[youtube 259r-iDckjQ]
Under the influence of four fundamental, unintelligent, forces of physics alone, atoms spontaneously rearrange themselves into science texts, spaceships, high speed computers and the internet on a planet. Try to imagine something which would more obviously violate the second law of thermodynamics. You can’t? No problem, according to Isaac Asimov, Richard Darkins, Daniel Styer and many others, there is no conflict with the second law because our planet is an open system, it receives energy from the sun, and anything can happen in an open system, no matter how improbable, without violating this law, as long as something is happening outside our open system which, if reversed, would be even more improbable. (If you don’t believe the argument is this silly, read this .) If we were to watch a tornado running backward, as in this embedded video, turning rubble into houses and cars, exactly the same argument could be made to say that this would not violate the second law: tornados receive their energy from the sun, so any decrease in entropy a backward-running tornado could cause is easily compensated by increases outside our open system. So they really are arguing, as I wrote 10 years ago, that anything can happen in an open system, without violating the second law, even though the very equations of entropy change upon which this counter-intuitive “compensation” argument is based do not support this, they actually support the common sense interpretation, as shown here.)
OK, well suppose the laws of physics in our universe were themselves fined tuned for life, to an incredible degree of precision. Our universe is closed, if there is anything outside, it could never, by definition of “universe”, affect what happens here; at least now you cannot appeal to something happening “out there” to explain the appearance of design here, can you? You can?? Well, is there anything that could happen, on our Earth, or in our universe, that would falsify the conclusions of opponents of design like Asimov and Dawkins? If so, please tell me what it would take.
And I thought the reason intelligent design was not science is that it was “unfalsifiable.”