Can anyone - even God - be both improbable and impossible at the same time?

Catching up on my inbox here, my friend David Rice III writes me to say, regarding the debate between Alister McGrath and Richard Dawkins on the probability of God's existence (May 30, 2007):

... Dawkins wants to have it both ways when it comes to assessing the probabilities for the existence of God. Here's how it goes..... On the one hand he said that God is not just improbable but impossible when it comes to the status of theistic EXPLANATIONS of certain phenomena (he said flat out that theism CANNOT serve as an explanation) but then he turns right around and claims that God is also an improbable being.

So that while God's existence might not be strictly-speaking impossible, theistic explanations are. But if you were to press Dawkins on WHY theistic explanations are impossible it would be precisely because God does not exist and hence has a probability of zero. So there are two different issues at play here. One is the existence of God per se and the other is the existence of the explanatory role that God provides, or has provided, for certain events or characteristics of the world. Dawkins juggles both of these ideas in the air but both of them refutes the other. If God's existence is improbable then it won't do to say that theistic explanations are impossible, they would also be improbable by extension and hence possible. But if theistic explanations are impossible then the existence of God is also impossible. It's a shell game.

But David, these people have been back-pedalling, stonewalling, and playing both ends against the middle ever since the Big Bang was first explained (1927). They need to be in a different universe. Heck, if I could make them one, I would do it tomorrow.

Key atheist argument is a shell game, philosopher says

I see that a number of people were interested in ”The teacher, the kids, and the atheist lobby“ (= what a Canadian high school philosophy teacher says to students about the recent atheist lobby).

Well, then, you might also be interested in a friend’s comment on the key argument, “God’s existence is improbable.” David Rice III writes,

If God's existence is improbable then it won't do to say that theistic explanations are impossible, they would also be improbable by extension and hence possible. But if theistic explanations are impossible then the existence of God is also impossible. It's a shell game.

I replied,

One characteristic of the current malaise is that people like Dawkins are so seldom called on these obvious points. As long as a guy is bashing religion (especially the Christian one), it doesn’t seem to matter what fool thing he says.

In fairness, the same fate befell the Dalai Lama. He was invited to address a neuroscience conference a couple of years ago, and you should have HEARD the ignorant remarks, by supposedly intelligent people who thought they were being clever. (Fortunately, the conference didn’t buckle, and he did give the address. But so many administrators, faced with these problems, seem to be wearing a “Where should I go to surrender?” sign on their backs.)

Mario Beauregard and I talk about the Dalai Lama and the neuroscience conference in The Spiritual Brain