Water - One Reason I Gave Up on Atheism

Water in all 3 of its miraculous forms - liquid, solid and gas

As a young man, as young men will do, I toyed with the idea of atheism. With my limited youthful logic I thought the idea of evolution and survival of the fittest a pretty smart idea as we often do in the midst of our youth and arrogance, when like Eve, we buy into the lie that we are, by nature, immortal and that, with a bit of knowledge, we can be our own gods.

Once I learned how to reason, however, some problems soon arose with the whole idea that there is nothing out there beyond our own, horrifically flawed selves. If, in fact, we are the result of a very long series of cosmic accidents, I came to realize, that then how could we trust that our minds are even capable of real rational thought. We could be thinking we have reasoned things out by cold logic, but the fact is, our accidentally constructed "minds" could well be incapable of anything other than a crippled kind of thinking influenced more by our lack of some missing kind of perceptive ability than by reason as we think of it, if we can think rationally at all. 

So, the truth is that the "logic" by which the atheist rejects the notion of God may only be the product of a limited ability to think. We could be limited in our ability to think truly rational thoughts about anything beyond what our five senses seem to perceive. In fact, there may be an entire reality beyond the limits of our perception. Perhaps God is a pan-dimensional being we can neither see nor hear nor touch nor taste nor feel because we lack the sense organs to perceive such a being. God told Moses it was impossible for him with his limited sensor equipment to see more than his "back parts".

If could be that we are only able to perceive the results of a creature outside the strictures of 3 dimensional space when He interacts with the universe and with us lower creatures. Consider, for instance, water. Without water, life could not exist. Water is a compound made of two of the simplest of elements - hydrogen and oxygen.Water has the following unique properties.

1. It is liquid in its normal state allowing us to drink it, sail on it, water crops with it, bathe with it and cook with it.
2. Water turns to gas in response not only to boiling, but to lowered humidity levels in the air at relatively low temperatures through evaporation. 
3. Were it not for evaporation, clouds would not form, nor would precipitation redistribute fresh filtered water over the land areas of the Earth where animals and plants take it in as a necessity of survival. 
4. Also, water changes to a solid (freezes) at a temperature at which animals and plants can survive. Just before it freezes and turns into a solid, unlike every other substance on the planet.
5. Just before freezing water expands rather than contracts causing its solid form to float on it's liquid form. 
6. Were water like all other substances, it would continue to contract as it cools and sink to the bottom of the body of water exposed to freezing temperatures.
7. If ice sank rather than floated, instead of protecting life below the surface of the water from freezing temperatures above, it would fill up lakes, rivers and oceans from the bottom up.
8. Ice that sinks would eventually force the fish our onto the surface of what had become a solid block of ice instead of a body of water. Sea life would die gasping. Virtually all animal life in the water would be killed after a single hard winter. 
9. Water, by all appearances, seems unlikely to be a happy accident of physics, but rather the product of some intelligent design scheme. And, where you have a design scheme, you pretty much have to have a designer. 
10. Were you to change those two very odd properties of water, life would be unable to exist. 

It turns out that it takes an incredible amount of faith in accidents or a remarkable lack of curiosity to attribute all that to chance. Over the past century or so, as science digs deeper and deeper into the nature of the universe around us it keeps discovering that life exists by a singularly complex web of factors which increasingly like they could only have occurred on their own by a string of not just improbable, but statistically impossible complex circumstances.

CS Lewis compared it to smashing a jug of milk on the floor and hoping it gives you a map of London. As unlikely as that would be to happen, no matter how many jugs you smashed to the floor, your family cat, attracted by the crashing, could hardly guess with the brain it has, whether the delightfully tasty patterns spread across the kitchen floor accidentally appeared there as a result of the crash or if this odd superior creature sitting on the drain board taking notes might have created the mess for some unfathomable reason known only to itself. The cat, with cat--like logic might assume the milk spread itself over the floor of its own accord for the cat's enjoyment.

Not having seen you smash several jugs of milk on the floor, the cat would likely accept the miracle of the milk and commence to licking it up without further thought. Me? Because I have a human's ability to reason, could look at the milk, even if someone else at broken the jugs, not me, and detect the action of some actor who was behind it. I could probably even guess which one of my kids was responsible for the milky map of London on the kitchen floor.

So given that I would require an extremely deep sort of faith to accept that this glorious world is the accidental product of volcanoes and asteroids, I have look deeper, with an open mind and found unmistakable imprint of Him, the great designer, in even simple things like water.