> Dembski and Behe maintain the flagellum, being irreducible
Which it's not.
http://www.millerandlevine.com/km/evol/design2/article.html
Since they are wrong from first principles, the rest of their arguement can be dispensed with.
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winna!
According to Dembski, the detection of "design" requires that an object display complexity that could not be produced by what he calls "natural causes." In order to do that, one must first examine all of the possibilities by which an object, like the flagellum, might have been generated naturally. Dembski and Behe, of course, come to the conclusion that there are no such natural causes. But how did they determine that? What is the scientific method used to support such a conclusion? Could it be that their assertions of the lack of natural causes simply amount to an unsupported personal belief? Suppose that there are such causes, but they simply happened not to think of them? Dembski actually seems to realize that this is a serious problem. He writes: "Now it can happen that we may not know enough to determine all the relevant chance hypotheses [which here, as noted above, means all relevant natural processes (hvt)]. Alternatively, we might think we know the relevant chance hypotheses, but later discover that we missed a crucial one. In the one case a design inference could not even get going; in the other, it would be mistaken" (Dembski 2002, 123 (note 80)).
What Dembski is telling us is that in order to "detect" design in a biological object one must first come to the conclusion that the object could not have been produced by any "relevant chance hypotheses" (meaning, naturally, evolution). Then, and only then, are Dembski's calculations brought into play. Stated more bluntly, what this really means is that the "method" first involves assuming the absence of an evolutionary pathway leading to the object, followed by a calculation "proving" the impossibility of spontaneous assembly. Incredibly, this a priori reasoning is exactly the sort of logic upon which the new "science of design" has been constructed.
Not surprisingly, scientific reviewers have not missed this point – Dembski's arguments have been repeatedly criticized on this issue and on many others.
Bravo!
The counterproof in your link is not terribly convincing.
Secondly, the idea of irreducible complexity is physical and mathematical fact. There are many systems in physics, chemisty, mathematics, engineering, etc. that are irreducibly complex. To maintain that biological systems are the only systems where irreducible complexity doesn't exist is an unwarranted assumption.