>> OK, well how about chaos theory? That puts hard bounds on what can and
>> cannot be predicted. I should imagine that over the course of 4 billion
>> years, one single stray photon would probably be enough to perturb the
>> system sufficiently that it wildly diverges from your predictions.
>
> Unless you run your prediction simulation on the same "hardware" as the
> real thing.
>
> I can run some chaotic program on my PC and the results look pretty
> chaotic, yet I am then able to predict *exactly* the outcome if you run
> it again on your PC (assuming same CPU architecture etc).
>
> I can then be the intelligent designer, playing about with the initial
> conditions until I find something that looks nice. Then I can inform you
> the initial values and you get to see the nice outcome too.

Computer systems are designed to be predictable.

The trouble with unpredictable systems such as the Earth's atmosphere is 
that arbitrarily tiny perturbations of the initial state yield huge 
divergences in the end result.

If I set my Earth up the same way as your Earth, but with a 10^-47 error 
in wind speed in one place, the weather patterns of my Earth will 
rapidly diverge from the weather patterns you got.

On top of all that, the Earth has been here for a few billion years. 
Where did the designer find the time (and space?) to rerun their 
simulation countless hundred trillion times to get it all to work out? 
The only really plausible explanation is a designer "outside" of the 
universe - the old "the universe is a computer simulation on somebody's 
desk" theory.

In short, to make the implausible ID theory work, you need to postulate 
even more radical theories such as the designer running the universe as 
a computer simulation...

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