If you're going to argue, at LEAST get your scientific laws right. Newton's third law of motion != second law of thermodynamics.
Anyway, what's already said has been said - invalid not even just because the earth is not a closed system, but also because life does in fact increase the entropy of the system because of the heat waste that results from life.
Strike 1: You used an ad-hominium attack, which invokes the first law of fallacious arguments (i.e. when the arguer resorts to personal attacks, he or she is doing so in order to cover up the weakness in his or her own argument), therefore, that is 1 mark against you and others who decided to jump on this "straw man" you created, namely the declaration that just because I got my laws of physics temporarily confused, my entire argument is invalid, which is not the case, when the error in terminology is corrected. I MAY have gotten the NAME of the law wrong, however, I did not get the law itself wrong. Therefore that is TWO strikes in the logical fallacy game. Care to go for 3?
The only reason I got somewhat confused was that I had about 5 minutes to get to class when I made that post, and therefore did not have sufficient time to double-check my facts.
Now to the next part of your (and the others who responded.. please do not think I'm picking on you.. It's just that your counter-argument was better worded and thought out than most of the others' variation on this theme) counter-argument:
Yes, the Earth is not a completly closed system in and of itself, but it is part of another semi-closed system, namely the solar system, and this solar system is part of yet another system known as the Milky Way Galaxy, which is part of the ultimate closed system: the Known Universe. Where your (and many other athiests' arguments) fall apart is to try treating the different branches of science as separate from each other, when they are all tied together, both by where they overlap and in the chains of causality back to whereever everything comes from. For the theory of evolution to be able to stand on its own merits, it must also take into consideration the laws of physics and chemistry in addition to biology. FUTHERMORE, it needs to also take into consideration the whole evolution of the universe itself, as well as the mathematical probability of anything like this happening in the first place.
Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the odds of life originating by chance from some organic primordial slime (this calculation is based on the chance that 2000 enzyme molecules will be formed simultaneously from their component amino acids on a single specified occassion) is 1 in 10 to the power of 40,000 (in otherwords 1 with 40,000 zeros behind it), or as he so aptly said that it is
"as ridiculous and improbable that a tornado blowing through a junkyard may assemble a Boeing 747."
Still, I have yet to hear ONE good argument why life itself has increased in order and complexity, even as its environment goes the other way (and then, too so does the organism itself, once life has ended), even taking in to account the "explanation" that life does so at the expense of the system (as someone has just said a few posts earlier). By all LOGICAL explanations, life should not have arisen at all, and even if it did, then it would have stayed at the simple, easy to sustain level of single-celled bacteria... Just think about it: Bacteria can survive in a vaccum (as long as they have something to eat), they can survive in extreme environments that would kill more complex organisms in a matter of minutes, they can hibernate for decades, and when food and moisture become available, they can reproduce so fast that a single bacterium would become millions in a matter of hours.
THEREFORE, from a pure, evolutionary perspective, bacteria fit the criteria of natural selection better than anything else, and therefore, again, all probability would be for life staying as simple, tough, bacteria rather than evolving into more complicated forms (again, this is leaving out the insurmountable odds against it occurring from chance in the first place as well as the conflict with the 2nd law of thermodynamics), since more complex life forms aren't near as tough as bacteria are, and therefore would have less chance of surviving long enough to pass on their DNA.....
UNLESS someone or something was guiding the whole business (which chaos math seems to indicate). The best illustration of this I heard from Dr. Zacharias describing how those fancy Indian cloths (can't remember what they're calle at the moment) are made: The master weaver has the intricate pattern set before him, as well as the spools of silk thread used to weave the various colors into the cloth. His apprentice sits on the floor below his master and operates the shuttle and loom while the master gives a nod or gesture here and there to let the apprentice know what he should do. The apprentice, though, won't know what the pattern is until the cloth is finished, and that is how I believe it is with us and God (only a far, far greater difference in knowledge and understanding). He's the master who has the design for the universe and is weaving its tapestry with time, matter and life, while we are the apprentices who can only see a small part of the overall pattern that exists.
Xannick: the reason I don't usually post in OT is because of people like Masquerouge, who seem to be only capable of attacking or belittling other people without providing a good, solid counter-argument. (that goes for you, too, TLC... You haven't found a hole in my argument, you only helped confirm it, since your "open" system of life is part of a closed system, therefore it is under the rules of that closed system as well... Not to mention you are also guilty of the ad-hominium attack fallacy as well...)
