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It Is Written Canada

Designed With Purpose

Chris Holland

Water

It’s All Just a Bunch of Gas

It’s All About the Genes

God's book, the Bible, still relevant in today's complex world.

It is written sharing messages of hope around the world.

Have you ever wondered why our Earth is not covered by oceans of oxygen?

Now, if you were paying attention in chemistry class, and I know it may have been hard for some of us to pay attention, but it probably crossed your mind at some point.

In our atmosphere, the oxygen molecule composed of 2 oxygen atoms.

Now, I know I'm getting a little technical, but stay with me.

When those 2 oxygen atoms are joined together, it's a gas.

But if you put 2 hydrogen atoms together with an oxygen atom, of course you get liquid water, H2O.

The water molecule is much lighter than the oxygen molecule.

Now, why is the heavier molecule a gas and the lighter molecule water?

How would our world be different if there were no liquid water to help me answer those questions and their implication on faith?

Standish, I was talking about things that were getting me a little bit outside the realm of my expertise.

You are an expert in this area of water because of course you are a biologist.

You hold a PhD in environmental biology and public policy.

You have a master's in biology, an undergraduate degree, a bachelor's of science in zoology, and you're the senior scientist at the Geoscience Research Institute.

Standish, just to help our audience get a little more familiar with you, What do you do on a daily basis for the Geoscience Research Institute?

The great thing about working where I work is that every day is different.

Some days I come in and I write for much of the day.

There are always constant interruptions and things like that.

I work with graduate students who are working on graduate degrees in the sciences.

On a good day, I get to do some work in there.

And then, of course, there's a lot of work outside of the office where we travel, teach classes, give presentations at various kinds of meetings.

Well and you you work in a place where every day is different.

The Geoscience Research Institute, just to help folks, what is it dedicated to?

What's kind of the mission of the Geoscience Research Institute?

The reason for the institute to exist is to explore the relationship between science and faith.

What is a good, productive, reasonable understanding of the biblical record of history and the current claims of science?

Most of the time, there are no tensions there.

The Bible talks about a place called Jerusalem.

Hey, we can go and see Jerusalem, and there it is.

But there are these occasional areas where there's some kind of tension.

Where might there be something new that we need to find out?

Those are questions that we ask, and sometimes if we can come up with 1 that we might be able to address, we may actually go out and work on doing science to see whether a given way of resolving things might in fact be a possibility.

And if someone wanted to maybe read more about your work or some of the work of the Geoscience Research Institute, where would they find information?

Probably the best place to start is our website, which is www.grisda.org.

I encourage people also to get onto our Facebook page.

You can just do that by looking for Geoscience Research Institute.

And there's constantly changing information there.

On the website itself, we have a constant news feed where we put up links to articles, not necessarily articles that we all agree with, but articles that are coming out in the literature that address these issues that we're interested in in some way.

Now we've opened, we've talked about water and I'm sure someone might be wondering what does water have to do with faith?

But let's just talk about water because we're going to get there.

We're gonna tie this into the biblical faith.

What makes water so different than other molecules?

We already talked about how it's a relatively small light molecule but it exists as a liquid at room temperature.

Now the interesting thing is There are not many things that actually do exist as liquids at room temperature.

There are certain oils, but oils are big molecules.

Some alcohols, ethanol and methanol and these, they are liquids at room temperature but they're significantly heavier also than water itself.

But things that are liquids at room temperature are kind of unusual.

So that's 1 special thing about water and the big question is why?

What that means is it's got an area that is a little bit more negative on it with a little bit of a negative charge And it has slightly positive charges out where the hydrogen atoms are on the molecule.

And because of that, the positive and negative charges attract 1 another.

And so the water molecules stick together and they remain a liquid at room temperature as opposed to pretty much anything else that is that kind of molecular weight.

But the fact that it's polar then means that water has some other really interesting characteristics to it Have you ever tried dissolving salt in in cooking oil?

It just doesn't happen at all Yeah, Water will dissolve all kinds of different things.

Sometimes people call it a universal solvent.

It isn't truly universal, but because there are things obviously that you can't dissolve in water, But it is amazing the way that it can dissolve all kinds of different ions like salt.

It can dissolve alcohols, it can dissolve sugars, it can just tons of stuff which is really useful for living things.

Because those are the sorts of things that we need to move around in our bodies.

Well we can use water to move things like salt and sugar and so on around inside our bodies because our bodies are made primarily of water.

When we talk about living things frequently we get obsessed with carbon and carbon-containing molecules.

Water, when you weigh yourself, it's mostly water.

Now, obviously, there are other things that weigh something in you.

But If we were to dry ourselves out, we would lose a huge amount of weight.

Losing water is the quickest way to lose weight for a human being.

Don't do it, because you need that water.

Another amazing thing about water, in fact, some people have contended that life might not be possible on Earth because of this 1 property.

And that is that water, when it freezes, expands.

Now most things, the colder they get, the more they shrink.

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Series

Designed With Purpose

Water

Transcript

Parent Series

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