Episode Transcript
Welcome to faith and science. I'm Doctor John Ashton. One of the great biochemists of the early 20th century was Lawrence Joseph Henderson.
And he published a book called the Fitness of the Environment. And one of the things that he pointed out was the amazing properties of water really made life on earth possible. And that the whole, he looked at the evidence for design in nature and purpose and saw that so much of the way nature was structured seemed to be to support life.
And he was an agnostic, but he made this particular important observation. And of course, he was very interested in water. And he pointed out, for example, that water has this unusual property that as it cools, once it reaches four degrees to around four degrees, just a fraction under four degrees, it begins to expand.
And this means that when it forms ice, ice is less dense than water, and it means that the ice then floats. So water freezes over in ponds and rivers, rather than with normal expansion. As the substance cools, it becomes more and more dense, and therefore the colder water would sink to the bottom, the ice would sink to the bottom and a pond would freeze up and kill all life.
And so this was a quite remarkable property of water. And there are very few molecules that have this particular function, that they reach a point where, as they cool, they then began to expand rather than continue to contract. Water is actually one of the most abundant substances in the universe, after hydrogen and carbon monoxide.
And it's interesting that the Bible talks about how the earth was formed out of water. God formed the earth out of water. And water also has a number of other fascinating properties.
Water has a very unique structure. The properties of oxygen and hydrogen are such that water forms a molecule of a particular bench shape, and there is a separation and a charge separation that occurs. And this gives water a peculiar bonding structure, which we call hydrogen bonding.
And this hydrogen bonding also enables some unique properties of water. It means that water can be a very important solvent, and in particular, it will dissolve what we call ionic substances and acids and alkalis, as well as alcohol type compounds. And this enables the biochemistry in our body to be buffered.
So in our body, we have a number of biochemistry actions, but we need to maintain a ph around neutral, or we don't want it to get too acid or too alkaline. And water has the property of enabling these compounds that we call buffers to operate and ionise. So one of the other fascinating aspects of water is that it has a very, very high heat capacity.
One of the higher, one of what we call specific heat, one of the other molecules that has a high specific heat. A bit higher than water is ammonia, and that's why ammonia was used in the early refrigeration units. But water has this amazing capacity to hold heat and that means that as we're exposed to heat energy, it will absorb a lot of energy before raising the temperature.
And that enables us to maintain a fairly constant temperature through sweating and so forth. Another fascinating aspect of water associated with this is of course with regard to climate, the water in the oceans helps really regulate the surface temperature of the earth. One of the other factors of water is what we call surface tension.
So you sometimes notice with water that it can form a little edge under certain conditions. Sometimes the edge is down, for example, if you put perhaps metal in there, or sometimes it's up. And this surface tension arrangement, for example, enables little creatures like insects to walk on water.
And again, this supports many life, the whole part of the ecological systems. Another aspect of water is its really strong cohesive factors that it exhibits. And this enables capillary, what we call capillary action, to work which enables water to travel up the height of trees.
So if we think, for example, it takes 1 atm pressure to push a column of water up about ten metres or 34ft, and you know, that's quite a lot of work. So to pump the water up, say, to a very tall tree, would require quite a strong pump. But this capillary action, this property of water, enables water to travel up to the tallest trees.
It's quite fascinating. One of the other things that connects water with the Bible, of course, is as God talked about, as the world became wicked and more and more wicked, God destroyed life on earth largely, well, most of life on earth with the flood. And it's interesting that after the flood, the ages of people is recorded as declining rapidly.
So prior to the flood we have many of the patriarchs, their lifespans listed and it was up around 900 years. A lot of people scoff at this, but it's quite fascinating that after the flood we find that the lifespan decreases exponentially. And this is recorded by a number of different people, different books, and when we plot the data, it's an exponential decay curve down to around 120 years.
So I was reading just recently that the longest officially documented person, I think was a woman that lived to 122 years. That's where they had an official birth certificate and the death certivate. And so it seems now that seems to be the cut off, which is again an age that was mentioned in the Bible would be the limit of lifespan on earth.
And one of the things that is coming out of some research in. In Europe is the effects of what we call deuterium. So we know that water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen.
And, of course, normal hydrogen has just one proton. But if we have heavy hydrogen or deuterium, where we have a neutron as well, in the nucleus, and that combines with oxygen and forms water, we have what is called heavy water. So we could say that if we had water without any deuterium in it, in the hydrogen, that would be a light water, then we would have heavy water, where we have water made with heavy hydrogen or deuterium, and then we would have normal water.
So the normal water in our ecosphere is a mixture of light water and heavy water. It's mainly light water with only about 150 parts per million of heavy water. But very interesting.
Some studies that were done back in the early 1930s showed that deuterium water, or heavy water, was very deleterious to life. One of the experiments was by a scientist there, Gilbert Lewis, and he showed that heavy water dramatically accelerates the ageing process, leads to lethal results, for example, in seeds. Now, subsequent research that has been done over the past few decades, different universities in Europe has shown that when we remove the deuterium out of normal water, that it increases, for example, the lifespan of mice, it increases egg production in chickens.
It increases the growth rate and the productivity of plants. And so I think it's quite interesting that the Bible talks about that during the flood, the fountains of the deep opened up. And it seems very feasible to me.
And from what I've. And I report in my book, evolution impossible. And I discuss this issue that the evidence that ancient groundwaters or the very deep groundwaters, are much richer in deuterium.
And so I can suggest that back prior to the flood, there was very little heavy water in the ecosphere, and that after the flood, this increase of heavy water into the echo sphere decreased the lifespan and also meant that the animals perhaps didn't grow as big and the plants as big as we see evidence for in the fossil record. So I think water gives us is a classic example of amazing design. As the famous physicist and one of the most brilliant physicists, James Clerk Maxwell, who showed that light was a combination of electric and magnetic fields, he was very much opposed to the theory of evolution.
One of the points he made was that how did atoms and molecules evolve? And we see the amazing structure of the water molecule seems just so finely tuned. It's based on the properties of the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen, and yet it has all these amazing properties that support life. To me, this is very, very strong evidence that we were made by an amazing supernatural creator God.
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I'm Doctor John Ashton. Have a great day. You've been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia radio.
