The Wonder of Water

Rod introduces the program for the March Chapter Meeting of Reasons to Believe, Atlanta.

Glen Leckman and Rod led the discussion. Rod had worked with Glen and Barbara for many years at Georgia State University as they ministered to Christian faculty. Rod was President of the Christian Faculty Forum for a number of years.

The intent of the session was to explore the many coordinated properties of water and ask the question "does this imply teleology?" - that water was designed by God for life. Can the design inference be convincingly made with what we find in nature?

Rod had read four books on water, and this session used content from them, but was particularly focused on Michael Denton's book The Wonder of Water (notes). It also drew from Rod's extensive work on water, which can be explored from the water concept map in HyperPhysics. Finally, most of the slides for the presentation were reproduced in a summary in the collection of apologetic material called "The Book of Nature".

One of my favorite slides in the presentation is shown below. What an amazing "coincidence" that the narrow window of wavelengths admitted by the water vapor of the atmosphere closely matches the sun's wavelength range! They are totally independent phenomena, yet if they had not matched in this way, life as we know it would not exist! Another "coincidence" is that this energy range closely matches that required for most biochemical processes.

After an enthusiastic session of about an hour and twenty minutes, we had our usual book drawing.

The winner of the book was Dr. Robert Wall, who lives in Little Rock, but visits us often at our RTB meetings when he comes to visit family.