Is there a God? Consider the human body. Psalm 139:14 declares we are "fearfully and wonderfully made." Let's examine one small part of the body, the human eye. Because of its extreme complexity, scientists still don't fully understand how it works. Guess who 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 possible degree— The belief that an organ as perfect as the eye could have formed by natural selection is more than enough to stagger anyone."
Who declared this remarkable truth? None other than the famous evolutionist, Charles Darwin. Even he recognized that an organ as intricate and magnificent as the eye required a Creator.
[Now guess what book he cites as the source of the quote!
The Origin of Species ?
No dice!
It's a book called Flaws in the Theory of Evolution .]
35 comments
Correct quotation:
"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 possible degree.
Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated; but I may remark that several facts make me suspect that any sensitive nerve may be rendered sensitive to light, and likewise to those coarser vibrations of the air which produce sound."
Yes lets look at the eye.
It is indeed a wonderful and complex organ.
It's also has a number of flaws. For instance, the retina is BEHIND the blood vessels supplying it. And the eye has imperfections and crystals in the liquid inside that impair vision. In fact, an image taken from the eye directly is blurry and almost completely meaningless until the brain gets a hold of the data and sorts it out.
If the eye was a video camera, it would have the power cord dangling in front of the lens which was dirty and chipped... and yet somehow we could still get a clear image.
The eye is complex to make up for all it's flaws. A designed organ would not have these flaws to begin with.
Oh and an argument from ignorance is always fallacious. Just because Darwin didn't know something doesn't mean he was wrong about what he did know or that knowledge had not progressed since then.
Copypasta'd from Hovind's same piece of idiocy just now:
We see this bullshit all the time, but I have a lot less patience for it with Chick, since he must be fully aware of the full quote by now, and intentionally chooses to ignore it.
The best counter for it ever: actually forcing them to recite the rest of the quote.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfFXH3VqcCM
Hey Rick, what's the ISBN number of your copy of "Origin"?
Don't have one?
Shut your festering gob, then.
Jesus said "Trouble me not: the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot rise and give thee."
See how easy it is to quote stuff out of context?
Obviously this person does not know how a digital camera works, as it's Charge Coupled Device mimics almost exactly the retina's function...
Conversely, if the human eye works in the same way a digital camera does, then I'd be demanding that my autofocus/zoom function be fixed under manafacturer's warranty (I'm Short sighted BTW).
I love that quote.
It's fun to watch people's eyes bug out when it is shown that their trusted sources lied to them. Blatantly.
Rescuing people from blind adherence to misguided beliefs is wonderful. Even if it's only with regard to the anti-scientific creation/ID videos.
Edit: Oh, and Laser Eye surgery is the only reason my eyes can focus. Not to mention the blind spot caused by the optic nerve coming out the wrong side. Or the many people with lazy eyes. Or the eye's degeradation over time. Yes. Some stellar design work there, God.
@ everyone who has already mentioned their poor vision: right on and let me add my astigmatism to the mix, my husband's lazy eye, my grandfather's glaucoma, my ex boyfriend's colour blindness, etc etc.
As for scientists not fully understanding how it works, they've pretty much got it down pat.
Also, if god DID design us...wtf was he thinking when he came up with genitals??? And why, when we sweat, don't we smell like roses or something pleasant?
It is a favorite pastime of christians to quote one verse that suits thier agenda and ignore the 600+ that say otherwise.
Charles Darwin said no such thing.
As for the human eye, in the animal kingdom (of which we are part) it is one of the poorest of all.
Cats, Birds and Flies have far bettter vision than we.
Also the cheapest camera lens is better than the human eye.
Sanctimonious crap from someone who knows jack-shit beyond what is written in a compendium of babylonian goat-sodomisers rambling.
Consider human head: offers good protection for the brain, but is wayyy too easily severed from the body. Good proof that we indeed possibly did not evolve, but might indeed have been designed by a deity that is a complete nitwit and, as an added bonus, has no sense of aesthetics. :)
I know its a hard concept to grasp, but Darwin was a Christian when he wrote that. He became an agnostic not because of his theory, but when his daughter died.
It still does not make proof that Jesus was a creator..it just says that at his time it was hard for people to think an eye could be created through natural selection.
Stop taking things out of context if you want to be taken seriously by the scientific community.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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