First I should point out that I fully accept the theory of evolution and I will always argue on the side of science in such threads since nothing else makes sense.
BUT
Everything in the Universe tends towards disorder, right? How then can the increasing compexity and order in living creatures through evolution be explained? Is there something wrong with the disorder idea (there must be a name for it) or am I just missing something?
The main thing you’re missing is the big yellow ball in the sky.
Seriously, all closed systems tend towards disorder. The Earth, by itself, is not a closed system. The Earth plus the sun is a better approximation of a closed system (though we still get other stuff coming in). We get our energy from the sun. That energy can be used, in part, to increase local order. Meanwhile, the sun itself is moving towards more disorder. So, overall, the system is tending towards disorder. All is well.
Here are a couple of links to help:
The disorder you refer to is called entropy. The second law of thermodynamics states that the total amount of entropy, in a closed system, can only stay the same or increase, never decrease. It is however ok for a local decrease in entropy as long as there is a balancing increase elsewhere.
The earth is not a closed system, the sun constantly supplies energy and the planet radiates heat out into space. On a local level organisms can consume food, convert it into energy which can be used to create some sort of order, then vent off the entropy created as heat. The entropy in the body may decrease but the total entropy of the system which contains it will increase.
I always had a problem with the box-of-marbles analogy.
Red and black marbles in a box. If all the reds are on the right and all the blacks on the left, is that order or disorder?
It’s more ordered than marbles in some random pattern but less ordered than marbles with numbers on being in the correct sequence. Basically disorder rules because there are more disordered ways to arrange things than ordered ones so you are far less likely to get an ordered state than a disordered one by chance.
So my dropping third semester physics is due not to third order partial differentials, but a bad analogy?