Man has never developed a camera lens anywhere near the inconceivable intricacy of the human eye. The human eye is an amazing interrelated system of about forty individual subsystems, including the retina, pupil, iris, cornea, lens, and optic nerve. It has more to it than just the 137 million light-sensitive special cells that send messages to the unbelievably complex brain. About 130 million of these cells look like tiny rods, and they handle the black-and-white vision. The other seven million are cone shaped and allow us to see in color. The retina cells receive light impressions, which are then translated into electric pulses and sent directly to the brain through the optic nerve.
A special section of the brain called the visual cortex interprets the pulses as color, contrast, depth, etc., which then allows us to see “pictures” of our world. Incredibly, the eye, optic nerve, and visual cortex are totally separate and distinct subsystems. Yet together they capture, deliver, and interpret up to 1.5 million pulse messages per millisecond! Think about that for a moment. It would take dozens of computers programmed perfectly and operating together flawlessly to even get close to performing this task.
The eye is an example of what is referred to as “irreducible complexity.” It would be absolutely impossible for random processes, operating through gradual mechanisms of genetic mutation and natural selection, to be able to create forty separate subsystems when they provide no advantage to the whole until the very last state of development. Ask yourself how the lens, the retina, the optic nerve, and all the other parts in vertebrates that play a role in seeing not only appeared from nothing, but evolved into interrelated and working parts. Evolutionist Robert Jastrow acknowledges that highly trained scientists could not have improved upon “blind chance”:
The eye appears to have been designed; no designer of telescopes could have done better. How could this marvelous instrument have evolved by chance, through a succession of random events? Many people in Darwin’s day agreed with theologian William Pauley, who commented, “There cannot be a design without a designer.”
You’ve probably been led to believe that the first simple creatures had rudimentary eyes, and that as creatures slowly evolved their eyes evolved along with them. However, that’s not what scientists have found. Not only is there no evidence of this occurring, but some of the most complex eyes have been discovered in the “simplest” creatures.
Riccardo Levi-Setti, professor emeritus of Physics at the University of Chicago, writes of the trilobite’s eye:
This optical doublet is a device so typically associated with human invention that its discovery in trilobites comes as something of a shock. The realization that trilobites developed and used such devices half a billion years ago makes the shock even greater. And a final discovery—that the refracting interface between the two lens elements in a trilobite’s eye was designed in accordance with optical constructions worked out by Descartes and Huygens in the mid-seventeenth century—borders on sheer science fiction… The design of the trilobite’s eye lens could well qualify for a patent disclosure.
How could the amazing, seeing eye have come about purely by blind chance? Based on the evidence, wouldn’t a reasonable person conclude that the eye is astonishingly complex and could not have evolved gradually, and that each creature’s eyes are uniquely designed?
Even Charles Darwin, the father of evolutionary theory, admitted the incredible complexity of the eye in The Origin of Species:
To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.
Even more incredible, though, is that Darwin went on to say that he believed the eye could nonetheless have been formed by natural selection. He was right on one point. If a Designer is left out of the equation, such a thought is absurd in the highest degree.
