Taken for granted - Take 4: Water

We take water for granted, until we don’t have it. My first word I learned was "water" and I have subsequently spent a large portion of my life in it. Water is a miracle in that it is a perfect liquid that sustains all life on earth. No other liquid can replace it, not even a Diet drink.

In the formation of the earth, water (H2O) had to be one of the first steps. Water contains the only reservoir of oxygen large enough to produce the atmosphere we have today. The atmosphere’s free oxygen that we breathe comes from the waters surrounding the earth. It is produced through photosynthesis where an organism uses sunlight and water to create oxygen.

The origin of Earth's water is still a topic of ongoing scientific research and debate. The quantity of water produced from collisions with comets and asteroids or outgassing from volcanic eruptions from the earth’s interior, seem inadequate in my opinion, to produce enough water to almost cover the earth. For example, it is estimated that the total water content of all comets in the Solar System is about 3% of the Earth's oceans.

Water is the most plentiful substance on earth. Approximately 71% of the Earth's surface is covered by water, and it is estimated that there is a total of 1.386 billion cubic kilometers (332 million cubic miles) of water on Earth. Most of this water is in the form of saltwater in the oceans, which accounts for about 97% of the Earth's water.

Humans and animals cannot drink saltwater because it is hypertonic to their body fluids, meaning that it has a higher concentration of salt (sodium chloride) than their cells and bodily fluids. When saltwater is ingested, it draws water out of the body's cells and tissues through a process called osmosis, which can cause dehydration, kidney damage, and other health problems. In addition, excessive salt intake can cause an imbalance in electrolytes, such as sodium and potassium, which are important for the proper functioning of cells and organs.

Fortunately, the earth has a natural way to purify salt water into fresh water, called the hydrological cycle. Heat causes water in the salty ocean to evaporate into water vapor (without the salt), which form clouds, and then rain on earth to form rivers, lakes and glaciers. Fresh water is critical for human, animal and plant life to exist. Is this hydrological cycle random or by design?

Water is unique among liquids for several other reasons as well:

Water is a polar molecule, which makes it an excellent solvent for other polar molecules and ions. This property is important for many biological and chemical processes, in other words critical for life on earth.

Water has a high specific heat capacity: Water can absorb a large amount of heat energy without a significant increase in temperature. This property helps regulate Earth's climate and makes water an important coolant in many industrial processes.

Water has a high surface tension: This property allows water to form droplets and enables capillary action, which is important for plant growth.

Water is less dense as a solid: Unlike most liquids, water is less dense as a solid than as a liquid. This property allows ice to float on water, which is important for aquatic life and helps regulate Earth's climate. If this was not the case, lakes and oceans would freeze from the bottom up, killing aquatic life.

Water has a high heat of vaporization: Water requires a large amount of energy to evaporate, which makes it an effective coolant and helps regulate Earth's climate.

For the properties of water to be effective, average temperatures on the planet need to be to where water can exist as a liquid, between 32 and 212 degrees Fahrenheit at our normal atmospheric pressures. These conditions are very rare in our solar system and galaxy as far as we know.

How rare is our water condition on earth?

Water has been found on several planets within our own solar system, including Mars, Venus, and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. However, the presence of liquid water on a planet's surface, as we have on Earth, is thought to be relatively rare, as it requires a delicate balance of temperature, atmospheric pressure, and other factors.

As of 2021, there were a few exoplanets that had the potential to host liquid water on their surface, such as Proxima b and TRAPPIST-1 e, f, and g. Rare, as only four planets of the 4000 exoplanets that have been discovered have potential to host water in its liquid form. (Exoplanets are planets external to our solar system.)

Water also has other qualities that are essential for life on earth that are extremely rare among liquids including being a polar molecule allowing biological processes and chemical reactions to occur, being less dense as a solid, high heat capacity to regulate the earth’s climate. All of these rare attributes are not being included in the analysis.

Are all these favorable factors by chance, or by design?

If by chance, we estimate the chances of all these factors occurring simultaneously, 1 in 8 based on our experience in our solar system for our base case. More realistically, this is a four in 4000 occurrence, as only 4 planets in the 4000 we have discovered to date, may have similar favorable conditions for water that earth has.

When you combine these probabilities with the prior Taken for Granted variables (Take 1 through Take 3), the chances of all these variables occurring by chance together are shown in the table below and compared to the probability of a Designer..

Our optimistic Base Case is showing a one in 16.4 million chance that all of these four things occurred simultaneously by chance. When you compare this probability of 1/16,400,000 to the probability of there being a Creator at 50%, the case for their being a designer is 8.192 million times more likely. Since the probability of their being a Creator is at worst 50% -- God cannot be mathematically or scientifically disproven unless you visited every planet, every star in the universe, at the same time to prove that God does not exist.

Assuming our more realistic case, the probability these variables occurred by chance is now 1 in 10 quintillion. That’s equivalent to rolling heads 63 times in a row. If each roll took 5 seconds, it would take 1.6 trillion years to do that. The age of the earth is estimated based on the geological record to be 4.5 billion years. Using the table, it is 5 quintillion times more likely the earth was created by design than by chance.

Things are starting to get interesting, there is much more...