Secularism

Every December, churches across the United States prepare for an influx of visitors, but fewer Americans than ever are including church in this year’s Christmas plans. According to a Lifeway Research study, only 47% of U.S. adults say they typically attend church during the holiday season, while 48% admit it’s not on their agenda, and 5% remain undecided. While 9 in 10 Americans do something to celebrate Christmas, less than half typically attend church at Christmastime today.

The study reveals a sharp divide in Christmas church attendance, particularly among the religiously unaffiliated—a group growing fastest among younger demographics. While 71% of this group say they’re unlikely to attend church at Christmas, 40% admit they might consider it if personally invited by someone they trust.

Among those who do attend, the motivations are surprisingly diverse. Sixty percent of Christmas churchgoers say their attendance stems from faith, but others are only doing it to keep up with tradition (16%), appease family and friends (15%), or simply embrace the festive ambiance (8%).

As churches prepare for Christmas Eve services — often the highest-attended service of the year — the message is clear: intentional outreach matters.

A writer admits that secularism still hasn’t found an alternative to belief in God. Lauren Jackson writes, “I knew the potency of believing, really believing, that I had a certain place in the cosmos. That I was eternally loved. That life made sense. Or that it would, one day, for sure. I had that, and I left it all.

I spent my 20s worshiping at the altar of work and, in my free time, testing secular ideas for how to live well. I built a community. I volunteered. I cared for my nieces and nephews. I pursued wellness. I paid for workout classes on Sunday mornings, practiced mindfulness, went to therapy, visited saunas and subscribed to meditation apps. I tried book clubs and running clubs. I cobbled together moral instruction from books on philosophy and whatever happened to move me on Instagram. Nothing has felt quite like [the religion of my childhood].

Jackson concludes:

But I don’t feel I can go back… I’ve been steeped in secularism for a decade, and I can no longer access the uncritical belief I once felt… [But] my spiritual longing persists — and it hasn’t been sated by secularism. I want a god… I still want it all to be true: miracles, souls, some sort of cosmic alchemy that makes sense of the chaos.

For years, I haven’t been able to say that publicly. But it feels like something is changing. That maybe the culture is shifting. That maybe we’re starting to recognize that it’s possible to be both believing and discerning after all.

Amazon has unveiled its latest innovation in warehouse automation: Vulcan, a state-of-the-art robot equipped with touch-sensitive technology. Currently being piloted in fulfillment centers in Spokane, Washington and Hamburg, Germany, Vulcan represents a significant leap forward in robotic dexterity and efficiency. Unlike previous warehouse robots, Vulcan can “feel” its way around packages, allowing it to handle a wider variety of items with greater precision and care.

The introduction of Vulcan is part of Amazon’s ongoing commitment to improving both the speed and safety of its logistics operations. According to Amazon’s robotics division, “Vulcan’s ability to sense and adapt to the objects it handles is a game-changer for our fulfillment process.” The robot’s touch sensors enable it to detect the size, shape, and fragility of packages, reducing the risk of damage and improving overall workflow.

Warehouse employees working alongside Vulcan have noted the robot’s smooth integration into daily operations. The company also emphasizes that Vulcan is designed to work collaboratively with human staff, not replace them. “Our goal is to make our employees’ jobs easier and safer by automating repetitive or strenuous tasks,” an Amazon spokesperson explained. Regardless of its current level of efficacy, the e-commerce giant still reserves its most important tasks for humans.

As Amazon continues to expand its use of advanced robotics, Vulcan stands out as a symbol of the future of warehouse automation—a future where machines and humans work together more seamlessly than ever before.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Idolatry; Technology; Trust - The Bible warns against placing ultimate trust in human inventions or allowing technology to become an idol, such as the Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1-9). Trust should be placed in God, not in human innovation (Psa. 20:7); 2) Cooperation, Teamwork - Vulcan is designed to augment, not replace, human workers, echoing the biblical theme of shared labor and partnership in work (Ecc. 4:9)

While U.S. currency says “In God We Trust,” only half of U.S. adults have certainty about God’s existence.

When asked about their confidence in God’s existence, 50% say they know God exists and have no doubts, according to the latest General Social Survey (GSS). In 1993, 65% of Americans said they were certain God existed, and the percentage has been sliding down ever since.

Belief in God has particularly fallen among young adults. In 1993, 63% of 18- to 34-year-olds knew God existed with no doubts. Today, just 36% have the same confidence. Other age demographics have fallen, but not to the same extent. Belief in the divine among 35- to 49-year-olds is down to 49%. While the percentage of those 50 and older who have complete confidence in God’s existence remains higher than other age groups, it has dropped to 58%.

Belief in God among upper-class Americans has actually increased over the past two decades, from 49% to 53%. But it has declined in every other class designation. Middle-class belief is down from 62% in 1993 to 44%. Working-class belief has declined from 67% to 54%. And lower class belief has dropped from 75% to 57%.

A study of YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook revealed that American Teens—by a large margin—use YouTube (71%) more than TikTok (58%). But they're more likely to scroll through the TikTok app "almost constantly," according to Pew Research Center polling.

The stat points to how addictive and unhealthy TikTok's endless feed of videos can be for teens.

A study from the Center for Countering Digital Hate found that new TikTok accounts were shown self-harm and eating disorder content within minutes of scrolling.

• Suicide-related videos popped up within 2.6 minutes.
• Eating disorder content popped up in 8 minutes.

Because of this, there's suddenly a roaring national debate over fears about teens' privacy, their data security—and all the misinformation going straight to their phones. Citing national security concerns, Congress is pushing to force the platform's Chinese parent company to sell TikTok or face a ban.

Psychologist Jean Twenge says. "It's of course possible that people will replace TikTok time with YouTube time or Instagram time. However, TikTok's algorithm is particularly effective at getting you to spend more time on it."

Journalist Derek Thompson is lamenting the decline of church attendance in America. As an agnostic, one would think he would be pleased. In a piece for The Atlantic, he writes: "Maybe religion, for all of its faults, works a bit like a retaining wall to hold back the destabilizing pressure of American hyper-individualism, which threatens to swell and spill over in its absence."

Thompson paraphrases social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his book, The Anxious Generation:

Many Americans have developed a new relationship with a technology that is the diabolical opposite of a religious ritual: the smartphone. (To) stare into a piece of glass in our hands is to be removed from our bodies, to skim our attention from one piece of ephemera to the next. Digital life is disembodied, asynchronous, shallow, and solitary.

Religious rituals put us in our body, requiring some kind of movement that marks the activity as devotional. Christians kneel, Muslims prostrate, and Jews pray. Religious ritual also fixes us in time, forcing us to set aside an hour or day for prayer, reflection, or separation from daily habit. Finally, religious ritual often requires that we make contact with the sacred in the presence of other people.

I wonder if, in forgoing organized religion, an isolated country has discarded an old and proven source of ritual at a time when we most need it. It took decades for Americans to lose religion. It might take decades to understand the entirety of what we lost.

In October 2022 a bird with the code name B6 set a new world record. Over the course of 11 days, B6, a young Bar-tailed Godwit, flew from its hatching ground in Alaska to its wintering ground in Tasmania, covering 8,425 miles without taking a single break. For comparison, there is only one commercial aircraft that can fly that far nonstop, a Boeing 777 with a 213-foot wingspan and one of the most powerful jet engines in the world.

During its journey, B6—an animal that could perch comfortably on your shoulder—did not land, did not eat, did not drink, and did not stop flapping, sustaining an average ground speed of 30 miles per hour 24 hours a day as it winged its way to the other end of the world.

Many factors contributed to this astonishing feat of athleticism—muscle power, a high metabolic rate, and a physiological tolerance for elevated cortisol levels, among other things. B6’s odyssey is also a triumph of the remarkable mechanical properties of feathers. Feathers kept B6 warm overnight while it flew above the Pacific Ocean. Feathers repelled rain along the way. Feathers formed the flight surfaces of the wings that kept B6 aloft and drove the bird forward for nearly 250 hours without failing.

Research shows that feather shape is largely optimized to allow the feather to twist and bend in sophisticated ways that greatly enhance flight performance. Merely being anatomically asymmetrical doesn’t mean much. What matters is that the feather is aerodynamically asymmetrical. That is, the trailing blade needs to be three times wider than the leading one. Below this ratio, the feather twists in a destabilizing rather than stabilizing way during flight.

Editor’s Note: This small bird is one example of the creative wisdom of God. This article goes on to attribute the marvel of the flight in this bird to evolution. However, the Bible says that all of creation shows the glory of intelligent design by God for those who are willing to see it (Ps. 19:1-6; Rom. 1:18-25).

“It’s hijacking my brain.” Say young people addicted to social media and who are desperate for help. Many people have compared the addictive nature of social media to cigarettes. Checking your likes, they say, is the new smoke break. More than 75% of teens check their phone hourly, and half say they feel like they’re addicted to their devices.

Here are some of the things they’ve said:

“TikTok has me in a chokehold.”

“I would 1,000% say I am addicted.”

“I feel completely aware that it is hijacking my brain, but I can’t put it down. This leaves me feeling ashamed.”

Maybe you’ve had similar feelings yourself, no matter your age. Although it’s true social technologies offer some benefits, many people feel uncomfortable with how much time they spend online and often wonder if they’re addicted.

One approach is to view your media consumption as a diet. Just as there are many ways to have a healthy diet, there are also a variety of ways to develop healthy and personalized social media habits.

The researchers offered practical steps that you can take right now to reduce your dependence on social media. This includes turning off notifications, removing apps that you find harmful, curating your social media feed by unfollowing certain accounts, setting your phone to grayscale to reduce the appeal, and reserving phone-free time.

Possible Preaching Angle:

In addition to the practical steps listed above, the believer should add prayer (Heb. 4:14-16; Jam. 1:5), time in the Word (especially memorizing God’s promises for overcoming destructive habits, Ps. 119:11), and finding an accountability partner (Prov. 27:17).

In CT magazine, Brad East reflects on Olympic athletes sharing their Christian testimony:

The opening ceremonies of the Olympics are extravagant celebrations of national glories and global unity. But if you watch past the opener to the 2024 Games themselves, you’ll notice an unusual pattern: Athletes are always talking about God. Athletes of every kind continuously gave God the credit, often in explicitly Christian terms.

For my money, US track star Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone won. After breaking the world record (again) for women’s 400-meter hurdles, she answered a reporter’s question this way: “Honestly—praise God. I was not expecting that, but he can do anything. Anything is possible in Christ. I’m just amazed, baffled, and in shock.” The reporter laughed nervously and moved on to the next qualifier.

It’s not news that athletes thank the Lord for their success. But watching these public displays of piety made me wonder: Why is this still normal? Unlike other events, like the Oscars, sporting events appear to be the last refuge of “acceptable” public faith in our secular culture. In a time when belief is belittled, ignored, or relegated to one’s private life, athletes are unapologetically faithful in public. But why?

The place to start, I think, is the nature of sports itself. Athletic discipline is rigorously controlled because, when the whistle blows, nothing is under control. It’s chaos, contingency, and chance all the way down. The skies fill with rain clouds; the court is slick with sweat; the track is spongy; your opponents are strategically unpredictable.

With good reason, therefore, athletes turn to God. None but God is sovereign. I can’t control the weather, but he can. I can’t stop my body from failing, but he can. Even the wind and the waves obey him (Matt. 8:27). Shouldn’t footballs and softballs obey him too?

For athletes, God isn’t just in charge of the moment. He’s the governor of history. This is true for all of us, at all times, but elite athletes are viscerally reminded of it with a frequency few of us experience.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a victorious athlete will speak of more than God answering a prayer. Sure, they may be caught up in the moment. Deep down, though, they’re expressing faith in divine providence. It’s one more way to be clear about control. None of us has it, because only God does, and the sooner one recognizes that, the sooner peace is possible when losing and real joy available when winning.

In Buddhist Japan, they now have robot priests. Mindar is a robo-priest which has been working at a temple in Kyoto for the last few years, reciting Buddhist sutras with which it has been programmed. The next step, says monk Tensho Goto, an excitable champion of the digital dharma, is to fit it with an AI system so that it can have real conversations, and offer spiritual advice. Goto is especially excited about the fact that Mindar is “immortal.” This means, he says, that it will be able to pass on the tradition in the future better than him.

Meanwhile, over in China, Xian’er is a touchscreen “robo-monk” who works in a temple near Beijing, spreading “kindness, compassion and wisdom to others through the internet and new media.”

In India, the Hindus are joining in, handing over duties in one of their major ceremonies to a robot arm, which performs in place of a priest.

In a Catholic church in Warsaw, Poland, sits SanTO, an AI robot which looks like a statue of a saint, and is “designed to help people pray” by offering Bible quotes in response to questions.

Not to be outdone, a protestant church in Germany has developed a robot called BlessU-2. BlessU-2, which looks like a character designed by Aardman Animations, can “forgive your sins in five different languages,” which must be handy if they’re too embarrassing to confess to a human.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Computer scientists and programmers pursue their goal of creating their own god from AI. They seek wisdom and guidance apart from the true source. “For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water.” (Jer. 2:13)

When Americans are asked to check a box indicating their religious affiliation, 28% now check “none.” A new study from Pew Research finds that the religiously unaffiliated is now the largest cohort in the U.S. They're more prevalent among American adults than Catholics (23%) or evangelical Protestants (24%). Researchers refer to this group as the "Nones."

Back in 2007, Nones made up just 16% of Americans, but Pew's new survey of more than 3,300 U.S. adults shows that number has now risen dramatically. Pew asked respondents what they believe. The research organization found that most Nones believe in God or another higher power, but very few attend any kind of religious service.

They aren't all anti-religious. Most Nones say religion does some harm, but many also think it does some good. Most have more positive views of science than those who are religiously affiliated; however, they reject the idea that science can explain everything.

Pew also asked respondents what they believe. While many people of faith say they rely on scripture, tradition, and the guidance of religious leaders to make moral decisions, Pew found that Nones say they're guided by logic or reason when making moral decisions. And huge numbers say the desire to avoid hurting other people factors prominently in how they think about right and wrong.

Demographically, Nones also stand out from the religiously affiliated:

• Nones are young. 69% are under the age of fifty.

• They're also less racially diverse. 63% of Nones are white.

• The Nones are comprised of three distinct groups – atheists, agnostics, and those who describe themselves as “nothing in particular.”

Sharing a Christian worldview with others can often create tense situations. Especially when we are talking with friends and family who do not share our views.

A "Profile" article in The New Yorker spotlighted Ross Douthat, a popular Times columnist. The title of the article is noteworthy: "The Believer: Ross Douthat's Theories of Persuasion." Douthat is a conservative leaning Catholic who is a pro-lifer and an advocate for traditional marriage.

How does he negotiate working with colleagues whose views are radically different from his own? The article offers one example that might be instructive.

In 2015, Douthat wrote a piece critical of the Supreme Court's decision to legalize gay marriage, expressing concern that it reflected a "more relaxed view of marriage's importance." Before releasing it, he thought of Michael Barbaro. Barbaro has been a close friend of Douthat's since childhood. He refers to himself as Douthat's "sidekick." And Barbaro was married to a man. Barbaro recalls:

We hadn't been in touch that much, but Ross reached out to me to say, “I'm about to publish a column in which I come out against same-sex marriage. I want you to know that it didn't come to me easily. It's something I know may be sensitive to you. And, as somebody I care about, I want you to understand it. I don't want you to read about it in my column without us talking about it.”

When Barbaro shared how much he appreciated the note, Chotiner, the New Yorker reporter conducting the interview, was surprised, Barbaro should have been furious! Why wasn't he? Barbaro explained:

I was wounded by the position he took on a personal level. How could I not be? But it was meaningfully tempered by the reality that I knew where he was coming from, and that he had gone to the trouble to reach out to me.

Barbaro and his husband later divorced. When Chotiner interviewed him, Ross was on vacation with his wife and two children. He shared, "I've been on a long journey that I know Ross generally approves of. But, although I didn't do it for him, it's very funny, as I have had children, I can just sense his glee. It's no secret that he wants people to have children and to enter into monogamous heterosexual relationships." Barbaro let out a laugh. "And that wasn't my plan, but I have sensed his joy at that outcome."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Part of the pressure of sharing our Christian worldview comes from our mistaken belief that we must convince others of our views. But our job is much simpler than all that. We are called only to speak the truth in love. And you'd be surprised at how persuasive that simple act can be.

Controversial activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali became well known when she published her 2007 memoir Infidel, which was an account of her life as a Muslim woman and her fight against radical Islam. She made headlines worldwide when she converted to atheism, receiving numerous death threats. In November 2023, she announced her conversion to Christianity. Her reasons address in part what is happening in the world today. She writes:

Atheists were wrong when they said rejection of God would usher in a new age of reason and intelligent humanism. But the 'God hole'—the void left by the retreat of the church—has merely been filled by a jumble of irrational, quasi-religious dogma. The result is a world where modern cults prey on the dislocated masses, offering them spurious reasons for being and action. This is mostly by engaging in virtue-signaling theater on behalf of a victimized minority or our supposedly doomed planet. The line often attributed to G.K. Chesterton has turned into a prophecy: 'When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.'

In this nihilistic vacuum, the challenge before us becomes civilizational. We can’t withstand China, Russia, and Iran if we can’t explain to our populations why it matters that we do. We can’t fight woke ideology if we can’t defend the civilization that it is determined to destroy. And we can’t counter Islamism with purely secular tools. To win the hearts and minds of Muslims here in the West, we have to offer them something more than videos on TikTok.

The lesson I learned from my years with the Muslim Brotherhood was the power of a unifying story, embedded in the foundational texts of Islam, to attract, engage, and mobilize the Muslim masses. Unless we offer something as meaningful, I fear the erosion of our civilization will continue. And fortunately, there is no need to look for some New Age concoction of medication and mindfulness. Christianity has it all.

Grammy award-winning singer Billie Eilish says she has deleted her social media apps from her phone due to her complicated relationship with the internet.

In 2023 Eilish said, “I don’t look at it anymore. I’ve deleted it all off my phone.” She noted that the move was “such a huge deal” for her as a self-proclaimed “internet kid.”

I feel like I grew up in the perfect time of the internet when it wasn’t so internet-y that I didn’t have a childhood. I really had such a childhood, and I was doing stuff all the time. It was like computers and games on computers, but barely.

And then when I became a pre-teen, there were iPhones, and then I got a little older, there was all of what has become. But being a pre-teen and a teenager on the internet, those were my people, I was one of them. Anything I read on the internet I believe. And I know for a fact that’s stupid and I shouldn’t do that because I have proof that it’s not all true. Almost none of it’s true. It’s, like, little things, like small white lies that goes over everybody’s head, but everyone believes.

An Aperture video goes into some depth as to how the promises of self-help and New Age teachings fail to deliver what the individual truly needs. The narrator says:

Today a snake oil salesperson describes someone who advertises or sells any product that promises the world and fails to deliver. Sadly, that's the story of self-improvement, at least as it is today. Because while it might seem like a new trend, the idea of self-help dates back to early philosophers like Seneca and Socrates. In the Fifth Century BC Socrates spoke about the constant improvement of your soul. He insisted that practices like meditation, fasting, prayer, and exercise could feed your soul and therefore improve your life.

Hundreds of years later, in the 1970s, the New Age movement arose and preached a philosophy of personal transformation and healing. The movement revolved around accessing our spiritual energy through yoga, meditation, tarot card readings, and astrology. This idea that we could elevate ourselves has persisted. But like most things in the West, once people found out just how much money they could make, self-improvement shifted from being a guide for those who needed it the most to a product reserved for those who could afford it.

Deepak Chopra, a prominent figure in the New Age movement, tells us that our mental health can determine our physical reality, that we can think ourselves into being healthier and happier. After his ideas were popularized by Oprah Winfrey, Chopra became an international sensation. He held seminars and became a spiritual advisor to celebrities like Michael Jackson. Needless to say, lost souls worldwide have made Chopra a very wealthy man.

Possible Preaching Angle:

One of the biggest problems with self-help is that just like snake oil salespersons, self-help experts claim to be able to heal the world with their speech. In reality, whether you're Chopra or one of the hundreds of other experts, the false path to self-improvement continues to ruin lives.

The CDC’s bi-annual Youth Risk Behavior Survey (2023) showed that most teen girls (57%) now say that they experience persistent sadness or hopelessness (up from 36% in 2011), and 30% of teen girls now say that they have seriously considered suicide (up from 19% in 2011). Boys are doing badly too, but their rates of depression and anxiety are not as high, and their increases since 2011 are smaller.

What are the causes behind this concerning trend? It’s complex, but in a thorough overview of hundreds of studies, here’s how researcher Jon Haidt summarizes the data:

There is one giant, obvious, international, and gendered cause: Social media. Instagram was founded in 2010. The iPhone 4 was released then too—the first smartphone with a front-facing camera. In 2012 Facebook bought Instagram, and that’s the year that its user base exploded. By 2015, it was becoming normal for 12-year-old girls to spend hours each day taking selfies, editing selfies, and posting them for friends, enemies, and strangers to comment on, while also spending hours each day scrolling through photos of other girls and fabulously wealthy female celebrities with (seemingly) vastly superior bodies and lives. The hours girls spent each day on Instagram were taken from sleep, exercise, and time with friends and family. What did we think would happen to them?

The term “deaths of despair” was coined in 2015 by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton. The researchers were seeking to find what was causing the decline in U.S. life expectancies in the later part of the 20th century. They discovered the dramatic increase in death rates for middle-aged, white non-Hispanic men and women was coming from three causes: drug overdoses, suicide, and alcoholic liver disease. Deaths from these causes have increased between 56 percent and 387 percent and average 70,000 per year.

The researchers said, “The pillars that once helped give life meaning—a good job, a stable home life, a voice in the community—have all eroded.” Those pillars are certainly important, but another factor may have an even more detrimental effect.

Research suggests a potential cause of deaths of despair could be the decline in religious participation that began in the late 1980s. The researchers found “there is a strong negative relationship between religiosity and mortality due to deaths of despair.”

In 2010, country singer Jason Aldean released a song called “Church Pew or Bar Stool” in which he complains about how he’s stuck in a “church pew or bar stool kind of town.” He sings, “There’s only two means of salvation around here that seem to work / Whiskey or the Bible, a shot glass or revival.” That’s a crude dichotomy, but it appears to increasingly be the choice many Americans face. They’ll either find hope from a community of faith or the lonely despair that leads them to self-medicate with alcohol and drugs.

It is impossible to do justice to the wonder of the creation of the world and everything in it. You and I have to work hard to make anything. Even when you buy a piece of furniture from IKEA, with all the pieces properly designed and a booklet of instructions, you are driven to the edge of your sanity trying to follow the instructions and assemble what you bought.

All of our DIY projects require mental focus, physical dexterity, and perseverance. We struggle to make things, even though we always start with raw materials, are following instructions, and have collected the appropriate tools. But you and I have never created anything; we do not make something out of nothing. C. S. Lewis said it this way: "Creation, as it is for God, must always remain totally inconceivable to man. We only build. We always have materials to build from.”

The truth of creation should fill us with awe, humble us, and drop us to our knees. God, with nothing more than his will and his word literally spoke the universe into existence. Think of huge galaxies and little ants. Think of the body of an elephant and the translucent creatures that swim in the deep­est trenches of the sea. Think of huge towering trees and microscopic organisms. Think of the technology of the human eye and the intricate design of your hand. Genesis 1 and 2 are meant to put you in your place and insert God in his proper place in your heart and life.

Only half of Americans now say they are sure God exists according to the General Social Survey, conducted by NORC, the research arm of the University of Chicago. Religious scholars consider NORC the gold standard of surveys on faith.

According to this 2022 survey, 50% of Americans say they’re unsure God is real; just under 50% say they’re positive God exists; and 34% say they never go to church—the highest level in 50 years. It’s still about a fifty-fifty world out there; but it’s tipping toward uncertainty.

If you look at years past, in comparison with years present, it seems America is hurtling toward secularism. In 2008, for example, 60% of those responding to this General Social Survey expressed certainty in the existence of God. At that rate—of 10% drops in belief in God every 15 years—all of America will be non-believing by the dawn of the next century.

Ryan Burge, is a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University who studies faith. He wrote that mainline Protestantism, the backbone of faith in many American communities, is “collapsing.” Since the 1970s, the share of Americans who identify with Protestant denominations has declined from nearly 1 in 3 to around 1 in 10.

Researchers reported recently that it is striking that water is the “least understood material on Earth.” In an article, researchers ask, “What could we not know about water? It’s wet! It’s clear. It comes from rain. It boils. It makes snow and it makes ice! Does our government actually spend taxpayer money to study water? Yes, water is common—in fact, it is the third most common molecule in the universe. But it is also deceptively complex.” From steam to ice, water continues to mystify. Here are several of the weird facts about water:

Why Does Ice Float?

Researchers tried to tease apart what makes water unique among liquids. It’s got anomalous properties, like expanding when cooled below 40 degrees Fahrenheit. (This) explains why lakes freeze downward, from top to bottom, rather than up. Normally frozen solids are denser than their liquid equivalents, which would mean that frozen chunks would fall to the bottom of a lake instead of staying on top. But when water freezes, it creates an open structure, mostly empty space and less dense than … liquid water, which is why water props ice up.

Why Can Insects Walk On It?

Water has an uncanny level of surface tension, allowing beings light enough, like insects, to walk or stand atop it. Since it’s these distinctive features among others that power our climate and ecosystems, water can appear to be “fine-tuned” for life according to the researchers.

How Does Water Evaporate?

The rate of evaporation of liquid water is one of the principal uncertainties in modern climate modeling. ... The addition of salts to water raises the surface tension … and so should reduce the evaporation rate. But experimental studies show little or no effect when salts are added. The exact mechanism for how water evaporates isn’t completely understood.

Possible Preaching Angle:

These researchers point out some of the weird anomalies of water, which covers 71% of the surface of our world. Although they do not acknowledge God in their research, they do admit that “water can appear to be ‘fine-tuned’ for life.” Christians would respond that without its God-given properties, lakes would freeze from the bottom up, killing all fish in them. And, although the salt in oceans should inhibit evaporation, the water in the oceans evaporates, producing rain over the land. These are some examples of “Intelligent Design” in which our wise creator fine-tuned the earth to sustain life and provide for our needs and enjoyment of life.