Everyone knows what water is. It is the primary source of liquid in the entire world’s diet and is found naturally throughout the universe. Yet few have considered just how great a miracle water is, nor how water proves the design of the universe. This article will discuss water in the context of origins and demonstrate why it could not possibly have evolved by chance.
Water is perhaps the most easily identified chemical in the world. Many elementary school students, if given the chemical formula of water, could quickly and easily associate it with the name water. The formula, two hydrogen atoms binding with one oxygen atom, demonstrates design. Water molecules bond covalently. I’ve previously discussed covalent bonding in these pages. For more information, please visit the link here. Because water forms a covalent bond, both the oxygen and the hydrogens have the correct number of electrons in their valence shell due to the sharing process involved in covalent bonding. Thus water molecules do not carry a charge. This fact is massively important because it allows water molecules to act as carriers for ions, which are any atoms or molecules which carry a natural charge, such a sodium(Na+) or potassium (K+). Why this matters will be discussed further down the article. For now, understand that water can carry these ions because it is neutral in charge. This neutral charge means that it is not strongly attracted to either a positive or a negative charge, allowing ions to float in water molecules freely, without attempting to bind to water electrochemically. This makes it much easier for these ions to be removed later.
Water has other properties which make it special. Unlike the majority of chemicals, water molecules expand in colder temperatures rather than contracting. This decreases their density, rather than increasing it as most chemicals do. This means that an equal mass of liquid or solid water takes up more space at a colder temperature than at a warmer one. Without this key feature, whole kinds of animals would be wiped out every year as lakes and rivers froze from bottom to top, essentially quick freezing every creature unfortunate enough to live in them. However, this is not what happens. Because colder water molecules expand, as they freeze, they float to the top of the water column and form sheets of ice there. By forming at the surface, these sheets of ice act as thermal insulators, trapping heat in the lakes and helping keep the water beneath from freezing. This cries out for a designer. A blind process such as evolution would have neither known nor cared that thousands of animals would die in each lake as it froze all the way through. No random chance process would prevent that by having water molecules expand as they freeze and thus rise to the surface. It had to have been designed.
Water also functions as a conductor for ions as mentioned above. Ionic molecules are necessary for the majority of organisms. Some uptake them directly from liquid around them, such as bacteria, fish and some amphibians and reptiles. The remainder of creatures need to obtain them from other sources. These ions are generally obtained by drinking and eating. It is plants, however, which play the most crucial role in this cycle. Plants desperately need ions, particularly nitrates. They obtain these from the soil around them. However, plants cannot directly uptake dirt and sift out the ions. Instead, as they absorb water through their roots, the needed nutrients come packed with the water molecules. If water was unable to carry ionic molecules freely, or retained them when it did, then plants would be unable to obtain their needed ions and would slowly die off. This would lead to mass extinction as plants no longer converted carbon dioxide back into breathable oxygen.
Being able to transport ions makes water valuable to humans and other organisms as well, as a key component of bodily fluids. The cells of living organisms require ions to survive. However, with the exception of skin cells and bacteria, most cells are not directly exposed to liquid sources of these ions so another solution is required. the body deals with this in several ways. In some cases, cells directly uptake ions from the interstitial fluid using ion transporters that I wrote about previously. In other cases, the blood stream is the answer. The blood does far more than provide oxygen and removed waste. The blood plasma serves as a transporter of ions, among other things. The plasma is about 55% of the bloodstream as a whole and consists of 95% water. Once again, water as a carrier of ions is incredibly useful. This cannot be coincidence that the body relies heavily on water and so do plants. No blind process could weave water so tightly into the fabric of every living thing.
Water is tightly bound up in everything we do and see in the universe. Plants desperately need water in order to gain the nutrients they need to survive, grow and thrive. Animals need water just as much to transport the nutrients they eat to the various parts of their bodies. Every single feature of water cries out for a designer, from its specialized chemical structure, to its usefulness to the universe. Yet evolutionists will maintain that water evolved by chance. They have a problem. In their imagined primeval world, oxygen either did not exist or existed in minuscule quantities. They must believe this because oxygen would oxidize any newly forming polypeptides, preventing evolution. Yet their own description of this primeval world claims that there were millions of years of rain. Rain is largely made of water, each molecule of which requires an oxygen atom. So either they write out the rain and the oxygen, or they accept both. If they accept both, they cannot have evolution, but if they reject both, then there is no liquid to create the complex chemical soup that life supposedly evolved from. Water is a death blow to evolution and a great evidence for an all knowing Creator. Only an all knowing Creator could have woven a single molecule into the very fabric of the universe in the way that water is.
In His Image 