Muslim creationism part 8
This is part of a series about the book “The Creation of the Universe” by Adnan Oktar. View Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 and Part 7.
Chapter 7: The signs of creation in water
This chapter waxes lyrical about the amazing properties of water asserting that it was created specifically to be one of the building blocks of life. He does this by arguing that not only is water unique, it is inconsistent with out liquids in its behaviour and therefore must have been divinely created.
Firstly, he covers thermal properties: ice floating on water, water having a high heat conductivity and high heat capacity but ice having a low heat capacity.
Oktar asks why water expands as it cools below 4 degrees and states that nobody has ever been able to answer this question, which is absolutely untrue. Water freezing is a well understood phenomenon. Water (H2O) is a bent polar molecule, meaning that the two hydrogen atoms have a slight positive charge and the oxygen atom has a slight negative charge. When water freezes, the hydrogen atoms don’t want to sit next to each other (like charges repel). The shape of the molecule means the most stable structure is a tetrahedral lattice where the hydrogen atoms are next to oxygen atoms in the next molecule. This creates a crystalline structure that is less dense than liquid water. Oktar consistently confuses mass and density here, saying that the water gets heavier and lighter as it melts and freezes. The mass doesn’t change, but the density does. The rigid crystalline structure means more space between the molecules than when water is fluid, making it less dense. Liquid water has molecules that are closer together and thus are denser.
This property is not unique to water. Silicon expands when it freezes, as does Bismuth, Antimony and Gallium and pretty much any other polar molecule such as ammonia, hydrogen fluoride or sucrose. And interestingly, this is actually not a very desirable property for life – if the water in our cells freezes, our cells burst and are destroyed. If Allah had made it so that it didn’t expand like this, we would have been able to withstand much colder temperatures and live in polar regions or high mountains without so many problems.
Water does have pretty good heat capacity, and moderately good heat conductance, but an all powerful creator of everything in the universe would certainly have been able to come up with better systems for cooling the body than sweating water. There are many other liquids and solids with better heat conductance.
Next, he makes a very big deal of water’s low viscosity: “Indeed, if we discount a few substances such as ether and liquid hydrogen, water appears to have a viscosity less than anything except gases.” Why yes, if you ignore all the liquids with viscosity lower than water, you will find that water has the lowest viscosity of all. The few substances also include liquid nitrogen, acetone, benzene, methanol and ethyl alcohol. He next notes that if water suddenly became more viscous, our heart wouldn’t be able to pump it properly. Obviously, since our circulatory system evolved to work with blood that was largely made of water.
He says several times that water was obviously perfectly designed for our bodies. I do wonder how Oktar things this whole creation thing worked. Allah apparently created us (out of either clay (15:26), a drop of fluid (16:4), dust (30:20) or a blood clot (96:1-2) depending which chapter you believe) with this circulatory system and then sat back and thought, hmm, I better design something to go inside all these arteries, veins and capillaries. I better make it not too viscous, and since it will be oozing out the sweat glands, I better make sure it has high heat conductance. Except that water already existed, because he apparently made all living things out of water (24:45), including us (25:54).