Question

When I talk with people about God, I like to use the argument from the laws of physics. I explain to them that if I give them a sheet of paper and they write on it a list of laws (including constants and force magnitudes if necessary), and we replace the existing laws of physics with the laws written on the page, it is very unlikely that a world would emerge with complexity even close to that of our world. And that is even after they are allowed to think about and design the laws however they want. (Anyone who proposes the theory of many/parallel universes is offering an “alternative” that simply pushes the question back one step. Instead of the laws of physics, we can talk about the more general laws that generate universes, so that is not really a problem.) Although this is very clear intuitively, there are people who insist and argue that the universe that would emerge as a result of the new laws they write on paper would be as complex as the current universe. It feels like a lack of intellectual honesty, but usually they really do believe it. I feel that with people like this the discussion gets stuck and I have nowhere to go from there. Do you have an idea how one might succeed in changing their assumption that they can write new laws on a sheet of paper that would manage to create a universe as complex as ours? Or is this a situation where each side simply has an opposing intuition, and therefore the discussion cannot continue?