The Wonder of Sight
by Whit Sasser
God’s design of sight is such a wonder of the human body and our eyes in particular. The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord has made them both (Proverbs 20:12). Charles Darwin struggled with the problem of an organ so complex as the eye evolving via naturalistic processes. In The Origin of Species, he admitted: "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 freely confess, absurd in the highest sense" (1859, p. 170).
Light enters the eye, first passing through the outer, transparent layer of the eye, called the cornea. Through the cornea, the light next passes through the pupil. The pupil gets bigger to allow more light in (when there's very little light) and smaller to allow less light in (when there's a lot of light). How does the pupil know to get bigger or smaller? That's the job of the iris. The iris is the colored part of your eye, and it controls the pupil's size.
Once the light passes through the iris, it next hits the lens. The lens puts the light rays into focus and sends it to the retina. But before it hits the retina, it has to pass through the vitreous humor. This is a colorless mass of jelly-like material that lives in the eye behind the lens. Think of the eye as a camera. The retina, then, is the film in the camera which captures the image.
The retina contains light-sensitive cells called rods and cones…137 million light-sensitive receptor cells that convey the message (at over 300 miles per hour) to the brain for processing. Those cells (130 million rods that allow the eye to see in black and white and 7 million cones that allow the eye to see in full color) convert light into chemical…chemical signals, which then travel along the optic nerve to the brain. The funny thing is that the image on the retina appears upside-down, backward, and 2-dimensional. It's at this point that the brain is able to switch that backward, upside down, 2-dimensional image into its correct form. How does the brain turn a 2-dimensional image into a 3-dimensional image? You need to remember that you have two eyes, each carrying this light information to the brain from two slightly different angles (your eyes are several inches apart, and that gives each eye a slightly different view on the world). When the brain receives both of these 2-dimensional images, it combines them together into one 3-dimensional image, allowing you to see the world in 3D! Amazing!
And one more thing…the eyes are kept clear by tear ducts that produce exactly the right amount of fluid to cleanse both eyes simultaneously in one five-hundredth of a second.
What a journey! What a process! What a wonder! The eye processes approximately 80% of the information received from the outside world. In fact, the eyes can handle 500,000 messages simultaneously. It happens all the time, and you don't even have to think about it. Your eyes just do it! The eye is infinitely more complex than any man-made camera or telescope. Actually, the camera was patterned after the eye. If the function of the camera demands that it was “made,” does it not stand to reason that the more complex human camera, the eye, also must have had a Maker? The eye is truly amazing. God is much more amazing!
