Compiled by Michael T. Griffith
(Expanded on 12/24/97)
***** From Marshall and Sandra Hall, The Truth: God or Evolution?, Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1975, pp. 112-113:
Any eye from any animal provides a good example of the total illogic of evolutionary theory. The human eye is a subject evolutionists would rather skip:
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.
Who said that? A struggling, obscure nineteenth-century British scientist. His name? Charles Darwin!
Start with a completely developed, fully functioning eye (the only kind that has ever been found!) and work backward a couple of evolutionary steps and you will see why Darwin was so candid.
He had no choice.
Take away just one of the "evolved" parts of the eye--let's say the retina--and what do you have? An organ that can see? Hardly! Subtract the lens, or the cornea. Then put the retina back. Could the eye see? Never! It must be complete or it won't function.
By what reasoning or logic, then, would an eyeless creature begin a hundred-million-year project of forming an eye which would be of no use to it whatsoever until the hundred million years were over? Did these microscopic animals think they were developing something that would be useful after a period of time of which even humans cannot even begin to conceive? And how many more million years for a fish eye to evolve to be useful out of water?
***** From Roger Oakland and Caryl Matrisciana, The Evolution Conspiracy, Eugene, Oregon: Harvest House Publishers, 1991, pp. 90-91:
The human eye is another remarkable system. As you are reading this page, light is reflected from the page to your eyes. The light then passes through an opening in the eye called the pupil. The size of the opening, and thus the amount of light allowed to pass through the pupil, is controlled by muscles in the iris. The iris closes down in bright light and opens up when the light becomes dim. The light then passes through a lens. Muscles within the eye control the shape of the lens, focusing the image that you are viewing onto a light-sensitive screenlike retina at the back of the eyeball. Cells in the retina convert the light energy into an electrical stimulus which is then transferred to the brain. The brain then records the information the eye has perceived, and it is stored there for as long as you live.
A video system, engineered by the design of man, functions in very much the same way as the eye. . . . No one would ever suggest that a video system is the product of random processes of chance over millions of years of time. Yet the eye, which is far more complex, is commonly attributed to the process of evolution--even though Charles Darwin himself said, "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."
Often evolutionists will argue that it takes a series of mutations or mistakes in the genetic code to develop higher orders of complexity. Given long periods of time and random chance events major changes can supposedly occur in an organism. But no one has ever been able to explain how this "hit and miss" process could create complex organs like lungs, hearts, or kidneys. How would the immune system come into existence gradually over millions of years of time? It is obvious that creatures with such highly specialized structures essential for survival could not manage to exist while these structures and functions were evolving.
***** From Phillip E. Johnson, Darwin On Trial, East Sussex, England: Monarch Publications, 1994, British edition, pp. 34-35:
The more pressing difficulty [of Darwin's theory of evolution] was theoretical. Many organs require an intricate combination of complex parts to perform their functions. The eye and the wing are the most common illustrations, but it would be misleading to give the impression that either is a special case; human and animal bodies are literally packed with similar marvels. How can such things be built up by "infinitesimally small inherited variations, each profitable to the preserved being?" The first step towards a new function--such as vision or ability to fly--would not necessarily provide any advantage unless the other parts required for the function appeared at the same time. As an analogy, imagine a medieval alchemist producing by chance a silicon microchip; in the absence of a supporting computer technology the prodigious invention would be useless and he would throw it away.
Stephen Jay Gould asked himself "the excellent question, What good is 5 percent of an eye?," and speculated that the first eye parts might have been useful for something other than sight. Richard Dawkins responded that
An ancient animal with 5 percent of an eye might indeed have used it for something other than sight, but it seems to me as likely that it used it for 5 percent vision. . . .
The fallacy in that argument is that "5 percent of any eye" is not the same thing as "5 percent of normal vision." For an animal to have any useful vision at all, many complex parts must be working together. Even a complete eye is useless unless it belongs to a creature with the mental and neural capacity to make use of the information by doing something that furthers survival or reproduction. What we have to imagine is a chance mutation that provides this complex capacity all at once, at a level of utility sufficient to give the creature an advantage in producing offspring.
Dawkins went on to restate Darwin's answer to the eye conundrum, pointing out that there is a plausible series of intermediate eye-designs among living animals. 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. 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.
If the eye evolved at all, it evolved many times. Ernst Mayr writes that the eye must have evolved independently at least 40 times, a circumstance which suggests to him that "a highly complicated organ can evolve repeatedly and convergently when advantageous, provided such evolution is at all probable." But then why did the many primitive eye forms that are still with us never evolve into more advanced forms? Dawkins admits to being baffled by the nautilus, 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."
***** From Dr. Alan Hayward (a British physicist), Creation and Evolution: Rethinking the Evidence from Science and the Bible, Minneapolis, Minnesota: Bethany House Publishers, Bethany House Edition, 1995, pp. 38-39:
When I first came across the title of a book, Mathematical Challenges to the Neo-Darwinian Interpretation of Evolution, I assumed it was a piece of creationist propaganda. But I could hardly have been more wrong. It was the proceedings of a high-level international conference, where some of the world's greatest Darwinists and a number of mathematicians met to discuss whether Darwinism made mathematical sense.
The mathematicians present were not merely eminent in their own fields. They were invited because of their specialist knowledge of biology, many of them having done mathematical research related to one of the life sciences. Even so, the conference proceedings make rather sad reading. The two groups seemed unable to find much common ground: instead, they kept restating their opposing points of view.
A good illustration of this occurs on p. 29. Dr. S. M. Ulam had just given a paper where he showed, mathematically, that it seemed virtually impossible for the eye to have evolved in a Darwinian fashion. Now he was facing a barrage of criticism from the evolutionists. One of these, Sir Peter Medawar, complained:
I think the way you have treated this is a curious inversion of what would normally be a scientific process of reasoning. It is, indeed, a fact that the eye has evolved; and, as Waddington says, the fact that is had done so shows that this [Ulam's] formulation is, I think, a mistaken one.
This remark is pure Alice Through the Looking Glass. Ulam had produced mathematical evidence that the eye could not have evolved by random mutations and natural selection. Medawar retorted that it was a fact that the eye had evolved, and therefore Ulam simply must have got his sums wrong!
The extraordinary thing is that the evolutionist Medawar even accused Ulam of "a curious inversion of what would normally be a scientific process of reasoning." Medawar's reaction was like that of a man who had been standing on his head for so long that he thought the rest of the world was the wrong way up.
Another prominent evolutionist, Dr. Ernst Mayr, was equally irrational. He dismissed Ulam's mathematics by saying:
Somehow or other by adjusting these figures we will come out all right. We are comforted by knowing that evolution has occurred. (Page 30)
"Knowing," indeed!
Throughout the conference this sort of situation recurred. The Darwinists took as their starting point that their opinion was fact. "Please don't confuse us with your evidence," was their entrenched attitude.
Perhaps the most impressive argument of all was that raised by Professor Murray Eden, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on page 9. He pointed out that the human genes contain about a billion nucleotides. (A nucleotide is the smallest unit of information in our genes --like a letter in a chemical alphabet. Groups of nucleotides convey messages to the developing embryo: messages such as "This white rat shall have pink eyes" or "This child shall be left-handed like its Dad.") He went on to show that, however you made the calculations, you ended up with the same conclusion: the length of time life has been on earth was not nearly long enough for all those nucleotides--all that information--to have been generated by chance mutations.