"We speak of the body as a machine, but it is hardly necessary to say that none of the most ingenious machines set up by modern science can for a moment compare with it. The body is a self-building machine, a self-stoking, self-regulating, self-repairing machine - the most marvelous and unique automatic mechanism in the universe."

THE EYE

In 1802, William Paley, the 59 year-old Anglican archdeacon of Carlisle, already had a reputation as an apologist. That year he published a design argument based on the mind-boggling organizational intricacies of the human eye.

Like the top-of-the-line modern camera, the eye contains a self-adjusting aperture, an automatic focus system, and inner surfaces surrounded by a dark pigment to minimize the scattering of stray light. But no camera that small is so complete.

The sensitivity range of the eye, which gives us excellent vision in bright sunlight as well as in the dimmest moonlight, far surpasses any film. The eye adjusts to 10 billion-fold changes in brightness.

Its neural circuitry enables the eye to automatically enhance contrast.

Its color-analysis system enables the eye to distinguish millions of shades of color and quickly adjust to lighting conditions (incandescent, fluorescent, underwater, or sunlight) that would require a photographer to change filters, films, and housings.

The eye-brain combination produces depth perception that is beyond the range of any camera. Engineers have yet to design a system that will, e.g., calculate the exact force required for an athlete to sink a basket, on the run, from 25 feet away, in a split-second glance.

Consider the combination of nerves, sensory cells, muscles, and lens tissue in the eye.

Light passes through the cornea, which has the greatest effect on focus. It is the cornea that determines whether someone is nearsighted, or has astigmatism. This is the part of the eye corrected by Lasik surgery.

The cornea is alive, one cell layer thick, getting its food and oxygen from tears. The tear gland not only feeds and lubricates the eye, but also packs enzymes into the tears that kill bacteria.

Then light passes through the iris, the aperture. People had no idea how intricate irises are until we started making biometric scanners for identification purposes. Whereas each human fingerprint has 35 measurable characteristics, each iris has 266. The chance that two people will have matching irises is one in 10⁷⁸.

Passing through the lens, the light is further focused, a fine-tuning. Then it strikes the pigmented retina.

The retina has 127 million photovoltaic receptors - only 7 million of which provide color awareness and fine detail. The information of these 127 million receptors is converted from light to electricity and transmitted along one million nerve fibers to the 1% of the cortex of the brain.

As little as one photon can trigger a photoelectric cell; a flashlight, eg, fires 10¹⁸ photons per second. On a clear dark night, the eye can see a solitary candle flame from 30 miles away.

Think in terms of Polaroid Instamatic cameras that printed out photos rapidly, and compare. The retina never stops "shooting" pictures, and each fiber of the optic nerve processes one hundred "photos" each second. Each of those individual photos would be represented mathematically by 50,000 nonlinear differential equations, to be solved simultaneously. Considering both eyes, and allowing only five synapses (connections) to other nerves from the retina to the brain cortex, a 1983 Cray supercomputer would require one hundred years to process the information that your eye transmits every hundredth of a second.

How could chance, acting with one gene at a time, start with a sightless organism and produce an eye with so many interdependent precision parts? The retina would be useless without a lens; a lens would be useless without a retina.

Paley asks,

"Is it possible to believe that the eye was formed without any regard to vision; that it was the animal itself which found out that, although formed with no such intention, it would serve to see with?"

"...There cannot be design without a designer, contrivance without a contriver...The marks of design are too strong to be got over. Design must have had a designer. That designer must have been a person. That person must have been God."

Darwin himself suggested the complexities of the human eye negate his own theory of evolution.

More than 50 years later, Charles Darwin himself wrote, (in a chapter from his Origin of the Species entitled "Difficulties with the Theory"), "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 degree." Jeremy Rifkin, evolutionist, writes in his book Algeny that Darwin confided to a friend, years later, "The eye to this day gives me a cold shudder."