In each case, the second law of thermodynamics plays a constructive role, generating complex but regular patterns. The same second law is also responsible for the fact that water freezes or evaporates, that minerals crystallize and form rocks, that radioactive materials decay, that glass is transparent but metal isn't. And all is based on statistical mechanics: chance made constructive through the law of large numbers.

Creationists tend to think of entropy as a measure of order, and thus are lead into lots of false analogies. The scientifically more appropriate interpretation is that of (microscopic) complexity: Formally, the entropy is the logarithm of the number of decisions needed to analyze a state down to the last detail - the more complex a state is the higher the entropy. If you pour milk into your coffee and stir, the entropy increases, but the final state is macroscopically as regular as you may want, a uniform grey combination of coffee and milk. But to pin down the details - where each molecule sits - has become much more difficult because of the mixing: the complexity increased.

In an open system, entropy need not increase, and (at fixed temperature and pressure) it often decreases! The second law of thermodynamics rather takes the form that the free energy decreases. This is one of the primary driving forces of what is called (a little misleadingly) self-organization - chaos turning into simple or complex order through the laws of statistical mechanics.

Crystals, formed in geological processes when molten minerals are cooled, automatically assume their regular and ordered shapes because these are the configurations of minimal energy. Even though the process leading to the final shapes is stochastic, i.e., with a chance component, the final form can be predicted deterministically by global optimization of the free energy.

Precisely the same kind of arguments (but with a vaguer concept of adaptivity in place of free energy) applies to biological evolution: Nature tends towards optimality as long as the boundary conditions are constant, and this explains to the satisfaction of most biologists why life is so well adapted - each ecological niche is forced by the second law to be populated by individuals where most of them are nearly optimal with respect to critical and constant boundary conditions. And when the boundary conditions change there is scope for development, just as when pressure or temperature change in a geological context.

More global optimization is involved in understanding the working of living cells: The way protein molecules fold into their biologically active state is determined by the same mechanism: different possible conformers compete for survival, and the law of large numbers guarantees that most of the molecules will be in the shape corresponding to the smallest energy - forcing the shape to be in a well-defined form that allows the molecules to be used as biological machines. The process is exactly the same as that postulated for evolution of life (and on good grounds, of course); the difference is that the conditions in a cell are so much more constant than those in our environment that it is much more predictable what shape results.

The possibilities of life are built in into the delicate mixture of deterministic and stochastic laws of nature. Which possibilities are realized are determined by the properties of the environment that carries out the plans of God through self-organization processes governed by the second law of thermodynamics.