, really believe in God(s). Now, I don't want to sound like those annoying "atheists believe in God, they just won't admit it"-idiots, but it's obvious that nobody fully trusts in god.

I remember when I was in the throes of religion deep down I knew it was all crap but because I invested so much time into it, I was carried away by the nonsense. I believe most people who profess creationism are the same, so the only way to get through to them is the way atheism got through to me, through scientific reasoning and other rational thought. Creationists are actually not ignoramuses the way Dawkins says in his latest book, they're just in a state of denial. Books like The Case for a Creator just give a little respectability to their irrational belief, just what Strobel is trying to achieve.

Of course, the possibility I am lying and only rolled "1" once is about 1 in 2, so the fact I'm telling the truth makes it twice as unlikely a result! On top of it all, a wind gust hit just as I rolled the 13, and those only occur about once every five minutes, or a probability of 1 in 288, added to the others, makes this roll so amazingly rare that there's no explanation OTHER than I was blessed by god. And it happened at 11:53 pm exactly, the odds of any given minute is 1:1440! Now that just seals the deal! My god-blessed dice skills must prove God exists!

Messing with probability theory is fun! Extra credit: determine the probability of exactly the events happening to everyone and thing on Earth, in one given week. Extra credit here is because God gave humans free will, so if we can will something that improbable (including atom movements!), it means irreducible complexity cannot ever lead to a god, since without any effort at all we and our world did something more improbable than St Patrick's ghost coming down to tell us the afterlife doesn't exist.

That more than one flaw can be pointed out in Behe's reasoning is not an argument in its favour. Even from a pure probability poker perspective, Behe gets it wrong, and Ebonmuse aptly points out.

But as most of us know, the genome of any organism alive today was not dealt randomly, it evolved over many generations from a predecessor which was presumably much simpler. I.e. it is the result of following a certain path, not from a random deal.

Arguing from a poker example that uses relatively huge probabilities is simply irrelevant. And I say that the poker probabilities are relatively huge because although the probability of any particular hand is low, the proportion of useful hands to all hands is high. If it weren't poker wouldn't be a game.

Where a "useful hand" is defined as a hand rated higher than those of your three opponents. Making the usual assumptions about a fair deck and no one cheating, the probability that the player in question will get a winning hand are exactly 1 in 4.