This article is from
Journal of Creation 37(3):29–33, December 2023

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Fine-tuned water

A review of: The Wonder of Water: Water’s profound fitness for life on Earth and mankind
by Michael Denton
Discovery Institute Press, Seattle, WA, 2016

reviewed by Shaun Doyle

The Wonder of Water is the second in Michael Denton’s (currently) 5-book ‘The Privileged Species Series’.¹ Denton is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and has an M.D. from Bristol University in the UK and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from King’s College in London. He has also commented extensively on evolution, with influential books such as Evolution: A theory in crisis,² Nature’s Destiny,³ and Evolution: Still a theory in crisis.⁴ In them, he showed that biology is pervaded by fundamental discontinuities that undermine the Darwinian expectation of a continuous spectrum of functionality between different types of organisms.

However, ‘The Privileged Species Series’ focuses on a different topic. It spells out the empirical fact of fine-tuning. There are many factors about our situation that have a ‘Goldilocks’ property. These are factors that, if they were even slightly different in any way from what they are, life as we know it would not be possible. In The Wonder of Water, Denton focuses on the many facets and functions of water that are ‘just right’ for human life (figure 1).

Image: José Manuel Suárez, Wikimedia / CC BY 2.0

Fine-tuned water—the science

Denton outlines his core thesis early on in the book:

“The one substance, water, is uniquely fit to serve two utterly different vital ends—ends as different as can be conceived: the erosion of rock and the circulation of the blood. Both are absolutely vital to our existence. No other substance in nature comes close to having the essential set of properties needed to do these two jobs.

“If water served only these two very different vital ends, it would be miracle enough. But as we shall also see in the chapters ahead, water’s unique fitness for life on Earth involves a vast ensemble of additional elements of fitness serving a vast inventory of diverse vital ends. These include the formation of the Earth itself, formation of the oceans, climate moderation and the hydrological cycle, tectonic plate movement, continent formation, and photosynthesis. The unique properties of water are also needed to make soil, cool the human body, fold proteins, and form cell membranes. Water enables phenomena and processes that unfold on vastly different spatial and temporal scales, from thousands of kilometers and millions of years down to nanometers and milliseconds” (pp. 9–10).

Water is a wondrous substance—it has a curious array of properties that make it uniquely fit for so many functions needed for life to exist and persist. It is impossible to mention them all, and some are more impressive than others. I will merely touch on some of the more interesting examples in the book.

Water cycle

Consider the water cycle (figure 2). As it evaporates from the oceans and falls on the land as rain, snow, or hail, and eventually returns to the oceans via several different paths, several key properties unique to water mediate this. First, it is the only naturally occurring substance on Earth that exists in three different phase states (solid, liquid, and gas) at ambient conditions (p. 13). Indeed, it has strangely high melting and boiling points for its low molecular mass. Why? Water forms many hydrogen bonds relative to its low molecular mass. Denton mentions two other properties of water crucial to the water cycle:

“Two more properties of water essential to the turning of the hydrological wheel are water’s relatively low viscosity, and the relatively high mobility of liquid water compared with other fluids and of ice compared with many crystalline solids” (p. 16).

Image: Ehud Tal, Wikimedia / CC BY SA 4.0

These properties prevent the excessive buildup of water and ice that would grind the water cycle to a halt. And Denton points out the consequences of water not having these properties:

“Without the hydrological cycle the entire land surface of Earth would be a dehydrated, lifeless waste, more lifeless than the Atacama or any of the most dehydrated deserts currently on Earth. Although the importance of the hydrological cycle is widely acknowledged, what is, as far as I am aware, never mentioned is the remarkable fact that the delivery of water to the land, an essential medium of all life on Earth, is in effect carried out by and dependent on the properties of water itself, unaided by any other external regulatory systems” (pp. 16–17).

Without water having the properties it has, life on land would be impossible. Plus, water achieves this all by its own physical properties; it isn’t regulated by something else.

But not only is the delivery of water itself in the hydrological cycle important for life, so is its capacity to deliver the minerals life needs to thrive. As Denton points out:

“But what is really extraordinary about this second great function of the water wheel—that of delivering the minerals of life to terrestrial life—is the way in which a suite of diverse properties of water ‘conspire intelligently’ together to carry out the task of eroding and weathering the rocks” (pp. 17–18).

What factors are these? They include: water being a solvent of diverse compounds, its high surface tension, the fact it expands upon freezing, and how water supports ice movement.

Most interesting, though, is the way water’s diverse properties work together to achieve several different ends.

“The intelligent collusion of various diverse properties of water to serve a particular end such as observed in the erosion and weathering of the rocks, which might be loosely termed ‘teleology in parallel’, is not the only type of teleological pattern of synergic interactions manifest in the unique properties of water for land-based life. This is when one unique property of water—such as water’s ability to exist in three states of matter, enabling the hydrological cycle—must be causally prior to the exploitation of a second set of properties—such as those involved in the erosion and weathering of the rocks—which are in turn logically prior to and necessary for a third—such as the water-retaining properties of soil. Such a purposeful use of various elements of fitness in a logical sequence represents what is in effect a teleological hierarchy” (p. 33).

Water does not just have a bunch of goldilocks properties that make it useful for these diverse ends. More than that, these ends are themselves linked together by the properties of water in a logical order of explanation. It bespeaks a structural complexity to the system that permits the existence of life that, in our experience, reflects the highest forms of intelligence to accomplish.

Photosynthesis

Photosynthesis is one of the most important processes needed for life to persist on this planet. However, it depends on a miniscule proportion of light compared to the wavelengths available in the cosmos. Denton elaborates:

“As I pointed out in Nature’s Destiny, ‘The wavelength of the longest type of electromagnetic radiation is unimaginably longer than the shortest by a factor of 10²⁵, or 10,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000. Some idea of the immensity this figure represents can be grasped by the fact that the number of seconds since the formation of the earth, 4 billion years ago, is only about 10¹⁷.’ So how much of that real estate is visible light? ‘If we were to build a pile of 10²⁵ playing cards, we would end up with a stack stretching halfway across the observable universe,’ and the visual region would be ‘equivalent to one playing card’ in that stack” (p. 130).⁵

It’s impressive enough that around 70% of the sun’s radiation is output in the visible range (p. 131). But what is most surprising is the ‘coincidental’ way water absorbs practically all light except visible spectrum light, allowing for photosynthesis to occur:

“These considerations of the immense range of EM radiations and the tiny region fit for photobiology brings us to perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of water’s unique fitness for life discussed so far: Water strongly absorbs electromagnetic radiation in every region of the spectrum except for the visible region, the only region in the entire spectrum useful for photobiology. Water, in one of the most staggeringly fortuitous coincidences in all nature, lets through only the right light in an infinitesimally tiny region of the EM spectrum—the one playing card in the stack of 10²⁵ stretching half way across the universe” (pp. 131–132).

Perspiration

Who are the best distance runners in the ‘animal kingdom’? Especially when the going gets hot? We may not be the absolute best (e.g. ostriches, camels, and horses), but humans come pretty close. Part of it has to do with our upright, bidepal morphology, which is more energy efficient for long-distance running than four-legged locomotion. However, a prominent reason has to do with our body’s cooling system: evaporative perspiration. What makes this so efficient at keeping us cool is water’s anomalously high latent heat of vaporization—40.66 kJ/mol (2,257 kJ/kg)—higher than almost any other substance, and higher than any other molecular fluid.⁶ This means that a gram of water that evaporates from our skin can carry away more of excess body heat than a gram of any other molecular fluid. So, of the relatively few substances that exist in abundant quantities as both a liquid and a gas under ambient conditions, water is the best for cooling.

Humans exploit this more than animals do. Denton points out that we can do this more effectively for long periods in the hot equatorial sun than other mammals, like dogs and deer, since we are not covered with hair or fur anywhere as thick as they are (pp. 145–146). Moreover, of the three main ways for our bodies to lose heat: conduction, radiation, and evaporation, evaporation becomes more relevant as air temperatures approach our body temperature. And evaporation is the only one that works above our body temperature. As Denton sums up:

“The high latent heat of evaporation … reveals a fitness of water for warm-blooded terrestrial mammals and birds living in regions where temperatures are often over 30°C (most of the globe) and where they often approach 37°C (many tropical regions and deserts). But because of our relatively minimal body hair and copious sweat glands, it is arguably of more use to humans than to any other organism on Earth. That this unusual property of water is particularly useful to us is one more indicator that water is uniquely fit not just for warm-blooded terrestrial organisms, but especially for humans” (pp. 148–149).

Fine-tuning in old-earth context?

The most objectionable part of the book from a biblical point of view is how Denton problematizes some of the issues in the context of deep time. For instance, how he prefaces the importance of water to tectonic recycling:

“Without continual renewal of the mineral content of the oceans, the oceanic ecosystems would grind to a halt in a few million years and the Earth’s oceans would become lifeless. Yes, the oceans receive nutrients from continental runoff, but there is not enough runoff, not enough continental landmass, to keep up with the rate of depletion.

“And yet over many hundreds of millions of years, the oceans have not been rendered lifeless, nor the mountains ground into sterile plains. But how could there have been continents and mountains and life on land for 400 million years? And how could there have been life in the seas for four billion years? What mechanisms are continually remaking mountains and replenishing the mineral content of the ocean waters?” (p. 40).

Plate tectonic recycling is the ‘solution’ to the ‘problem’, and water is the key that makes tectonic recycling possible.

What are we to make of this? Do we reject his solution and embrace his problems as genuine problems for deep time? I think that is likely in some cases. In some cases, his solution might create problems of its own. For instance, even if the continual production of new continental crust can explain why it can persist for billions of years, it seems harder to explain why particular pockets of continental crust can survive for over 3 billion years if erosion would level all the continents in 10–50 million years. Moreover, there appears to be a problem of not enough sedimentary rocks given deep time,⁷ especially if the continental crust is as stable as its radiometric age profile suggests. Moreover, problems such as the faint young sun paradox⁸ and the moon’s recession rate from the earth⁹ cannot be solved simply with recourse to the properties of water. Indeed, they require naturalistically improbable ‘Goldilocks’ conditions of their own to render them compatible with the standard deep time narrative.

However, when we actually pay attention to what Denton is saying in these instances, we realise some of these arguments may still have much value. Why? The points he makes are about how water enables processes to sustain the planet as life-conducive over billions of years and show no signs of waning. The irony here is that the longer the world can sustain such a fine-tuned condition, the more impressive a feat of engineering it appears to be. In other words, deep time works against the naturalist.

But if some of Denton’s arguments are successful in a deep time context, does this pose a problem for biblical creation? No. Such notions can be incorporated into a biblical creationist model of Earth history if they are found to be successfully functional. For instance, consider the notion that Creation Week, the Flood, or both involved God finely tuning those events to produce (or continue, in the case of the Flood) a dynamic life-sustaining Earth system that can persist almost indefinitely. In other words, the system is design parameterized to be a functionally mature self-sustaining system. The notion that it’s fine-tuned to run for far longer than it has run is irrelevant to how long it actually has run.

Fine tuning and explanation

Denton is characteristically shy about inferring design:

“Whether the remarkable instances in which various properties of water work together to serve a vital end … are actually the result of design or not, there is no doubt that they convey a compelling impression of design” (p. 216).

Nonetheless, he does a good job of underscoring the problems of avoiding teleology. He deals with ‘bad design’ objections by pointing out that water, since it performs so many different operations, is subject to constrained optimization. Thus, while a particular molecule might outstrip its fitness for use in one particular area (e.g. its ability to act as a broad-spectrum solvent), it fails in other areas (e.g. molecular weight or relative abundance). Water is not a ‘one trick pony’; its fitness for use as life’s liquid medium is based on many different properties that enable it to fulfil myriad roles.

Moreover, many of the ‘bad design’ arguments against water stress the problems it creates for the origin of life. As Denton admits, however, there is no agreed upon take for the naturalistic origin of life. In fact, he turns the problem around on the skeptic:

“Moreover, at least some stages in the origin of life must have occurred in an aqueous environment; and if some researches are to be believed, the provision of proton flows, a process unique to water … , may have played a critical role” (p. 218).

Nonetheless, the biggest problem with this objection is that it assumes abiogenesis. If an intelligent agent designed life, then these issues are moot.

So, Denton entertains the design explanation and notes its intellectual strengths. He does not, however, assent to it himself. He opts for a more modest conclusion:

“The unique fitness of nature for life on Earth and for beings of our biology, manifested so spectacularly in the properties of water, is a scientific discovery, whatever the ultimate cause of that fitness may be, whether by design or not.”

He does think, however, that the fine tuning of water for human life shows that we are not a purposeless accident:

“The properties of water show that beings with our biology do indeed occupy a special central place in the order of nature, and that the blueprint for life was present in the properties of matter from the moment of creation. We may have been displaced from the spatial center of the universe but not its ‘teleological center’” (p. 10).

This is good as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. Denton stated elsewhere that his preferred explanation is “internal causal factors according to a structuralist ‘laws of form’ framework”.¹⁰ However, this is not only inconsistent with Scripture, it is contrary to common experience. We have no knowledge of such ‘laws of form’ that can give rise to teleology. We are, however, thoroughly acquainted with intelligent agency. Indeed, it’s the only form of teleology we are familiar with in ordinary experience. So, why deny that the sort of multivalent and directionally ordered fine tuning Denton documents so well for water is God’s handiwork?

Assessment

Denton’s argument has weaknesses. He clearly supports deep time, and in some cases ties his argument closely to deep time. This can tie it closely to naturalism. Moreover, he’s shy about inferring a designer, and prefers to talk more broadly of teleology. As such, readers should read his arguments with care.

Nonetheless, there are some interesting ways the argument can benefit the biblical creationist. Since he problematizes his arguments in the context of deep time, that can reveal potential problems with deep time. However, it can also reveal some interesting ripostes to naturalists for creationists to exploit.

But it’s in what we see in the science of water that this book shines brightest. The science of water itself, and how it is so functionally fine-tuned not just for life. Not just for terrestrial life. Not just for rationally reflective terrestrial life. But for humans. Creatures with our mentality and morphology that are capable of building the wonders of modern technological society.

Conclusion

As with Fire-Maker, The Wonder of Water is a tour de force in the science of fine tuning. For that alone the book is well worth the read. And it reveals what may be perhaps one of the most compelling reasons to challenge skeptics: with all this fine tuning around us, how can you be so sure that we’re nothing more than a cosmic accident? But we should push beyond this. Not only is it problematic for atheism, it’s what we expect from Scripture. It doesn’t just point to purpose per se. It points to God’s purposes for us.

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