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This has been perpetually misinterpreted by by many without a physics education, including this author, to mean that the second law was caused by a necessary increase in disorder.

I'm sorry, 2ndreconmarine; I'm just not reading Swenson in a way that would allow me to draw the conclusion you reached (above).

In short, I don't think he said that "the second law was caused by a necessary increase in disorder" at all. I'm just not following you here. Help me out maybe?

Thanks!

In short, I don't think he said that "the second law was caused by a necessary increase in disorder" at all. I'm just not following you here. Help me out maybe?

OK.

Quoting from the text:

Boltzmann’s view of the second law of thermodynamics as a law of disorder according to which the transformation of disorder to order was said to be infinitely improbable. If this were true, and until very recently it has been taken to be so, then the whole of life and its evolution becomes one improbable event after another. The laws of physics, on this view, predict a world that should be becoming more disordered, while terrestrial evolution is characterized by active order production.

I read this passage as meaning that the evolution of life, from disorder to order is impossible (infinitely improbable), under the auspices of the laws of physics and Darwin evolution. Therefore, the only mechanism that would allow order from disorder, against the entropy gradient, is implicily divine intervention.