Calminian said:
Well actually I was blown away that NASA is reporting large reservoirs of water just hanging around out there in space near the edges of our universe.
“The environment around this quasar is very unique in that it’s producing this huge mass of water,” said Matt Bradford, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “It’s another demonstration that water is pervasive throughout the universe, even at the very earliest times.”
This is NASA, mind you, not a bunch of creationists. But it's no surprise the creationists are finding it amazingly compatible with how they are interpreting the waters of Genesis.
This is not helpful to you. It is not liquid water that was found, but water vapour, and though there is a large amount its density is 300 trillion times less than the Earth's atmosphere and is spread out in a thin cloud spanning hundreds of light years. This information is from the same scientific article your ICR people were quoting. They should have picked up on this, but it's not surprising they missed the bigger point as its not the message they wanted to propagate.
God, in Genesis, is described as "hovering" over the waters – depending on the translation. This is reminiscent of a liquid ocean, not a really thin cloud of water vapour spanning hundreds of light years as described in the NASA article. It is just not the same thing at all.
Furthermore, the article contains additional information that undermines belief in a young Earth.
• 12 billion light-years away (This is equivalent to saying 12 billion years ago. If you accept this as well then you must reject the Young Earth Hypothesis. I hope you do.)
• the water vapor is distributed around the black hole in a gaseous region spanning hundreds of light-years in size (The article is not talking of a small area the size of the Earth, as in the creation story. The region is immense and covers an area that would include numerous star systems. You need astronomers to locate a mass of liquid water not much larger than the Earth that inexplicable doesn’t disperse and doesn’t freeze into a solid block of ice.)
• Astronomers expected water vapor to be present even in the early, distant universe, but had not detected it this far away before (Lots of water in gaseous clouds has already been detected in our own galaxy. What’s new with this discovery is the total amount of water vapour present and its great age.)
• the gas is at a chilly minus 63 degrees Fahrenheit (Just another reminder that we are not talking about liquid water as in the creation story.)
• the astronomers say... some of the gas may end up condensing into stars (Do you accept that stars form from such clouds? Do you accept all the conclusions from the scientific article?)
Calminian said:
It's actually scientists that are now speculating that water may be the building blocks of our universe.
No. They are not saying Earth formed from water. They are not saying anything of the sort.
The scientific view is that the molecules from which Earth and all life formed are the by-products of super nova explosions. The material from which the earliest stars formed is hydrogen. The Sun, itself, is converting its hydrogen store into helium. More massive stars convert their helium into ever denser matter – oxygen, carbon, iron, etc. – and when they explode they seed their environments with a richer array of elements than previously existed. From this material new star systems then form. It is thought the Sun is likely a third generation star. The carbon that makes up most of our bodies formed as a by-product of supernova explosions. We are star dust. Of course, the author, or editors, of Genesis would have no inkling of this. It is not surprising a Bronze Age text says otherwise.
Here is an additional article highlighting recent findings of water vapour in space, but much closer to home, and note the title:
Observatory Finds Water Vapor In Cosmic Cloud That Could Drown Earth
Note, however, that once again this title is misleading. This “gas and dust cloud... contains enough water vapor to fill Earth’s oceans more than 2,000 times over.” However, it is spread out over a very large volume of space encompassing a region at least the size of the solar system.
Note also that water vapour is only one component of this cloud. It contains enough dust and gas to create a new planetary system. In fact the observed motion of the cloud indicates it is contracting and brings researchers to conclude that a new star is on the verge of forming.
“There is absolutely no sign of stars in this dark cloud today, but by looking at the water molecules, we can see evidence of motion inside the region that can be understood as collapse of the whole cloud towards the centre,” Caselli said in the release. “There is enough material to form a star at least as massive as our Sun, which means it could also be forming a planetary system, possibly one like ours.”
Cosmic Cloud Contains Water Vapor - Space News - redOrbit
Once again, none of this supports the claims made in Genesis regarding the supernatural formation of the Earth. Research paper, after paper, demonstrates the continued production of water by various natural processes on an on-going basis in the universe. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.