Of course Jesus would say that.
Jereel Hunter said:
Physical laws are the same. Liquids grow more dense as it gets colder... except water. It grows more dense to a point, but when it reaches freezing temperature, it instead expands, causeing ice to float, and thus create a protective layer at the top of bodies of water, instead of turning lakes and rivers into huge blocks of ice and killing everything in them.
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I won't comment on the rest cause I'd rather not get into another discussion, but this is a very prevalent argument and it includes a misconception. Water is not the only anomalous liquid. There are, infact, many other substances known to also behave like this and some others expected to by simulations, besides many more untested, I'd expect.
This study is concerned with modeling water, but it mentions on it's introduction how other tetrahedrally-bonded molecular liquids can have such anomalities: http://www.if.ufrgs.br/~barbosa/lattice-3d.pdf
These liquids, by the way, water included, are actually way more impressive than just this. They have quite a few other "weird" properties.
Also, I'm not too sure big bodies of water, and specially oceans would really freeze over if ice didn't float. Sure it seems like something "everyone knows" but I'd be interested in finding some actual models and scenarios, if any is even feasible.
First, there would a ton of complications, like maybe more water on the atmosphere which is hard to predict the exact effect of. There's also the fact that if ice just didn't float that would mean some very fundamental properties of chemestry itself would have to be different, with limitless implications, making analisys of the consequences pretty much impossible. So perhaps it's easier to imagine water being replaced by some other similar liquid which just doesn't have this property. Similar as in same triple-point, same fusion point, same specific heat, similar densities on some range, etc.
Even them, for one, the ocean is a HUGE thermal resovoir and even whithout the floating of ice you'd need to get vast expanses of it down to the cooling point in order to freeze anything (besides shores, that is), and that's quite a bit below the ocean's current mean temperature. Freezing the ocean at warm areas would seem specailly hard. It's not clear to me that the loss of ice caps would be able to do this at all. Also, this would depend a lot on the specifics, but frozen salt "water" tends to loose it's salt content, which would artificially lower ice's density compared to that of "water". This just might be enough to actually form some kind of an ice cap, if thinner, but I have no idea wether this would be the case, and this would need water to already be at a cooling point to even happen. Another point is that ice forming out of the ocean or on shores could "slide" into it way before the ocean had any semblance of a chance of cooling enough, which would create and extra cap. How relevant this might be I don't know.
Even if simply replacing water with such liquid might mean the freezing of the oceans on earth simply making taking planet a little closer to the sun, or near a "warmer" star, or a planet with bigger oceans or different atmosphere or whatever might be ways to make sure the "oceans" don't freeze. We could also just change the specifics of such liquid. So this idea of water, this single mystical molecule, being absolutely essential to life anywhere is very arrogant and not at all based on fact. Hell, life might not even need oceans at all.
I mean, sure, humans wouldn't exist if some other anomalous liquid took the place of water (temperatures would have to be different too and so on). Neither would we exist if ice sunk, but this means absolutelly nothing at all unless you require humans to be the goal of the universe, which is kind of begging the question: saying that a universe meant for the existence of humans has been made so that humans can exist isn't really saying much.