The Blessing of the Eye
The other day I got an e-mail from my father that I found interesting. It was a link to a video which talked about how God blessed us with perfect eyes to see such beautiful colors. The video mostly featured a series of images first in black and white and then in color to show how great the human eye is. I should note that my father is not all that religious any more and probably just enjoyed the visuals.
Of course, this type of argument is laughable. For starters, the human eye doesn’t see very much. So little of the electromagnetic spectrum makes up visible light to humans that one really needs to ask not why God has blessed us with color, but rather why God has cursed us by practically blinding us. Of course the reality is that God didn’t bless us or curse us. The human eye wasn’t designed by an intelligent designer with a plan, but rather was designed by the process of natural selection.
Second, the Intelligent Designer fails again when we look at the internal aspects of the human eye. God really fucked it up for humans. For some reason our optic nerves block much of the light from reaching our photoreceptors. The fact is that there are animals in the world whose photoreceptors are not blocked by their optic nerves. So it certainly seems like God designed the snail’s eyes better than the eyes of humans. Maybe snails have souls and humans don’t.
The real problem is that it is too easy for some ignorant Christian to throw up some black and white photos and contrast them to color photos and claim that humans are number one without having the slightest idea of what is out there or what he or she is talking about. People like my father like looking at the “eye candy” and some people might even get suckered in with that and fall victim to the ridiculousness of the argument being quietly put forth.
The Christian cloaks his or her self in being uplifting when they are really just been ignorant and/or dishonest. In some cases, they are using people’s sense of awe and love of beauty as a way to push their product and sucker people. We can still experience the awe of color and the beauty of the world as we see it and still admit that human vision is far from number one. In fact, through the magic of science humans can now see much better than our flawed human eyes normally allow.
Microscopes and telescopes allow us to see things both big and small. Glasses and contacts correct people’s flawed vision and other scientific instruments even allow us to observe much more or the electromagnetic spectrum than our “God” given eyes possible could. Isn’t science wonderful? The collection plate in located in the side bar in the form of a contribute button. Thanks!
Filed under: Argument by Design, evolution