Repeat after me: Improbable IS NOT Impossible

I got a request to respond to look at this. It's yet another one of those innumerate jackasses arguing that god must exist, because life is too unlikely otherwise.

It's the same old crap, but with one interesting twist - this guy tries to provide an argument for why anything less probable than a specific level of improbability is absolutely physically impossible. In his own words:

In a previous post, I presented a logical, factual argument for the existence of God. But one of my readers, Seanny McShawn, took issue with my syllogisms, saying that I was simply making an argument “from incredulity”.

When someone tries to win an argument based on simple probabilities, this is called an “argument from incredulity.” This is a logical fallacy. In other words, the sheer unlikeliness of a scenario does not preclude its possibility and cannot be proof against it.

But was I arguing from “incredulity”?

The answer is, pretty much, "yes".

Physicists estimate that in our universe there are 10^80 particles. Mathematicians say that the mathematical level of absolute impossibility is 1 chance in 10^50.

Not any competent mathematician.

However, the physical level of absolute impossibility is 1 chance in 10^80, and here’s why:

On the basic level, probability is defined by the ‘particle’ example: finding a specially marked particle among 500,000 particles is beating odds of 1 in 500,000. In a universe that has 10^80 individual particles, the most improbable scenario is finding a specially marked particle in the entire universe. Due to the size of our universe, it is impossible to have a more improbable set of odds than 1 chance in 10^80. Anything that is more improbable than the most improbable is by all standards absolutely impossible.

I have never seen this particle example nonsense. But nonsense is what it is. It is, in fact, astoundingly easy to demonstrate.

Ready? Are you sure? Ok. Here goes:

adfjiopwqeruoipboisdupoqwerbjksggfiuqwerup9ujdknc
blkjdbfqlijwecna34kjvldjfghqiopewufnadsmvbviuhwro
wprotiudvncmbcxbnajkhgpqrjwopeporewgjvdlkfmfkpowe
ri3nwe9mfwkdgnguipewiofkxnvcvpuiweklhhjnjwrn9fpuo
isdhpvjpndjkgnewqhtrepiuwifjoxcjvkneqotiurhwepafk
makdlgnqwejrhpqfioudshnfeiqjhweiufh

That's 286 random characters, produced by pounding my hands on my keyboard, and then deleting any punctuation characters (because I'm too lazy to figure out how many unshifted characters there are on my keyboard, so I stuck to numbers and letters.) The odds of generating that particular string are 36^286. That's quote a bit less likely than 10^80. But guess what? It's possible!

Or, just to annoy the fundies, go get yourself a deck of Tarot cards. (Hey, they're good to have. There are some damned neat poker variants that you play with a Tarot deck, not to mention some funky solitaires.) A tarot deck has 78 cards. Shuffle the deck. Lay the cards out in order. The odds of that ordering? Less than 1 in 10^115. But entirely possible.

What is the probability of a solar flare taking a specific shape? Think of the trillions of trillions of particles in a flare, and the unique shape of each one. The probability of those shapes? Quite a bit worse than 1 in 10^80.

This one in 10^80 stuff is pure nonsense. It's just another attempt to create an arbitrary threshold beyond which we can say something is impossible.

He then goes on to repeat yet another variant of the "odds of life based on the probability of a particular protein" gibberish. I've covered that plenty of times on this blog; for example, my analysis of Berlinski's version of this argument here.

So this guy concludes with:

This is not an argument from incredulity. This is an argument from facts: cold, hard facts. Since any set of odds above 1 in 10^80 is absolutely impossible, random chance could not and did not produce life.

Except that it is an argument from incredulity, utterly lacking in cold, hard facts. In fact, it's trivially refuted by cold hard facts; and it's based on one of the most pathetic attempts I've seen so far to define "impossible" in terms of probability.