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The Eye

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The Eye

Article by Dr. Richard Paley

According to the philosophy of evolutionism, the organs of the body arose through chance mutations wherein they were incrementally built up from nothing. We are assured by the evolutionist that this is possible because these mutations were beneficial to the survival of the species and so were "selected for" by Nature. "Each step," says the evolutionist, "adds to the organism's fitness and so leads naturally to the functional organs we see today."

But is this really so? To test this idea, let us consider the eye:

The eye is a marvel of design; it is made of a number of parts -- an enclosed sphere; a field of light receptive cells; a transparent, focusing lens; an iris that adjusts the amount of light let in; a transparent cornea to protect the lens and iris; a system of muscles to move the eye in its socket; and a highly complicated section of the brain to process its signals -- that all work in harmony to allow us to see. And to top it all off, we have two of them! How did it evolve?

The First Eye?
The first eye as postulated by evolutionism. How could it have worked? (Illustration by Peggy Miller)

Logic dictates that if evolutionism is true and the eye was built incrementally over time from nothing to its present state of functional wholeness, then it must have at some point in the past been only half of an eye.

Only a moment's thought on this supposed ancestral eye lets us see that there would be problems: How would this eye be moved in its socket if it wasn't a smooth spherical shape? What would stop the seepage of light through the top? How would the lens keep from being deformed if it was not held equally on all sides? How would the eye jelly have kept from spilling out of the opened bowl of the half-eye?

The evolutionist's theory depends on each step in the gradual procession from nothing to wholeness be beneficial to the survival of the organism, but how could this half an eye be considered by even the most sympathetic observer to be functional much less beneficial? If we consider that the individual with these half-eyes was probably more susceptible to infections due to the exposed optical insides, then we must conclude that half an eye is a detriment to the individual's survival and therefore a whole eye could not have evolved.

But what of the possibility that the eye developed all at once, fully formed and functional? In the context of Godless evolutionism, there are only two ways that this could have happened:

  • First, the eye was the product of a single mutation. This is called the "Hopeful Monster" theory since it proposes a freak, monstrous occurrence -- ad hoc -- in the hope that no one will question the unlikeliness of it. We can rule this out since the eye is clearly made up of many parts and so no single mutation could account for it.

  • Second, all the mutations necessary for an eye would just have happened to occur -- by chance -- all at once in the same individual. If one calculates the odds of this it is clear it could not have happened; the likelihood is the same as a twister blowing through a junk yard and constructing a Boeing 747!

The idea that the eye just appeared in an individual is further made laughable if we consider that any potential mate for this newly-eyed person would have been eyeless and consequently the trait would have soon disappeared in the population.

While evolutionism would try and assure us that all the above speculation is reasonable, it is clear to the unbiased observer that trying to reduce the complexity of the eye only reduces the evolutionistic position to absurdity. Darwin himself even admitted this:

"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 been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."
(The Origin of Species, Chapter Six: "Difficulties of the Theory", "Organs of extreme Perfection and Complication")

As Zophar the Naamathite once reproved Job: "The eyes of the wicked shall fail" (Job 11:20). And as we have seen, he was right. The eye postulated by the wicked Evolutionist could do nothing but fail as its complexity would have had to been undesigned and thus unfunctional.

However the science of creation gives us a more reasonable and evidenced origin for the complex eye: it was created by God whole and fully functional.

The Bible tells us that the first person -- Adam -- was created with fully functioning eyes. In Gen. 1:4 it says that God saw the light and in Gen. 1:27 it says that He created man in His own image, consequently man must have been able to see light as well. Furthermore, in Gen. 2:19, the Lord brings the animals He created before Adam to see what he would name them. How could Adam name them if he couldn't see them? Also, nowhere in the Bible does it say that Adam had half-eyes -- a notable fact that would not have been left out -- so that means he didn't.

The Lord gave us eyes that we may see the Light and read His Word. They are the windows to our souls and one of His most important gifts to us. The evolutionist tries to debase them and use them for his own nefarious ends, but try as he might he can't explain them with his false philosophy. They are truly a testament to creation!

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