The Eyes Have it - Creation is Reality
Charles Darwin expressed confidence that natural selection could explain the development of the eye1, but how does this confidence stand up to the light of reason? Today, we are in the curious intellectual situation of allowing only naturalistic explanations in public schools. This is done in spite of the fact that the alternative (creation or intelligent design) more adequately explains the observations. It would take a miraculous number of design changes to transform a light sensitive patch into an eyeball. Furthermore, each change would have to be coded onto the DNA of the “new†creature in order for the change to pass to the next generation. It has never been explained how this could have happened. Each new feature would need to be independently useful or natural selection would not have allowed the new creature to live.
• An eyeball with no retina would be a tumor, not an improvement to be passed on to the next generation.
• An eyeball without a focusing lens would be worthless except as a light detector.
• An eyeball without a functioning optic nerve to carry the signal to the brain would be worthless.
• An eyeball without the perfect balance of fluid pressure would explode or implode.
• An eyeball without a brain designed to interpret the signals would be sightless.
• There are over 100,000 different proteins in our body. The only one with a molecular structure to make it perfectly transparent to light is used to construct the lens of our eye.
It is beyond credibility that chance mutations could have produced any of these changes, let alone all of them at once. Any one of these changes would result in a worthless tumor. All are needed simultaneously for sight to result.
Yet, the chance development of this “hardware†for the eye pales in comparison to the impossibility of the “software†development. The brain must be wired to both accept and understand the signal coming to it from the eyeball. An analogy would be the multi-pixel image from a digital camera. Each part of the image is wired to a specific spot in the receptor screen of the camera to reproduce an image of what the camera is viewing. As the “first eye†was developing, how could the brain have known what the randomly wired image received from the pixels of the optic nerve represented? Before there was sight, the image would be wired like the white snowy image of an out of tune television screen. It can be statistically proven that randomly changing the location of a few of the millions of available pixels would never produce a clear image and sight could never develop in this way.2
In Darwin’s time, the complex design of the eyeball was forceful evidence in favor of creation. Our more advanced knowledge of the intricate design of the eye provides even stronger evidence for its creation.
The complexity of the eye still argues for the reality of its instantaneous formation by an incredibly intelligent designer. There is neither a fossil record showing that the eye evolved nor any testable observations to explain how it could possibly have happened. The fanciful story that a light receptive patch turned into the complex eyeball is nothing but the dogmatic faith of a religious belief system. Why do we allow textbook selection which leaves out both the problems with evolution and the evidence for intelligent design? This is indoctrination, not education.
1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species, republished by J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., London, 1971, p. 167.
2. Stoltzmann, David, The Specified Complexity of Retinal Imagery, Creation Research Society Quarterly,
6/06.
Charles Darwin expressed confidence that natural selection could explain the development of the eye1, but how does this confidence stand up to the light of reason? Today, we are in the curious intellectual situation of allowing only naturalistic explanations in public schools. This is done in spite of the fact that the alternative (creation or intelligent design) more adequately explains the observations. It would take a miraculous number of design changes to transform a light sensitive patch into an eyeball. Furthermore, each change would have to be coded onto the DNA of the “new†creature in order for the change to pass to the next generation. It has never been explained how this could have happened. Each new feature would need to be independently useful or natural selection would not have allowed the new creature to live.
• An eyeball with no retina would be a tumor, not an improvement to be passed on to the next generation.
• An eyeball without a focusing lens would be worthless except as a light detector.
• An eyeball without a functioning optic nerve to carry the signal to the brain would be worthless.
• An eyeball without the perfect balance of fluid pressure would explode or implode.
• An eyeball without a brain designed to interpret the signals would be sightless.
• There are over 100,000 different proteins in our body. The only one with a molecular structure to make it perfectly transparent to light is used to construct the lens of our eye.
It is beyond credibility that chance mutations could have produced any of these changes, let alone all of them at once. Any one of these changes would result in a worthless tumor. All are needed simultaneously for sight to result.
Yet, the chance development of this “hardware†for the eye pales in comparison to the impossibility of the “software†development. The brain must be wired to both accept and understand the signal coming to it from the eyeball. An analogy would be the multi-pixel image from a digital camera. Each part of the image is wired to a specific spot in the receptor screen of the camera to reproduce an image of what the camera is viewing. As the “first eye†was developing, how could the brain have known what the randomly wired image received from the pixels of the optic nerve represented? Before there was sight, the image would be wired like the white snowy image of an out of tune television screen. It can be statistically proven that randomly changing the location of a few of the millions of available pixels would never produce a clear image and sight could never develop in this way.2
In Darwin’s time, the complex design of the eyeball was forceful evidence in favor of creation. Our more advanced knowledge of the intricate design of the eye provides even stronger evidence for its creation.
The complexity of the eye still argues for the reality of its instantaneous formation by an incredibly intelligent designer. There is neither a fossil record showing that the eye evolved nor any testable observations to explain how it could possibly have happened. The fanciful story that a light receptive patch turned into the complex eyeball is nothing but the dogmatic faith of a religious belief system. Why do we allow textbook selection which leaves out both the problems with evolution and the evidence for intelligent design? This is indoctrination, not education.
1. Charles Darwin, The Origin of the Species, republished by J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd., London, 1971, p. 167.
2. Stoltzmann, David, The Specified Complexity of Retinal Imagery, Creation Research Society Quarterly,
6/06.
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