[jlogajan]

Dembski explains in detail how irreducible complexity is determined.

Yeah, he makes up odds for things that have already occurred. Most people can understand the folly of that.

For instance, calculate the odds that at this moment I just picked up a pencil. Using Dumbowski's method, he'd compute a series of improbabilities and say that the chance of me picking up a pencil just then is 1 in 10^76.

Of course, I did pick up the pencil, so there is no probability calculation that matters. It is a certainty. It already happened. Applying probability to prove it couldn't or didn't happen is hilariously inane.

But that's all ID has. Too bad for them.

[cookcounty]

"Yeah, he makes up odds for things that have already occurred. Most people can understand the folly of that."

But lots of us can't understand it.

The example of your intelligent mind choosing to pick up a pencil is not a particularly cogent argument for the power of random non-intelligent processes.

How about this: You come to my house and find 10,000 pennies on the driveway, all facing heads up. Then I tell you they got that way by my flipping them out the window.

You express your skepticism about my flippping the coins.

Then I explain: 'You can't argue with it. It's already happened!

[cookcounty]

I hear this "you can't calculate the odds for things that have already happened," but that's nonsense. In the case of the 10,000 heads-up pennies on the driveway, YOUR only argument against randomness would be a calculation of odds---even though the pennies were already there when you arrived!

In other words, only an idiot would NOT try to calculate the odds of this past event.