What this atheist opponent of Christianity says is a mixture of truth, error, and poor interpretation of science, as well as the result of clear bias.  A few things he claims are true or almost certainly are true.  For one, to say that evolution is “not random,” is both true and not true.  What I mean by this is that the process of evolution clearly involves random events, such as the random interaction of genetic information when offspring are produced.  The science tells us that the process of inheritance involves random recombination of DNA.  However, the net result is NOT random.  This is true because environmental factors, most famously natural selection, but other processes as well, produce a non-random result from the random processes of reproduction.  Many of the random effects of DNA recombination as well as of random mutations are eliminated from the gene pool because they have a negative effect on survivability, with the result that non-random changes occur over time.

How capable the known processes of DNA recombination and mutation are to produce the kinds of proteins we observe is a matter of some debate.  Many evolutionists tell us that the currently-known processes cannot have produced the kinds of genetic information we observe.  I suggest a recent book “Theistic Evolution” as a source which strongly supports the conclusion that random events cannot explain the genetic diversity we observe.  Others conclude differently, and believe that the observed information can be produced through the random processes of evolution.  This remains an open question (open, that is, except to the philosophically committed atheists, who have no choice but to assume the processes of evolution are all natural, and that the supernatural is ruled out).

Up to this point, other than a somewhat tricky misuse of vocabulary to deny the truth that the processes of evolution are indeed random, what this person says is either true or at least debatable.

But then he makes a statement which is not supported by science.  Matter is not self-organizing and there is literally no process in nature by which the information required to produce live can be self-assembled.  Here he is simply wrong.  He is arguing by presupposition, in opposition to what the science tells us, which is that information is not produced from non-information through any known random process.  Here he is arguing by rhetoric rather than by science.

He is also wrong on fine tuning.  Things which look fine tuned are in fact fine-tuned.  Why they are fine tuned is something to be debated, but the fine tuning is not a figment of human imagination.  Atheists are forced to invent evidence-free theories (which are, arguably, not even proper theories) about so-called multiverses to explain the clear evidence for fine tuning. Here your atheist friend is shooting from the hip and creating ad-hoc hypotheses.  He has literally NO EVIDENCE for this so-called iteration, which is a figment of his imagination.  You should take this presupposition-based belief with a very big grain of salt.

He says that the “reason” things are they way they are is because, essentially, they had to be, otherwise we would not be here to observe it.  This is the weak anthropic principle.  The problem is that he has literally zero evidence for his other universes–the ones in which intelligent beings are there to observe them.  This is sheer speculation and it is NOT science.  Trust me on this.

Again, matter does not self-correct.  This is a fantasy, created by your atheist friend in a desperate (in my mind) attempt to save his philosophical determinism.  And, by the way, chaos theory has nothing to do with the evolution of species or the origin of the universe.  Here the atheist is simply throwing out fancy-sounding terminology to sound like he knows what he is talking about.

John Oakes