300 Foxes and a Donkey's Jawbone
Water is the essence of free will which is why God used it as the raw material for the universe. God's goal was to create sentient life that had the ability to accept or reject Him as creator based on the testimony of the creation itself.
God *could* have created a perfect world, and He *could* have made companions who were as pure as the matter which he *could* have made from nothing, but he didn't. He created a corrupted world from water.
Why was the lamb slain at the foundation of the world? So that light could become darkness, good could become evil, the sinless could become sin, and we could have sentient life with free will.
Giving an answer to secular humanists which is Biblically accurate, captures the spirit and the nature of God, and which is in complete harmony with our knowledge of the universe isn't impossible, but it may take some work.
Creation has a purpose which combines the spiritual goal of separating good from evil with the physics of separating light from darkness. It gives us a unified theory of everything within the broad narrative of scripture.
There have been times in our life when we didn't know what to do. Or perhaps we knew what to do but we didn't know how to do it. Or maybe we knew what to do but we just didn't want to do it.
Let's be very clear about a key aspect of the Matty's Paradigm premise: The fall of man isn't the fall of creation: the universe was created in a fallen state, the fall of man was when Adam and Eve realized the truth.