Yes, but that is exactly what I meant with atheists believing in magic – they must believe in miraculous properties of matter that science has not shown to exist in actual matter. We know how matter behaves, and it does not behave that way.
And if some kind of physical system existed which does not follow the second law of thermodynamics, why should it turn into something where the law does hold?
Moreover, consider the law of conservation of matter and energy. If the system constantly cranks out universes where the second law of thermodynamics does hold (even if those are just a fraction of all universes produced at a given time), some of it constantly is turned into something that decays over time. This constantly diminishes the portion of matter and energy in the system that does not decay. So if the system was in the business of cranking out universes from all eternity (here to be understood as an infinite amount of time – time as measure of motion --, not changeless timelessness), where even small fractions of the whole tremendously accumulate over time if the process gets repeated over and over, it would all have become worn down into decay eventually.
Of course, you could invoke a physical system where the law of conservation of matter and energy does not hold. But you see that we come here from one special pleading invoking miraculous properties to another, with no end in sight.
Given what I said above, there are severe caveats to this, but you mentioned “all other things being equal (ie. excluding fine tuning for life)”, and this of course is the problem, the fine-tuning issue.
It barely lessens its potency. It would have to be an incredibly sophisticated device if it would be able to crank out universes varying from one another with such fine-graded differences in physical parameters that our universe would become statistically inevitable on a purely random basis, without someone/something that makes the choices. Such a device would shout out for design.
As physicist Stephen Barr says:
“having laws that lead to the existence of domains of a sufficiently rich variety to make life inevitable would *itself *qualify as an anthropic coincidence. There seems to be no escape. Every way of explaining anthropic coincidences scientifically involves assuming the universe has some sort of very special characteristics that can be thought of as constituting in themselves another set of anthropic coincidences.”
I agree that the physical system as necessary being sounds attractive at first. Yet while such a system sounds superficially attractive – and I agree with you that it does – ultimately it simply does not work. Eternal matter has tremendous difficulties, and a designing intelligence is required.
So when you sum up all the issues, It is not even remotely a contest between a necessary physical system and God. The final nail in the coffin of atheism then is the argument from reason, that rationality is impossible without free will.
That is how I see it.
