The Inverted Retina

Why is man so intent on disproving the God of the majority-text? Carnal man will naturally accept or tolerate any teaching that is contrary to the singular truth of the Word of God. Man’s thousands of contrary positions of pseudo-science, philosophy, and various and sundry denominations and doctrines of devils appear diverse from one another, but they all have one very deadly thing in common—and that is rebellion against the singular, absolute truth of God’s Word. In the Garden of Eden, when Adam and Eve heard Satan’s voice and embraced it, eternal life in Paradise was lost. Satan’s Edenic voice has taken on multitudinous forms, but be sure they are all just one, and that one voice is rebellion against the absolute God, the only purveyor of truth.

Man’s rebellion and desire to destroy the God of absolutes is a matter of kinship. Unregenerated man is kin to the father of lies, and naturally sees the God of truth as his adversary, just as darkness sees light as an adversary. Romans 8:7:

Because the carnal mind is enmity against God: for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.

The word enmity means "hostile to or at war with." The carnal mind is at war with God, and cannot conform. Carnal man’s cry is, "Down with God and His absolutes! Down with sin! Down with responsibility! Down with Judgment Day! And, don’t stuff your morality down my throat!" Then he shouts, "Up with ‘tolerance,’ up with ‘freedom,’ and up with ‘everything goes!’" This carnal spirit, spawned by Satan, is at war with God—a war carnaldom can’t win. Their champion, Satan, has already been spoiled by the King of Kings, Jesus Christ the Lamb of God, the Lord of Glory. Seek Him while He may be found. Click onto "Further With Jesus," for immediate entrance into the Kingdom of God. This is not an exaggeration. NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.

GOD SAID, Psalms 14:1:

...The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.

GOD SAID, Proverbs 30:5-6:

5 Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.

6 Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.

GOD SAID, Ecclesiastes 3:14:

I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him.

GOD SAID, Psalms 4:2:

O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame? how long will ye love vanity, and seek after leasing? Selah.

MAN SAID:  Mankind has and continues to evolve from basically nothing, without a need for a God or a Creator. The imperfect engineering we see in the human anatomy is positive proof that an all-knowing God has not created man.

Now THE RECORD. It must be noted that atheism and evolution are anomalies strictly unique to earth. Once atheists or evolutionists die, they are quickly converted to faith in God and the obvious fact of creation, albeit their belated faith is to no avail. The Bible declares concerning carnaldom’s leader, Satan, and devils in general, in James 2:19:

Thou believest that there is one God; thou doest well: the devils also believe, and tremble.

Just recently, I reviewed an article from ICR (Institute For Creation Research) in which the writer mentioned a movement afoot in America to establish a national day for Charles Darwin, possibly February 12th, as several other countries have already done. The writer pointed out the redundancy of the effort, because in America, we already have April 1st set aside for Darwin. It’s funny, but unfortunately true.

Pseudo-science has challenged the bona fides of the Bible countless times. One of its "proofs" of evolution was what they dubbed "vestigial organs." Vestigial organs were organs in the human body that, due to the advancements of evolution, were supposedly no longer of any value. A hundred years ago, there were 200 vestigial organs listed. Today, medical science has proven that every one of the so-called vestigial organs has real and valuable benefit. There are no vestigial organs.

Undaunted by monumental setbacks, pseudo-science continues to bite and snap at the heels of the God of creation. In the past 20 years or so, its followers have attacked the existence of an all-knowing God in the design of creation from the premise of flawed engineering. One of their champions, Richard Dawkins, in his 1986 book, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design, had this to say about your eye’s retina:

Any engineer would naturally assume that the photocells would point towards the light, with their wires leading backwards towards the brain. He would laugh at any suggestion that the photocells might point away, from the light, with their wires departing on the side nearest the light. Yet this is exactly what happens in all vertebrate retinas. Each photocell is, in effect, wired in backwards, with its wire sticking out on the side nearest the light. The wire has to travel over the surface of the retina to a point where it dives through a hole in the retina (the so-called "blind spot") to join the optic nerve. This means that the light, instead of being granted an unrestricted passage to the photocells, has to pass through a forest of connecting wires, presumably suffering at least some attenuation and distortion (actually, probably not much but, still, it is the principle of the thing that would offend any tidy-minded engineer). I don’t know the exact explanation for this strange state of affairs. The relevant period of evolution is so long ago.  [End of quote]

Dawkins claims there is no all-knowing God of creation, for if there were, He would not have wired the retina backwards.

Dawkins’ allegations were researched in detail by Peter Gurney in an extensive report found on the web at www.trueorigin.org. This article first appeared in the Creation Ex Nihilo Technical Journal, published by Answers In Genesis. Gurney’s conclusion follows:

Light at various wavelengths is capable of very damaging effects on biological machinery. The retina, besides being an extremely sophisticated transducer and image processor, is clearly designed to withstand the toxic and heating effects of light. The eye is well equipped to protect the retina against radiation we normally encounter in everyday life. Besides the almost complete exclusion of ultraviolet radiation by the cornea and the lens together, the retina itself is endowed with a number of additional mechanisms to protect against such damage:

• The retinal pigment epithelium produces substances which combat the damaging chemical by-products of light radiation.

• The retinal pigment epithelium plays an essential part sustaining the photoreceptors. This includes recycling and metabolising their products, thereby renewing them in the face of continual wear from light bombardment.

• The central retina is permeated with xanthophyll pigment which filters and absorbs short-wavelength visible light.  The photoreceptors thus need to be in intimate contact with the retinal pigment epithelium, which is opaque. The retinal pigment epithelium, in turn, needs to be in intimate contact with the choroid (also opaque) both to satisfy its nutritional requirements and to prevent (by means of the heat sink effect of its massive blood flow) overheating of the retina from focused light.

If the human retina were 'wired' the other way around (the verted configuration), as evolutionists such as Dawkins propose, these two opaque layers would have to be interposed in the path of light to the photoreceptors which would leave them in darkness! Thus I suggest that the need for protection against light-induced damage, which a verted retina in our natural environment could not provide to the same degree, is a major, if not the major reason for the existence of the inverted configuration of the retina.  [End of quote]

Frank Sherwin, a regular science writer for ICR, under the feature banner "Origins Issues," counters Dawkins’ allegations:

In past decades, evolutionists, such as Richard Dawkins, have maintained the retina of our eyes was actually "wired backward." If a Creator existed, He certainly would not have done it that way with photoreceptor cells oriented so their sensory ends are directed away from incident light. Today, we hear virtually nothing about this allegedly imperfect manner of wiring. Why? Because scientists have shown our retinas are designed exactly the way they should be in order to receive photons (light) and direct the impulses via the optic nerves to the back of the brain where they are made into images. Indeed, if the eye was designed to Darwinist specifications, we would be blind.  [End of quote]

Blind! Mr. Evolutionist, blind!

Charles Darwin said:

To suppose that the eye, (with so many parts all working together) . . . could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.

After that statement, Darwin proceeded to express a rationale on how a series of small changes can make his doctrine of evolution work. When Darwin made his comments about the eye, the scientific understanding of the eye was truly elementary. Today’s advanced researchers of the human eye are continually awestruck by its design’s intricate genius, and their discoveries are making Darwin’s statement, "...I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree," even more dominantly relevant.

The following paragraphs are from A. L. Gillen’s research book, Body By Design:

The most amazing component of the camera eye is its "film," which is the retina. This light-sensitive layer at the back of the eyeball is thinner than a sheet of plastic wrap and is more sensitive to light than any man-made film. The best camera film can handle a ratio of 1000- to-1 photons in terms of light intensity. By comparison, human retinal cells can handle a ratio of 10 billion-to-1 photons over a dynamic range of light wavelengths of 380 to 750 nanometers. The human eye can sense as little as a single photon of light in the dark! In bright daylight, the retina can bleach out, turning its "volume control" way down so as not to overload. The light-sensitive cells of the retina are like an extremely complex high-gain amplifier that is able to magnify sounds more than one million times. There are over 10 million rods and cones in the retina and they are packed together with a density of 200,000 per square millimeter in the highly sensitive central fovea. This is the area of highest concentration of cone cells. These photoreceptor cells have a very high rate of metabolism and must completely replace themselves about every seven days! If you look at a very bright light such as the sun, they immediately burn out, but are rapidly replaced in most cases. Because the retina is thinner than the wavelength of visible light, it is totally transparent. Each of its minute photoreceptor cells is vastly more complex than the most sophisticated man-made computer. It has been estimated that 10 billion calculations occur every second in the retina before the image even gets to the brain! It is sobering to compare this performance with the best output of the most powerful man-made computer. Stevens reported, "To simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations one hundred times and would take at least several minutes of processing time on a Cray super-computer."

Somebody made the eye—somebody bigger than you and me, somebody bigger than we are, historically and aggregately. That somebody is God, who created all things by Christ Jesus.

GOD SAID, Psalms 14:1:

...The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there is none that doeth good.

GOD SAID, Proverbs 30:5-6:

5 Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him.

6 Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.

GOD SAID, Ecclesiastes 3:14:

I know that, whatsoever God doeth, it shall be for ever: nothing can be put to it, nor any thing taken from it: and God doeth it, that men should fear before him.

GOD SAID, Psalms 4:2:

O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame? how long will ye love vanity, and seek after leasing? Selah.

MAN SAID:  Mankind has and continues to evolve from basically nothing, without a need for a God or a Creator. The imperfect engineering we see in the human anatomy is positive proof that an all-knowing God has not created man.

Now you have THE RECORD.




References:

King James Bible

Gillen, A., Body By Design, Master Books, May 2001, pp97-98

Gurney, W. V. G., "Is Our ’Inverted’ Retina Really ‘Bad Design’?" www.trueorigin.org

Sherwin, F., "That Troubling Laryngeal Nerve," Back To Genesis, Institute For Creation Research, April 2005

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