HUMAN VISION AS EVIDENCE OF NON-DESIGN

We can be so blinded by our commitment to our ideology that we can no longer see. This is especially true of a commitment to Darwinism and naturalism.

Although Darwin wasn’t about to reject natural selection, he 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).

Despite his incredulity, Darwin reaffirmed his commitment to natural selection. What is so astounding about the eye that would lead Darwin to temporarily waver?

·       The human eye possesses 130 million light-sensitive rods and cones that convert light into chemical impulses. These signals travel at a rate of a billion per second to the brain. https://www.ucg.org/the-good-news/the-miracle-of-the-human-eye

This is part of the reason that we can see things in “real time.” Even more amazing, in order to see, every electro-chemical reaction must be immediately undone to allow room for the immediate succession of succeeding reactions.

As amazing as this process is, evolutionists are not awed. Instead, they find fault with the human eye and predictably conclude that this system could not have been designed. Had it been designed, it would have been designed better.

In The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design, Richard Dawkins offers the vertebrate eye, including the human eye, as evidence against design:

·       Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain…Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate retinas. Each photocell is, in effect, wired backwards.

A hot-wired commitment to evolution and naturalism drives the evolutionist to provide “evidence” for a failure in design. In Douglas Futuyma’s text on evolution (2005), he concluded that:

·       “no intelligent engineer would be expected to design” the “functionally non-sensical arrangement” of cells in the human retina. (Jonathan Wells, Salvo Magazine, Winter 2017, 45-46)

In another biology text (2014), Singer, Mason, and Losos also concluded:

·       “an excellent example of imperfect design is the eye of vertebrate animals, in which the photoreceptors face backward, toward the wall of the eye.” (46)

The evolutionist suggests that this “excellent example” of non-design has produced a “blind-spot” in our vision. However, it is possible that they are magnifying the “problem,” since the blind-spot is undetected by us. I am still able to get on my bicycle and successfully navigate the traffic despite this “blind-spot.”

Perhaps the Designer had a good reason for such a design, one that has been overlooked or ignored by the evolutions in their zeal to promote their theory. This is the claim of biologist Jonathan Wells – that the evidence against the “poor-design, non-design theory” has been available but ignored for a longtime:

·       But Dawkins and the other critics of intelligent design didn’t bother to check the scientific literature. They simply assumed that evolution is true and that they knew how as eye should be designed. Then they concluded that the human eye is badly designed, claimed it as evidence for evolution, and ignored the contrary evidence. (47)

Evolutionists claim that evolution is a settled fact. However, anything can be considered a “settled fact” when counter-evidence is either ignored or denied.