Against the ID arguments based on improbability and specification some evolutionists oppose the “snowflake objection”, which sounds something like this: “Also snowflakes are highly improbable, yet it snows, then the ID arguments fail”.
Such objection is baseless. To understand why we must first state a premise. Probability is not an absolute concept or measure. The probability of an event must always be contextualized. It must be related to the whole scenario, the boundary conditions, and — mainly — to some potential cause or generator of that kind of events. Example: suppose I ask “What is the probability of hitting the center of the target?”. Such question, as stated, is perfectly undefined. It says nothing about the context. The more important issue is: what or who is the potential hitter of the target? If the hitter is a person launching a stone 100 miles away the probability is 0. If it is a meteorite falling down the sky, the probability is infinitesimal. If it is me, by my self-constructed toy sling, the probability is near 0. If it is the olympic champion archer it is almost 1. If it is a carpenter nailing the center by a hammer it is exactly 1. To sum up, depending on the context and the events producer, the probability value spans the entire numeric range from 0 to 1.
That said, if we contextualize the snowflake objection and describe the scenario we see that, contrary to the objection, snowflakes are highly probable. In fact, first, in general when the weather conditions are apt, the natural laws produce snowflakes with probability near 1. Second, in particular, also if evolutionists would mean a specific pattern of snowflake, since their producer is able to generate billions of them in a second, it is likely that any particular pattern is generated. In both cases the core of the objection is rotten.
IDers always specify the scenarios and the potential producer of the events they examine and about which they want to infer design. Example, before the bacterial flagellum, they say that it is improbable that natural laws acting on sparse atoms could produce it. The scenario is well defined. Therefore the false analogy between snowflakes and flagella implicit in the objection doesn’t apply at all. The snowflakes generated by the physical laws are highly probable, while the flagella generated by random natural forces operating on dispersed atoms are highly improbable.
In conclusion, when evolutionists, contra ID, repeat their ritornello “Improbable things do happen”, I suggest to reply asking to specify the context in details please, to see if the best explanation about the cause of the events is chance & necessity or intelligence.