Which is exactly my point--once the ball is in the hole, the "odds against" it landing in that particular hole are irrelevant. And given that we're here, calculating the so-called odds against our being here are an empty exercise. I think I understand that much pretty well.
That was coyoteman's strawman. The odds of life forming based upon certain initial conditions is not an empty exercise.
You're starting with the presupposition that the ball did get in the whole by a certain method.
But we don't know empirically that the ball actually got into the hole by the proposed method.
But remember that we are like detectives who did not witness the incident, and are trying to determine it based on small facets of fact. The fact that the incident happened is not inherently proof that it happened a certain way.
When a golfer tells me that he hits a ball x number of feet and lands it right down in the hole, the number of feet matters. If he says 20 feet, I would be correct to believe him if I've found him to be an honest fellow. But if he says he hit it from 25 miles away, and got it right in the hole, then as a detective I am this time quite correct to consider the odds of the golfer's swing actually getting it into the hole, since there are other ways the ball could have been put in.
It's not that we're considering the likelihood of something happening when it's already happened, but rather we're considering the likelihood of whether it happened a certain way.
-Jesse