Miracle of the Eye

“The feeblest of designers,” writes [evolutionist] Steve Jones, “could improve it (the structure of the human eye).” This and other examples, says Jones, show that complex organs are “not the work of some great composer but of an insensible drudge: an instrument, like others, built by a tinkerer [the evolutionary process] rather than by a trained engineer.” (Quoted from Cornelius Hunter, Darwin’s God, p.83.)

Jones discounts the possibility of an intelligent Designer. However, he correctly concludes that we should be able to make certain predictions about the physical world. If the world is the product of blind evolution, then, according to Jones, it should reflect the imperfect work of “the feeblest of designers.” However, if the Designer of the world is the perfect, omnipotent and omniscient God, then His workmanship should reflect this.

Let’s just take the human eye, whose design Jones so glibly disparages. If perfection is judged by what the eye can do—how it functions, repairs itself, and integrates harmoniously with the rest of the body’s systems—there only remains awe. How the eye converts light waves into millions of chemical-electrical impulses, sends them off to the brain in organized, instantaneous, sequential patterns which are then reconstructed by the mind, drawing upon memory and other centers of learning, before converting the data into the substance of decisions, goes far beyond what we can understand and anything human technology can create. It is these visual impulses that enable us to make fine distinctions among a myriad of similar faces and to make thousands of precise decisions whenever we ride a bicycle.

When do our eyes mislead us? When do they give us incorrect data? Who has invented something superior to the eye so that he would pluck it out and implant his own invention? Rather, let us compare our eye with what unintelligent natural forces are able TO fabricate. Have natural forces ever collaborated together to produce anything of complexity and functionality? Has gravity ever written poetry? Has a hurricane ever recited Shakespeare or has it ever called out your name? Has electricity ever painted your portrait or told you, “I love you?” Have the tides ever written your name on the sand? Instead, it can be persuasively argued that unintelligent forces have never produced an object with the appearance of intelligent design. It’s like throwing paint on a canvas and expecting to eventually come up with the Mona Lisa.

Does nature reflect the workmanship of the “feeblest of designers”—evolution? According to Cornelius Hunter, “bats map out objects as small as mosquitoes by sensing the echoes of their own squeaks,” hardly the workmanship of a “tinkerer!”

“[Fish] use underwater electric fields either passively or actively to sense objects around them including other fish. The details of such systems would fill books. Anyone familiar with today’s sonar or radar systems knows the immense complexity inherent in such systems: the problems of sensing the echo in the presence of the transmitted signal…Yet the bat’s detection abilities are superior to those of the best electronic sonar equipment.” (Hunter, pg. 72)

Then consider “the rattlesnake with heat-sensitive (infrared) sensors to image its prey at night.” Or consider the owl “with ears tuned to different frequencies, to better track its prey” (Hunter). Somehow, these systems are perfect enough to keep their owners from going hungry. In fact, the evidence in favor of an intelligent Designer is so striking that,

“Amherst College astronomy professor George Greenstein (a pantheist or something similar), [writes], ‘As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency, or rather Agency, must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially created the cosmos for our benefit?’” (Quoted by Henry F. Schaefer, Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence, p.62.)

Indeed, many have “stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being,” but this isn’t because the evidence is so scarce, but rather because we have set aside our spectacles.

Daniel Mann