One of the terrible and ironic things about recent flood and hurricane disasters is the way that water, the ultimate life-giver on our planet, became a life-taker. You won’t realize the full poignancy of this until you consider the range of evidence for water as being finely tuned for life, and especially for mammals like us.

In his new book, The Wonder of Water: Water’s Profound Fitness for Life on Earth and Mankind, Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton explains that evidence with a clarity and eloquence that no other scientist or science writer does. The remarkable thing about water is the interlocking qualities of its unusual chemistry, and how that makes it ideally suited for the many roles it plays in making life on Earth possible.

A short video, above, summarizes these, including water’s aspects as a “universal solvent,” with just the right viscosity for the circulatory system, with its vital ability to effect body cooling by evaporation, and on and on. No creature benefits more from these qualities than humans do. Let that sink in. What about the fact that frozen water floats rather than sinks? Life as we know it would be impossible otherwise. On a planetary level, it drives the tectonic and water cycles, those “two great cogs that work together,” as Denton puts it. All a lucky coincidence, you say?

The many diverse capacities of water need not have been as they are. That these are all brought together just so provides among the most powerful pointers to intelligent design.

The Wonder of Water makes a fine match with Dr. Denton’s previous book, Fire-Maker Book: How Humans Were Designed to Harness Fire and Transform Our Planet, its companion in the Privileged Species Series.

Fire and water — could there be a more iconic dual symbol of the way our world, or its designer, saw us coming and carefully prepared the way? Materialists insist the universe is in no way specially intended for human life. That contention can’t survive an encounter with Michael Denton’s work.