The Problem With Half an Eye

The Problem With Half an Eye

The real issue here is whether or not a designer is behind such complexity. There are four possibilities:

A designer created biological complexity supernaturally
A designer created biological complexity through natural processes
A designer combined natural processes and supernatural means to create biological complexity
A designer doesn’t exist. Complexity came about naturally.

Materialists believe the latter. Scientists who advocate intelligent design generally agree that some super-intelligence is behind it all, even though they leave the nature of a designer to theologians.

Here we must look at the evidence to see which of the possibilities makes the most sense. To determine the best option, we need to look closer at complex biological systems to determine whether they can be explained by natural causes alone.

LOOKING AT THE EYE

The human eye is perhaps the best-known example of a complex system that couldn’t just pop up overnight.

(“Say, Bill, what’s that thing growing on your face?”
“I thought it was acne, but now that you mention it, I think you can see out of it.”)

With the eye we are not merely dealing with complexity, but with hundreds of separate parts that must work together in unison with incredible precision.

Those who study the inner workings of the eye say it operates much like a television camera, but is far more sophisticated. In fact it is more sophisticated than any machine imaginable.

DARWIN'S BIG IDEA

Since the dawn of history, the eye and other complex biological systems had baffled materialists. How could they exist without a designer? However, that changed in 1859 when biologist Charles Darwin published his revolutionary, The Origin of Species. The big idea in Darwin’s book was that life in all its complexity came about by a process he called natural selection. In other words, according to Darwin, no designer is needed. Materialists were elated.

Darwin postulated that natural selection was totally responsible for the complexity of organs like the eye, addressing the issue in a special section entitled, “Organs of Extreme Perfection and Complication.”

In his special section Darwin brilliantly argued that the eye might have developed in any number of ways. His reasoning was that even a partially developed eye would offer a creature some evolutionary advantage.

His explanation for the gradual development of such complex systems certainly had its critics, but by and large his ideas were embraced because they helped to explain a great deal of the observable phenomena of our world.

As the evolutionary movement grew, a great deal of evidence seemed to confirm Darwin’s theory, evidence similar to what you were taught in your high school textbooks. Adaptability, survival of the fittest, and other Darwinian tenets are clearly demonstrable within a given species. Materialist Richard Dawkins remarks of Darwin’s acceptance among most biologists, “Today the theory of evolution is about as much open to doubt as the theory that the earth goes round the sun….”¹ Back / Next