Water's Dual Role

If you were designing a molecule to be maximally useful to life, you would want it to dissolve almost anything: carry nutrients, flush waste, enabling the thousands of chemical reactions that biochemistry requires. You would want it to be stable across a wide temperature range, to moderate the temperature of whatever it fills, to be the most abundant molecule on the planet. You would want it to be water. And then someone would tell you that this same molecule actively attacks and destroys proteins and DNA, breaking peptide bonds through hydrolysis, degrading phosphodiester linkages, dissolving the very polymers you need life to build. And you would say: that can't work. And then you would look at every living cell on Earth, which runs in water, and realize it does work. That it works is one of the stranger unexplained facts in chemistry.

I. The Twenty Anomalies of Water

Water (H₂O) is, by any chemical prediction, a bizarre molecule. Based on the properties of comparable molecules in its periodic table group (hydrogen sulfide, hydrogen selenide, hydrogen telluride), water should be a gas at room temperature. It boils at -80°C, not +100°C. It freezes at -110°C, not 0°C. The fact that water is liquid at the temperatures relevant to Earth's surface (and to life) is itself an anomaly that requires explanation.

This anomaly is caused by hydrogen bonding: the extraordinary tendency of water molecules to bond to each other through partial charges created by the electronegativity of oxygen. The same hydrogen bonding is responsible for every other anomalous property of water that makes life possible. It is a cascade of engineering consequences from a single molecular design decision.

Each of these properties is caused by the same underlying feature: the hydrogen bond. A single molecular design decision: the geometry and electronegativity of H₂O produces a cascade of at least 20 known anomalous properties, every one of which is independently beneficial to life. Michael Denton's analysis in Nature's Destiny (1998) shows that the probability of this convergence being accidental is not calculable by standard probability. It is too improbable to be a coincidence and too elegant not to be purposeful.

II. The Hydrolysis Problem: Water Destroys What It Hosts

Here is the paradox that makes water the hardest problem in abiogenesis. The very same water that enables biochemistry actively destroys the polymers biochemistry depends on:

• Peptide bond hydrolysis: The bonds that link amino acids into proteins (peptide bonds) are thermodynamically unstable in water. They spontaneously hydrolyze — break apart — releasing free amino acids. In water at neutral pH and room temperature, a typical peptide bond has a half-life of roughly 7 years. An unprotected protein would dissolve. Life maintains proteins through constant resynthesis, quality control (ubiquitin-proteasome system), and molecular chaperones — all of which require enzymes, which are proteins, which are being hydrolyzed.
• Phosphodiester bond hydrolysis: The backbone of DNA and RNA — the sugar-phosphate chain — is also subject to hydrolysis. RNA is particularly unstable in water because the 2'-hydroxyl group on ribose catalyzes its own backbone cleavage. This is why RNA-World scenarios in water face a chemical catch-22: RNA cannot form in water easily, and when it does form, it breaks down quickly.
• The condensation problem: Forming any biological polymer requires a condensation reaction — releasing water as monomers join. In an aqueous environment, the equilibrium strongly favors the reverse reaction: hydrolysis. You are trying to build a polymer in a solvent that actively prefers to disassemble it. This is why life uses enzymes (ribosomes for proteins, polymerases for DNA/RNA) — they drive the condensation reaction against its thermodynamic preference.

This creates a problem with no spontaneous solution: you cannot polymerize amino acids or nucleotides in water without enzyme catalysis. But enzyme catalysis requires proteins and ribosomes. Proteins require DNA. DNA requires polymerases. Polymerases are proteins. The whole system must exist before any part can form in water. This is not the chicken-and-egg problem. This is a chicken that requires five eggs to hatch it simultaneously.

III. How Life Solved the Hydrolysis Problem — Evidence of Design

Living cells solved the hydrolysis problem in a way that reveals the depth of the engineering. Rather than avoiding water, life uses it — but restricts polymer chemistry to protected microenvironments where water is excluded at the critical moments.

Ribosome-mediated protein synthesis takes place inside the ribosome's peptidyl transferase center — a precisely shaped cavity from which water molecules are excluded at the moment of peptide bond formation. The ribosome is not just a catalyst; it is a machine designed to perform chemistry that is thermodynamically impossible in bulk water, by creating a micro-environment where water cannot interfere. The ribosome is ~2.5 megadaltons of precisely assembled RNA and protein — one of the most complex molecular machines in any living cell. Its solution to the water problem is not a patch. It is elegant, multi-layered engineering.

Similarly, DNA is protected from hydrolysis by: (1) wrapping around histones, which regulate access; (2) the DNA double helix structure itself, which buries the phosphodiester backbone in a hydrogen-bonded interior; (3) constant DNA repair machinery (mismatch repair, base excision repair, nucleotide excision repair); and (4) the nucleus — a separate membrane-bounded compartment that controls what enters and exits. All four layers of protection must be in place for DNA to survive. All four require proteins encoded by DNA.

IV. The Henderson-Lawrence Argument — A Forgotten Classic

In 1913, Harvard physiologist Lawrence Henderson wrote The Fitness of the Environment — one of the first rigorous scientific arguments for teleology in nature. Henderson catalogued the extraordinary chemical properties of water, carbon dioxide, and carbonic acid, and argued that the fitness of these molecules for life was not explicable by chance. He was not a fundamentalist. He was a Harvard scientist presenting a chemical argument that the materialist consensus quietly buried. His book was cited by John Collins (1924) as the most important book in biology since Darwin's — and is rarely assigned in modern curricula.

Henderson's argument anticipated the fine-tuning arguments of Barrow and Tipler (1986) and Denton (1998) by 70 years. It was ignored not because it was refuted, but because it was inconvenient. His core observation remains: the physical and chemical properties of water are not just compatible with life — they are the precise values that make life possible, and no chemical theory explains why.

V. Water as NO and NOW — The Same Molecule, Two Verdicts

The question is not whether water is dangerous. It is whether the organism that lives in danger was built with that danger in view. The ribosome says yes. The four-layer DNA protection system says yes. The cell membrane, which controls exactly what water can reach, says yes. These are not evolutionary accommodations. They are pre-specified answers to a problem that could not have been known by chemistry.

VI. Water and the Biblical Framework

The creation narrative of Genesis opens with water: "the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters" (Genesis 1:2). Before light, before land, before life — water. This is not presented as metaphor in the text. And the scientific account, from whatever starting point one adopts, also begins with water. Earth is uniquely water-covered in the solar system, in the precise proportions that enable the water cycle, life, and climate stabilization. The YEC framework (ICR, Dr. Walter Brown's Hydroplate Theory) places water at the center of both creation and catastrophe — as the medium of the Flood and the condition for life. Whatever one concludes about young-earth versus old-earth chronology, the choice of water as the medium of life is not random. It is precisely, almost impossibly, right.

The following sources constitute the primary intellectual foundations for reviewing and preparing for this kind of argument.

• BOOK — CLASSIC Henderson, L.J. (1913). The Fitness of the Environment: An Inquiry into the Biological Significance of the Properties of Matter. Macmillan. The original scientific argument for teleology in water's chemistry. Harvard physiologist. Cited by contemporaries as more important than Darwin. Rarely assigned today. View on WorldCat ↗
• BOOK Denton, M. (1998). Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe. Free Press. The most comprehensive modern argument for water's teleological fitness. Chapters 2–4 are the definitive treatment of water's anomalous properties and their biological significance. View on WorldCat ↗
• PEER-REVIEWED Chaplin, M. (2006). "Do we underestimate the importance of water in cell biology?" Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, 7, 861–866. Mainstream review of water's anomalous properties and their cellular significance — acknowledges the depth of the problem without drawing teleological conclusions. Read on PubMed ↗
• BOOK Brown, W. (2008). In the Beginning: Compelling Evidence for Creation and the Flood (8th ed.). Center for Scientific Creation. Brown's Hydroplate Theory places water at the center of creation and catastrophe — includes analysis of water's properties and their significance for the biblical creation account. View at creationscience.com ↗
• BOOK Ball, P. (2001). Life's Matrix: A Biography of Water. University of California Press. The most readable mainstream treatment of water chemistry — Ball is a senior editor at Nature. Comprehensive on the anomalies without engaging the teleological implications. View on WorldCat ↗