Evolution or Creation?
The Eye
"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 confess, absurd in the highest degree." - Charles Darwin[16]
An eye is completely useless unless all its parts are fully formed and working together. Even a slight alteration from its current form destroys its function. How, then, could the eye evolve by slight alterations? Even in Darwin's day the complexity of the eye was offered as evidence against his theory, and Darwin said the mere thought of trying to explain the eye gave him "a cold shudder."[15]
Darwin would have shuddered even harder had he known the structure of cells inside the eye. Contemporary Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins have tried to solve the problem by tracing a pathway to the evolution of the eye, starting with a light-sensitive spot, moving to a group of cells cupped to focus light better, and so on through a graded series of small improvements to produce a true lens.[15]
But as Michael Behe (author of Darwin's Black Box) points out, even the first step-the light-sensitive spot is irreducibly complex, requiring a chemical chain reaction, starting when a photon interacts with a molecule called 11-cis-retinal, that changes to trans-retinal, which forces a change in the shape of a protein called rhodopsin, which sticks to another protein called transducin, which binds to another molecule ... and so on. And where do those cupped cells that Dawkins talks about come from? There are dozens of complex proteins involved in maintaining cell shape, and dozens more that control groups of cells. Each of Dawkins's steps is itself a complex system, and adding them together doesn't answer where these complex systems came from in the first place.[15]
The human eye is so complex and sophisticated that scientists still do not fully understand how it works. The eye completes 100,000 separate functions in a single day. While we sleep the eye conducts its own maintenance work. Considering the number of complex structures in the eye, as well as the highly integrated synchronization, it is difficult to understand how the evolutionist can believe that the eye emerged from a natural trial-and-error process.[15]
Great numbers of trilobite fossils, ocean bottom dwelling creatures now thought to be extinct, have been preserved. Trilobite eyes had lenses made out of calcite. Because these lenses are made out of "rock" and therefore don't decay, paleontologists have been able to study the design of trilobite eyes. Unlike human eyes, which are composed of a single lens, the trilobite eye is composed of a double lens with up to 15,000 separate lens surfaces in each eye, allowing the trilobite to see under water perfectly without distortion. Precise application of several laws of optics, including Abbe's sine law and Fermat's principle, is inherent in the design of these lenses. How did a trilobite grow a second lens? How did the eye function before the second lens was present? Did a grand engineer design the eye or did it develop by chance?[34]
Researchers have found striking similarities between the compound eyes of these trilobites and those of modern insects. For instance, according to Riccardo Levi-Setti, "Trilobites could see in their immediate environment with amazingly sophisticated optical devices in the form of large composite eyes. ... The number of individual optical elements in the compound eye could vary from approximately one hundred to more than fifteen thousand in a single eye, a range not very different from that found in modern insects."[42]