Faithfully Scientific

For Easter. Faithfully Scientific: Water

“Water is H20, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, but there is also a third thing that makes water and nobody knows what that is.”

- D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930), Pansies, 1929

Some say they have never witnessed a miracle while they stand on a planet on which seventy-one percent of its surface is covered in water. Some miracles are so common that they are taken for granted. How is water a miracle? In many ways. Even though in quantity it is extremely common, in its chemical quality it is rare and unexplained and possesses nearly impossible capabilities as assigned to similar substances. What it is in quantity is a miracle but how it reacts to forces of earth is a miracle of quality as well.

The first example of what is amazingly unique about H2O is that it floats when it freezes. Other substances become denser and sink when frozen but water expands by eight percent making it buoyant. No one really knows how. If ice did not float on water there would be no life in our northern waters and a good part of the sea. Ice covering the bottom would smother aquatic life and expose it to harsh elements.

Another strange and unique quality about water is that hot water freezes faster than cool water. In fact, if you take boiling water and throw it into thirty-degree air, it turns to snow instantly.

There are only theories of why ice is slippery but, apparently, it shouldn’t be. However, I cannot think of a way that slipperiness helps life continue to exist on our blue ball. I don’t doubt though that in some way it does. Conversely, water is also sticky and that is very important to life. It pulls together densely, which is why water develops surface tension and allows the water in your body to pull blood up through blood vessels against gravity as well as sap through plants.

The biggest miracle about water is, that it IS and how big it is. Scientists have no idea how it got even got here, no less cover almost three quarters of the earth! Just about everyone agrees that all the water we have on Earth is all we will ever have; that it is not replenished. When the world was formed 4.5 billion years ago as the result of a fiery explosion (Apparently from nothing, that was initiated by nothing which then spawned spontaneous life all, in true science, are impossibilities). None the less, peer reviewed science concurs that the Earth was extremely hot for a long time starting 4.5 billion years ago and that there was no water here. Our young planet was hot enough that if water was created by the mysteries and fortuitous, scientifically impossible explosion from nothing; it would have evaporated and left the Earth’s young and barely existent atmosphere. So, if water was here in the beginning, created during the theory of a “big bang”, it couldn’t have stayed here.

So, if a big bang isn’t capable of creating an ocean of water, water that may have been here otherwise or if it was somehow created by an explosion, scientifically, it could not have remained on the Earth. Where, then, did water as we know it come from?

Science, faithfully, has an answer for its own impossibilities with an improbability. It is theorized, and still maintained, that the water came from asteroids. It is explained that millions of ‘huge water balloon’ asteroids pummeled the earth, through its thin, barely existent, and young atmosphere delivering enough H2O quantities to cover 71% percent of the earth and fill oceans miles deep. Then, when we had the perfect amount for life, it stopped. While that explanation is still mainstream, it is ignoring their own scientific facts. While there is water in space and it has been studied through the miracle of modern technology, they have been able to measure two things about their theory that contradict the philosophy of where this huge amount of finite water came from. One, there isn’t enough water on asteroids or comet vapor trails to fill the earth with oceans. Two and probably more importantly than quantity is quality; the water in space is different than Earth’s water. H2O collected from space has a different isotope than hydrogen on water here on Earth.

So, what everyone agrees about water is that it is everywhere, it defies the rules of physics and acts differently than it should. It makes up much of our atmosphere and much of our surface. It is also the key ingredient in all life allowing blood to flow and cells to grow. It can’t be replenished or recreated we have a perfect finite amount yet we don’t know how it got here. It is truly a miracle substance beyond floods and Baptisms which is ever flowing and ever alive. It is even often quoted by anglers that, “A River Runs Through It”. Secular science is still trying to figure out water asking, “What is it? How is it?” and “Where did it come from?” I don’t know myself but I have a guess. If I may, for a moment divert from the secular wisdom and refer to the eldest and most scientifically proven book in the world which says in Jeremiah, 23:23-24 “Am I a God who is near,” declares the LORD, “and not a God far off?” In that book, among its own many references to water, may be a clue about a miracle, taken for granted. Happy Easter.

See you along the stream.