Darwin’s Dilemma
Charles Darwin, when studying the amazing complexity of the human eye, admitted, “To suppose, that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances … could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree” (On the Origin of Species, 1909, p. 190).
And commenting on Darwin’s statement, Scientist Francis Hitching said, “Now it is quite evident that if the slightest thing goes wrong en route—if the cornea is fuzzy, or the pupil fails to dilate, or the lens becomes opaque, or the focusing goes wrong—then a recognizable image is not formed. The eye either functions as a whole, or not at all.”
“So how did it come to evolve by slow, steady, infinitesimally small Darwinian improvements? Is it really possible that thousands upon thousands of lucky chance mutations happened coincidentally so that the lens and the retina, which cannot work without each other, evolved in synchrony? What survival value can there be in an eye that doesn’t see?
“Small wonder that it troubled Darwin. ‘To this day the eye makes me shudder,’ [Darwin] wrote to his botanist friend Asa Gray in February, 1860” (The Neck of the Giraffe, 1982, p. 86).
So, the major challenge for the evolutionists is how many complicated mechanisms could have evolved to work in perfect unison when, if a single part failed to function perfectly in the eye, the rest would surely fail to work completely. This is because the eye either works as a whole, or not at all.
Although the eye is just one fourth-thousandth of an adult’s weight, it processes some 80% of the data coming from the outside world. The human eye holds 130 million light-sensitive rods and cones that sends light into chemical impulses to the visual cortex of the brain through one million nerve fibers. And amazingly, the eyes can handle 500,00 messages at the same time.
The most incredible part of the human eye, however, is the “film,” which is the retina. This light-sensitive layer is thinner than a sheet of plastic wrap and is more sensitive to light than any camera film. The best camera film can handle a ratio of 1000-to-1 photons in relation to light intensity. But if we compare it to the human retinal cells, we find that it can can handle a ratio of 10 billion-to-1 over the dynamic range of light wavelengths of 380 to 750 nanometers.
The truth is that behind this incredible design, there is a designer. “He who planted the ear, shall he not hear? He who formed the eye, shall he not see?” (Psalm 94:9). And the eye is just one small part of the highly complex human body. Thus, it actually takes more faith to believe that the complex eye just evolved by chance than to believe that God created this incredible organ for a specific purpose.
