Verse 12 encourages me to do something which I’ve always delighted to do. I love to take my limited knowledge of science to try to bring glory to our Creator, the Lord Jesus. Perhaps I am not really qualified to teach this lesson – at least from the scientific perspective. I have not spent years studying, correcting, and dissecting the human eye. For this lesson, I will be blindly consulting other people who have written on this subject. I am not even expert enough to accurately judge all of what they say. But I am fully qualified to approach this lesson from the perspective of Solomon. I am a Bible believer, and I take the Bible to be the Word of God, who will not and cannot lie to us. Verse 12 says, “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, Jehovah hath made even both of them.” Blind chance, evolution didn’t bring about the eyes through which you are looking at me. The eye testifies against the very principles of evolution. All things were made by God, the Word, and without him was not anything made which now exists.
If someone asks, “How do you know God exists?” One possible answer could be – “I have looked at the human eye.” As Hebrews 3:4 says, “Every house is builded by some man; but he that built all things is God.” And Solomon points specifically to his own body and says, “God built this eye.”
Above all things, it is a matter of faith.
Here is a quote worth considering; I want you to listen and guess who wrote these words. “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. Those words come from a book written in 1859 called “The Origin of the Species” by Charles Darwin. Even though the father of the evolutionary theory freely stated that the evolution of the eye is absurd, he continue to declare his faith in evolution. Evolution is a matter of faith, not science.
Over and over again, evolutionists repeat what Darwin said – in almost every area of the subject. Robert Jastrow published an evolutionary text book in 1981, which proves my point. He said, “The eye is a marvelous instrument, resembling a telescope of the highest quality, with a lens, an adjustable focus, a variable diaphragm for controlling the amount of light, and optical corrections for spherical and chromatic aberration. The eye appears to have been designed; no designer of telescopes could have done better. How could this marvelous instrument have evolved by chance, through a succession of random events?” Despite having to admit that he can’t understand or explain how the eye could evolve, he goes on to say it did, because his false faith demands that it did.
In contrast to these people and all their evolutionary kin, Solomon’s Biblical faith says, “God created the eye.”
When it comes to the eye, it’s a matter of detail.
Here is a quote from John Blanchard, a creationist. “The human eye is a truly amazing phenomenon. Although accounting for just one fourth-thousandth of an adult’s weight, it is the medium which processes some 80% of the information received by its owner from the outside world. The tiny retina contains about 130 million rod-shaped cells, which detect light intensity and transmit impulses to the visual cortex of the brain by means of some one million nerve fibres, while nearly six million cone-shaped cells do the same job, but respond specifically to colour variation. The eyes can handle 500,000 messages simultaneously, and are kept clear by ducts producing just the right amount of fluid with which the lids clean both eyes simultaneously in one five-thousandth of a second.”
Most of what I am sharing with you tonight is about the human eye, because it is Solomon’s subject. But I point out that OUR eye is ocular elementary school compared to the eyes of various animals. The eyes of the falcon, the eagle, and the owl are far, far superior to ours. There are four legged creatures whose eyes put our eyes to shame. But still, our eyes should make the evolutionist cover his eyes in further shame.
The outer white layer of the eye is called the “sclera” by scientists and the “white of the eye” by the rest of us. Six small muscles connect to the sclera and control the eye’s movements. Four of the muscles control the horizontal and vertical movement, while two control rotation. All six muscles work together so that the eye moves smoothly. If there were only 2, 4 or 5 of those muscles, then the eye wouldn’t be as efficient as it should be. All six muscles must have originated at the same time or the so-called “natural selection” would not have permitted the eye to remain in the evolutionary chain.
For us laymen, the eye has two major parts. The first is that which handles incoming light. This includes the cornea, iris, and lens. The cornea is the transparent, dome-shaped window that covers the front of the eye. One of its jobs is to protect the more delicate parts of the eye against damage by foreign bodies. It is like the face of a watch – it lets us look through the “window” of our eye while protecting the internal components from dirt and chemicals. The cornea works with the lens to help focus items seen at varying distances. It does so by changing its shape ever so slightly. The iris and the pupil work together to let in just the right amount of light. There are two opposing sets of muscles that regulate the size of the opening – the pupil – according to the brightness or dimness of the light. If the incoming light is bright, the iris constricts, allowing less light to pass to the back of the eye. But if it is dark, the iris dilates or opens, allowing more light to pass through. If from the very first, there was no control of light intake, that eye would have burned up and died.
The light, with the image of what we are seeing, then moves through a lens that has the ability to adjust its shape to help it clarify the image by changing the focal length, like a camera, sending it in an inverted form on to the retina where it is brought into focus. Between the lens at the front and the retina at the back is a transparent substance filling the eye’s interior. Among other things this “vitreous fluid” or “humor” provides nutrition for some parts of the eye. In children, the vitreous feels like a gel, but as we age, it gradually thins and becomes more of a liquid. It can also fill with junk, making those floating things which get in the way of our sight.
At the back of the eye is the reception area. Light, with the image we are seeing, comes through the lens area, the vitreous and then hits the retina. Here the light triggers reactions or processes in various nerve cells. One single square millimetre of the retina contains approximately 400,000 optical sensors. This light-sensitive layer at the back of the eyeball is thinner than a cheap sheet of paper but it is more sensitive to light than any man-made film used in our old cameras. If we say that the quality of best 35mm film used to be ranked at a thousand. Then the quality of the “film” at the back of your eye should be ranked at ten billion. The healthy human eye can sense as little as a single photon of light. But the retina also has a means of “volume control” so as not to overload. Its light-sensitive cells are like a complex high-gain amplifier that is able to magnify sounds more than one million times “The hearing ear, and the seeing eye, Jehovah hath made even both of them.”
The ultra thin layer of nerve tissue at the back of the eye is a marvel of engineering. It contains photo-receptor (light-sensitive) cells and four types of nerve cells – among other things. The two kinds of photoreceptor cells are referred to as rods and cones because of their shapes. A healthy eye has about 130 million rods and 7 million cones. The very sensitive rods allow the eye to see in black and white. But the three kinds of cones, while not as sensitive, recognize the three primary colors. When they combine their efforts, they allow the eye to see in full color. But as you may know, not everyone is blessed by these colors. Some are color blind. And I have noticed that one of my eyes sees colors differently than my other eye.
All of this is then converted into signals, which then travel along the optic nerve to the brain. Those images I am told are upside-down and inverted left to right. I am not surprised, because that is what happens in a camera. But that’s okay, because the whole eye system is designed to straighten everything out by the time we need it – in a millisecond. One expert put it this way – “Note that, although the brain processes the different parts of the image in various remote locations, the two halves of the field of vision are seamlessly reunited, without any trace of a joint—amazing! It is hard to believe that this inverted system of sight could have been produced through evolution.”
If evolution were true, there could have been a failure in the system at any of a hundred points, and that would have ended the evolutionary process, and no creatures would ever have enjoyed the gift of sight. Simply put, evolution doesn’t explain our ability to see.
Since our eyes are important organs, they must be constantly and properly maintained. So God designed a built-in cleaning system, consisting of the eyelashes, eyelids and tear glands. Those lacrimal glands produce a steady flow of tears that flush away dust and other foreign materials. Our tears also contain a potent anti-microbial agent which destroys viruses and bacteria. Of course, eyelids act like windshield wipers, blinking 3-6 times a minute to moisten and clean the eye.
For a century now, both creationists and evolutionists, have compared the eye to the modern camera. The camera you can buy today, may operate under the same rules, but it is not the camera your grandfather used. Why is it that a stand-alone camera, not the one in your smart phone, why is a really good camera so expensive? Isn’t the answer – “Because it is so complex with so many parts working so connectedly together”? Isn’t it because the people who make cameras deserve to be paid for their labor? Why does the evolutionist see this in the camera, but not in the eye? I read one man who said, “No human camera, artificial device, nor computer-enhanced light-sensitive device can match the contrivance of the human eye. Only a master engineer with superior intelligence could manufacture a series of interdependent light sensitive parts and reactions.” That master engineer was Jehovah God.
Solomon made a simple statement, but it was spot on when he said, “The hearing ear and the seeing eye, the Lord has made them both.”