Join us as we navigate the enthralling details of the human eye’s construction, from the initial spark of creation in the Big Bang to the meticulously designed systems that enable sight. This episode explores not just the physics and biology involved but also the philosophical implications of such a fine-tuned design in nature. By the end, listeners are invited to reflect on the role of a supreme designer in shaping the universe and our place within it.
The CEM Network is pleased to present Ronald L. Dart and Born to Win.
SPEAKER 03 :
Do you think it’s really safe for us to conclude that there is no God? Or at least to conclude that God isn’t there? Perhaps he just started everything and wandered off somewhere. Maybe he has a lot of worlds out there and he’s just given up on the earth project or lost interest in it. After all, we don’t seem to be doing very well with it on our end. And some of his prophets in the old days said that God got pretty well turned off with this project and considered forgetting the whole thing. A man named Noah saved our bacon the first time and Moses on another occasion. So it doesn’t seem very smart just to dismiss the idea of God out of hand. He has, after all, quite a lot invested in the earth project. And if you can believe the people he has sent to tell us what’s going on, he is not only still interested, he is almighty annoyed with us and has a view to setting some stuff right. And that settling of accounts is going to be downright painful for some people. Now, pardon me for saying so, but it seems downright stupid to just assume that there is no God or that he isn’t interested. What if you’re wrong? Aren’t the stakes awfully high? And what will it cost you to examine the evidence? Consider the simple fact that science now tells us that some 14 billion years ago, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. And then, in a heartbeat, there was everything. Hey, this isn’t my idea. This comes from science. One moment there was nothing. The next moment there was everything that ever has been or will be. Someone hung the label, the Big Bang, on the event, and it stuck. Now, the Bible presents the event a little differently, but it agrees on the most important point. One moment there was nothing, the next moment there was everything that ever would be. It’s true, you know. The stuff of which your kidneys and your liver are made came into existence all at that one moment in time. True, the matter has undergone a few translations over time, but the atoms are as old as time. The Bible says the first man was made out of dirt. Science says life might have originated out of green slime. That’s close enough to agreement for the moment. The point being that somewhere between dirt or green slime and the man we see standing before us, something had to be done. Not just something. A lot of stuff had to be done. And when you really look at it, the implications are awesome. For example, I have to see my eye doctor three times a year, and I’m always left waiting in his examination room while he works his way through however many customers are lined up ahead of me. The walls of that room are covered with pictures and diagrams of the human eye. I found myself one day staring at one of these pictures with something approaching religious awe. The eyes that I looked at all around that room were… plainly designed. It seems impossible to me that anyone could fail to see that. But it was one particular diagram that started me thinking. It was a vertical cross-section of the eye with everything named. It was there to help the doctor explain things to his patients. You know, when he starts using fancy words and what have you as to what’s going wrong in your eye, he can actually point to something on the eye chart there and tell you, this is what it is, this is what’s breaking down, this is where a problem is. Now, the chart itself was designed to make things as simple as possible, so it was easy to pick out the different parts of the eye. And the thing was huge, so it was easy to see. Now I already knew what rods and cones were. Rods and cones are the light sensors arranged around the back of the eye in the retina. A Navy school explained that to me so I would understand night vision. They are like the film in a camera except that they constantly renew themselves. There are millions of them in each eye. Light enters the eye through the cornea, passes through the lens, and gets focused on the surface of the retina, just like the image does in your camera. When light strikes the rods and cones, chemically, a tiny electric current is generated. The current travels along fibers to the optic nerve, hence to the vision center in the brain, and presto, we see! Most people don’t realize, by the way, that we actually see with the brain. All these electrical currents have to be translated into something useful. Now, it sounds simple enough. At least that’s what I thought until I noticed something that didn’t make sense. I was staring at the eye chart. Now, imagine the sensors at the back of the eye, each one with an electrical connection that sends an off and on signal down the line to the optic nerve. What I noticed was there are 150 million rods and cones in the retina of the eye to receive and record light. But there are only 1 million fibers in the optic nerve to carry the data. And that looks like too many items of data coming down for the wires needed to carry the information to the brain. When we look at an object, An image is projected on the retina of the eye, and it stimulates all 150 million rods and cones. Each of them has to carry its own message to the brain so we can see the entire image that is projected there. Now, simple math tells me that 150 different signals have to travel down one optic nerve fiber. And I wonder to myself, standing there looking at that eye on the wall, how? How does it do that? Having a basic knowledge of electronics, I knew you could carry multiple messages down one wire. Most people understand that a lot of different phone conversations can travel down one wire, and hopefully we don’t hear one another talking. But those messages all have to be coded in such a way as to be properly directed and understood at the other end. And I wondered how in the eye the coding of this was done. That was not on the eye chart. So I decided to ask my doctor when he finally came in. And I asked him, I said, how is this done? He said, well, there’s this tiny computer chip behind the eye. And we had a good laugh because I thought he was joking. He went on with the examination. But I wasn’t satisfied. I knew there was no computer chip, and I wanted to know how it was done. When I got home, I took my Britannica to my favorite chair. I propped up my feet, and I started reading. Much to my surprise, it turned out the doctor wasn’t joking at all. There really is a computer chip of sorts. It’s not in the brain where you might expect it to be. It’s in the retina itself. Pay close attention here. The sensors of the eyes, the rods and the cones, are not hardwired into the brain. Behind the sensors is a network of interconnected nerve cells, all right behind these rods and cones that generate the electricity and tell us what the image is on the retina of the eye. A whole network. Now, I learned that groups of rods and cones are connected together in networks and that the signals received by one influence the signals sent by the other. Some signals are strong and others are suppressed. All this goes on in a little tiny circuits behind the retina of your eye. The result is, think about this, the image you finally see, what you’re looking at right now, if you’re staring out the window of your car, you’re looking at your clothes on the ironing board or whatever it is you’re doing right now, that image that you are looking at is, in reality, computer enhanced. If you look at a fine black line on a white piece of paper, the image of the line that strikes the retina is relatively broad and composed of shades of gray. This is because the optics of the eye are not geometrically perfect. Now, they’re perfect for their purpose, but they’re not geometrically perfect. In the nature of things, diffraction of light spoils the perfect image. The spread of light from the white areas into the black has to be corrected. So the tiny computer chip in the retina enhances the contrast. In the old days, we knew what contrast was. We had to actually turn a contrast knob on our television set to get it worked out so that we didn’t have as fuzzy an image. It helped us get a good, clear image. The rods that receive more light in the back of your eye inhibit the rods that receive less light. And the resulting transmission to the brain is a fine black line. Now, if you’ve ever played with lenses, you may have noticed a phenomenon called chromatic aberration. It’s in the nature of a lens that it focuses different colors of light at different lengths. In other words, you know, probably from when you were a kid, you have to move a magnifying glass up and down to get the image sharp. If you wanted light of fire on some kindling with a lens, you have to move it back and forth to get your spot in focus. But the problem is that red focuses at a different length from the lens than blue. Now the result of this is you get a little margin of color around the image created by the lens. That happens in your eye just like it happens on your twig. As you look at a white object against a black background, the lens in your eye created a halo of color around the image just like that. But you do not see it. Why don’t you see it? Oh, because the little computer chip behind your retina suppresses it. The designer wanted you to have a nice, clean image to consider. He wanted you to see the world like it is. But that’s not all the little computer does. Take the problem of panning, for instance. You’ve probably had some guy with his home movies or his home pictures make you dizzy by panning the camera, sweeping it across the scene, and it really will make your eyes cross. Now, wherever you are, try to do the same thing with your eyes. Try to move them slowly from one part of the room or wherever your vista is to another, sweeping like a camera would pan. Now, why don’t you get that dizzying blur with your eyes? Stand in front of a mirror and look at your eyes. Look at one of them. Then shift your gaze to the other. If you’re like most people, you will not see your eyes move. What happens is that the little computer chip in the back of your eye momentarily suppresses vision. You only see when the eye stops moving. Now that is a nice little designed touch, isn’t it? We aren’t troubled with blurs as we move our gaze from one object to another. Try it. Scan around. What looks like a camera pan is to the eye a series of steps, each one accomplished neatly and without thought. Actually, it’s more than a nice touch. It’s an integrated part of a designed system, and it is brilliant. Perhaps you can begin to see where I’m going with this. We’ll talk about that when I come right back.
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Just how great is God? Really? How much power is controlled by the creator of the universe? And what does he plan to do with it? To find out, request your free CD titled, How Great Thou Art. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44.
SPEAKER 03 :
So where am I going? Well, the eye of man did not progress from green slime to the engineering masterpiece of vision that you and I both possess. without some intelligent consideration of how the job ought to be done. I got another surprise when I learned that individual sensors in the eye do not always send a steady message to the brain when they’re looking steadily at something. In fact, if the retina is steadily and evenly illuminated, there is very little going on in the optic nerve. Some of the sensors in the retina act like little on switches and others act like off switches. The result is that the brain is not bombarded with unnecessary information. When light strikes a set of rods, the message tells the brain that the light is on. The rods don’t bother telling the brain anything until something changes. But the brain keeps telling you that the light is on even though nothing is coming up the optic nerve. This is how 150 million sensors can make do with only 1 million wires to carry the message. They don’t use the wires all the time. Also, each rod and each cone has its own identity code. and ends up directed to its correct place in the vision center of the brain, even if it’s part of a mass of messages coming from many rods and cones. While we rarely think about it, the eye is in constant movement. Some of that movement is so small it’s hard to detect. But here’s the key. The eye must move in order to see. You may think you’re staring fixedly at some object, but your eye is always making tiny little movements. If you were able to fix your unmoving gaze on a black spot, it would disappear in a few seconds. The rods and the cones adapt to the stimulus and switch it off. So it’s necessary to move the eye enough to cause the image to fall on a new set of rods and cones every few seconds. And yet this still has to keep the object in the center of your gaze without giving any impression of movement. This is all microscopic. It’s all computer controlled. You could not stop that movement of your eye if you tried. But it has to be there or you couldn’t see. And it has to hold it steady or you’d go nuts. Do you think there might be some design here? Did you know, by the way, that you have a pulley in your eye? You know, of course, that you have muscles that move your eyes. You’re conscious of them. When you move your eyes to the extreme limits, both vertically and horizontally, you can feel them. There are four of these on each eye. They’re positioned above, below, and on each eye. Now, you and I, if we were designing this, I would probably think that was plenty. I mean, after all, you can look up, you can look down, you can look sideways, you can look at any combination of those. What do we need more than that? Well, as it happens, there is something else you need. Your two other little muscles that run through pulleys and enable the eye to actually roll in the socket a little bit. If you tilt your head toward your shoulder, those muscles act to keep the eye vertical. One more nice little touch of design. Just sit there, tilt your head to one shoulder, tilt it to the other, and notice that the image you are looking at stays upright the whole time. It is a nice little design, but the designer of the eye had still more problems to solve. Of special importance is the fact that the amount of light striking a rod or cone is very, very small, too small to provide the energy to create an electric charge. Well, then how does the retina sense light? It does it through a chemical process. When it’s exposed to light, the chemical substance of the retina breaks down into two other substances and generates the energy to turn the switch on. It takes about a half hour in the dark for the chemicals to recombine the period of what we call dark adaptation. So we’ve got not merely electricals, we’ve got a chemical-electrical combination going on here that is incredibly complex. We see through a complicated set of optics, a chemical reaction, computer enhancement, brain interpretation, and more. The eye turned out to be a much bigger deal than I had even imagined standing there in my doctor’s office. It became clear that the eye is useless by itself. It is part of a system of vision. Television is also a system for managing images. A video camera is useless by itself. You could drag one all over the place on your vacation, but if that’s all you’ve got, you’re never going to see anything. It needs a system of cables, modulation, amplification, broadcast, reception, and display to be of any use at all. The same is true of the eye. The images that fall on the retina of your eye must be processed and transmitted to the vision center of the brain to mean anything. Now, in a video camera, the image is projected by a lens onto sensors in the back of the camera. This image is picked off by a series of sweeps. A beam of electrons goes by. It’s coded, sent along a camera to a video screen. Here, a beam of electrons sweeps across the screen. It’s 400 lines or 600 lines per screen, depending on the system. And it causes microscopic dots to glow in color. This produces an image on the television screen for us to see. Now you sit there and wonder, well, do I have a screen in the brain somewhere that all this goes on? Now it’s significant to know that the video system sees nothing. It simply transmits an image to be seen. The image is not real. It is just glowing dots on glass. Your dog, for example, sitting in your lap, does not see what you see when it watches television with you. Animals sense movement and sound, but unlike you, they see no depth in the screen. In fact, neither do you. But your system, your vision system, is designed and trained to interpret what you see on a flat screen in terms of depth and texture. The dog’s system, the dog’s brain, is not designed that way. In the eye, an image is focused on the retina, where it is sensed by 150 million rods and cones. It’s computer-enhanced and adjusted, sent to the brain, and merged with the image from the other eye. But this combined image is not projected onto a screen to be seen. What it does is absolutely incredible. I’ll tell you about that after this message.
SPEAKER 02 :
For a free CD of this radio program that you can share with friends and others, write or call this week only and request the program titled Eyes to See. Write to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. Or call toll free 1-888-BIBLE-44 and tell us the call letters of this radio station.
SPEAKER 03 :
Now let’s see if we can understand the difference between what happens with television and what happens with your own vision. The images are processed by the brain, these images that come from the eye, from the rods and the cones down the optic nerve. And they create in your mind not a picture of the world around you. They create in your mind the world itself. Look around. What you see is not a picture. It’s real. You can move into it. I’ve sometimes stood in front of a gorgeous landscape painting and thought, oh, wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to just walk into that picture? Well, the picture you’re seeing right now, you can move right into it. It has texture. It has depth. It has color. Objects are related to one another in space. You can walk over to a table and touch it. It is precisely where you saw it to be. It’s real. You will even be able to predict how it will feel by the way it looks. It’s really staggering when you think about it. that we are designed, our eyes, the optic nerve, and the brain, to produce for us the real world inside our minds. Now, there are those who would tell you that all this evolved without conscious direction from a designer. They point to a wide variety of eyes, from the simple to the complex, and they argue that development up to scale is possible. And yet, there is no evidence that such an evolutionary process ever took place. And more important, there is no reason why it should have. Furthermore, each of the eyes in nature is part of a system of vision. Never let yourself forget this. We’re not just talking about the eye. We are talking about an entire system. The eyes of birds, bats, fish, dogs, and cats, each are part of an intricate combination of complex subsystems. No part of these systems is of any value without the other parts in whole. No part of one system is of any value with another system. A bird would not profit from the eye of a fish. That’s an extreme example, but it’s true nonetheless. Having the eye of a man would not profit a dog. A man arguably has the most developed eye, and we’re certainly satisfied with the one we’ve got. But is it useless to a dog? A hound would lack the mental capacity to make use of what he could see. The human system of vision might actually make it hard for a wolf to survive. He needs his particular combination of senses to hunt, to eat, and to live. Animals like this are able to fix their eyes in such a way that they are attracted by movement, that anything that moves in the field catches their attention. Their eye and their system of vision is designed for that. Philip Johnson in his book Darwin on Trial summarizes nicely, I quote, Some single-celled animals have a light-sensitive spot with a little pigment screen behind it. And in some many-celled animals, a similar arrangement is set in a cup, which gives improved direction-finding capability. The ancient Nautilus has a pinhole eye with no lens. The squid’s eye adds the lens, and so on it goes. None of these different types of eyes are thought to have evolved from any of the others, however. because they involve different types of structures rather than a series of similar structures growing in complexity. End of quotation. Evolutionists admit being baffled by the Nautilus, continuing now to quote, which in its hundreds of millions of years of existence has never evolved a lens for its eye, despite having a retina that is practically crying out for this particular simple change. End of quotation. The eye did not evolve blindly. It was designed. It was designed by someone who could himself see. Psalm 94 verse 9. He that formed the eye, shall he not see? When I took my encyclopedia back to the shelf, I placed it there with a sense of awe, because that short article made it completely impossible for me to believe that such a system for seeing could evolve on its own. It was designed by an intelligence who knew that there was something to see. And he gave it to man because he wanted man to see it.
SPEAKER 02 :
I’m Ronald Dart. The Born to Win radio program with Ronald L. Dart is sponsored by Christian Educational Ministries and made possible by donations from listeners like you. If you can help, please send your donation to Born to Win, Post Office Box 560, White House, Texas 75791. You may call us at 1-888-BIBLE44 and visit us online at borntowin.net.
SPEAKER 01 :
Christian Educational Ministries is happy to announce a new full-color Born to Win monthly newsletter with articles and free offers from Ronald L. Dart. Call us today at 1-888-BIBLE44 to sign up or visit us at borntowin.net.
