Research Paper for a Contest -

Man’s Windows to the World


Kendra E. Ardnek



This research paper will attempt to show the complexity of the human eye and how it supports creation.

Every human has two jelly-like spheres in their head. They are so flimsy that they have to be protected in a bony socket called the orbit. They have to be continually cleaned by certain flaps of skin and a special fluid made by glands that are located just to the sides of these spheres. Yet it is through these that the brain receives most of the information it processes. Without them, life would be total darkness. What are they? They are the human eyes.
The flaps of skin are the eyelids, and the fluid is tears. The eyelids help clean the eye by opening and shutting rapidly. This spreads the tears around, and is called blinking. The eyelids also blink when a foreign object touches it. The blinking reflex is so strong that, according to Menton (2003), it is one of the last reflexes lost before death. The eyelids have both skeletal and smooth muscle. The skeletal muscle gives voluntary control and the smooth muscle holds them open in order to prevent fatigue. Tears are produced by the tear glands, and are the optimum cleaning fluid for the eye. There are little holes in the corner of each eyelid that sucks up the excess tears and drain into your nose. This prevents the tears from constantly running down the cheeks, although in this fallen world sadness and pain can cause an overload, which does run down the cheeks.
The eye is controlled by six strap-like muscles according to Walker (1994) p.43. The Lateral Rectus turns the eye outward or away from the nose, the Medial Rectus turns the eye inwards or towards the nose, the Superior Rectus rolls the eye upwards, and the Inferior Rectus rolls the eye downwards. These muscles are all voluntary, but, according to Menton (2003), the other two are not. They are the Superior Oblique and the Inferior Oblique. Their job is to keep the field of vision stable when the head is tilted to the side. In order for them to do this they have to each run through a pulley. The Oblique muscles actually turn your eyes sideways. However, they are not able to turn the eye upside-down, so when the head is upside-down, the eyes see upside-down.
The eye, according to Kelly (2009) p.10, is constantly moving, if not voluntarily, involuntarily. When focusing, it wobbles just 1/70 the thickness of a sheet of paper. The eyes will also slowly drift to one side, then suddenly jerk back. Why did God make them so that they would continually move? Is it so they would tire themselves out? No. Unless something is moving, your eyes cannot detect it. The eyes move so that you can see objects that aren’t moving.
The tough, white outer coat is called sclera. It is criss-crossed with blood vessels, unlike the cornea. The sclera is where the eye muscles attach. There is also a thin, transparent mucous membrane, called the conjunctiva. It, according to Fekrat and Weizer (2006) p.3, lines the inner surface of the eyelids, helps form a barrier inside the eyelids that separates the front and back halves of the eye (the area is called the fornix), and it becomes even thinner and continues over the front surface of the cornea (this area is called the limbus).
The cornea, a transparent skin covering, protects the inner eye and lets light pass through to the retina. In order for it to do that, it has to be crystal clear. It has to be wet in order for it to be this way, and that is another reason for tears. There are no blood vessels in the cornea, instead the it is nourished by a special gel which is called, according to Fekrat and Weizer (2006) p.6, the aqueous humor and is manufactured by the eye itself. The cornea provides about 70% of the refracting of light. Some corneas, however, are not perfectly smooth, which distorts vision. This problem is called an astigmatism, which can be solved by a pair of glasses that has the same pattern of bumps ground in reverse.
The iris is the colored part of the eye, and a person’s iris is as unique as his or her fingerprint. According to Walker (2007) p.50, it is sometimes scanned by security devices and used to identify people. Its main purpose, however, is much like that of the shutter on a camera. The light enters the lens through a hole in the iris. The iris controls the amount of light that enters the eye, in bright light, the iris makes the hole, called the pupil, shrink in order to prevent dazzling, and in dim light, the iris makes the pupil grow in order to admit more light.
The lens provides the remaining 30% of the refracting of the light. The lens’s shape is controlled by the ciliary muscles which surround it. The cells in the eye are the most protein rich in the body. The cells on the surface are alive, but the ones on the inside have no nuclei. Magnified, the lens cells look like stacks of lumber and are joined together by super tiny balls and sockets. Although God made a perfect lens to begin with, age makes the cells in the eye cloudy, which is called a cataract, and the lens becomes stiffer and it becomes harder for it to change its shape, which makes small print and eventually large print very hard to read. The first of these problems can only be fixed by surgery while the second can be corrected with glasses.
After the lens, the light travels through the vitreous humor, a transparent gel-like substance composed of 99% water and 1% protein. It composes 80% of the eye’s mass and helps it to hold its spherical shape.
In a developing baby, still in the mother’s womb, the front of the eye and the back of the eye develop from two separate places. The cornea, according to Menton (2003), starts as part of the skin on the baby’s face, and the lens is just a flap of skin underneath that. The retina and choriod form from a ball-like cup that develops from the brain and is attached to it by a hollow tube which will eventually become the optic nerve.
The image that hits the retina is actually up-side-down. This is because the cornea and lens, by refracting the light, end up turning the image that is being looked at that way. The brain will turn it the right way when it gets there.
The light then is detected by the photocells and the information is turned into electrical pulses which are sent to the brain. There are two different types of photocells. Numbering at 120 million, the rods, which work best in the dim light in order to provide black and white vision are by far the more numerous and widespread. The cones, of which there are 6 million, are concentrated in one area, the fovea, and work best in bright light to provide detailed, color vision. The fovea is the only part of the retina that is focused. This in and of itself, proves a designer. If everything were equally in focus, life would be total confusion. Reading would be impossible. If every word were equally in focus, the reader would not be able to read the individual words. Man can only deal comfortably with one item at a time. We may be able to see the crowd, but we can focus only on the person.
The retina is very curiously designed. The photocells do not point towards the light as would be expected, but away. Because of this, the evolutionists think that the eye could not have been designed. They say that God would not have made such a faulty eye. However this is faulty thinking. They call the eye faulty before they study it to figure out why it is the way it is. There is in fact, according to Menton (2003), several very good reasons for this. First of all, the photocells burn out faster than any other cell in the body, therefore the eye needs something to eat the dead cells. One would not want all of those dead cells building up or the mechanism for eating them in front, either one would block the light. Putting the photocells in backwards allows the mechanism for eating them to be in the back, out of the way of the light and cloud vision. Another good reason is the choriod, which is pigmented in order to absorb the light after it is detected by the photocells. If the photocells pointed towards the light, the choriod would not be able to absorb the light immediately after the photocells detect it and they may end up detecting it more then once, and that would be very confusing. Evolutionists think that if the retina were to be turned around, it would work a lot better. The eye, however, is sensitive to a single photon of light, it can’t be improved!
The choriod contains 95% of the blood in the eye, the other 5% is in front of the retina, casting a shadow on it which the brain ignores. This is because it moves with the eye, and its movement will never be seen.
Some people have too long or too short of an eye, therefore making what they look at fuzzy or blurred. If the eyes is too long (which is the more common problem), he or she will have trouble focusing on objects that are far away. If it is too short, he or she will not be able to focus on things that are close up. The long eye can be corrected with concave lenses while the short eye is corrected with convex lenses.
All the nerves leading from the photocells gather in one area to form the optic nerve. The area where the optic nerve forms and leaves the eye is called the blind spot because there are no photocells there. Each eye’s blind spot is in a different location and the eye is always moving, so, according to Rainwater (1962) p.14, it usually goes unnoticed. The optic nerve itself is covered with the same tissues that cover the brain, making it truly part of the brain.
The whole back of the eye is part of the brain, making the eye the only one of the five senses that is not merely connected to the brain, but part of it. The two eyes together contain 70% of the body’s sensory cells, and, according to Elting (1986) p.53, were a computer to try and do all of the eye’s functions, it would have to perform at least 10 billion calculations a second!
The evolutionist wants us to believe that this marvelous little built-in camera happened by chance, yet it is far more complex than a computer, which they say could not happen by chance. Even though the eye today has many short-comings, it is the work of sin – not a loving creator. He made the eye perfect, without disease or injury. How could blind chance make a seeing eye?







References
Elting, M. (1986). The Human Body. New York: Macmillan
Publishing Company.

Fekrat, S. & Weizer, J.S. (2006). All about Your
Eyes. Duke University Press

Kelly, D.L. (Summer 2009) Glimpses of Light. Creation
Illustrated. Vol.16, No.2 pp.4-11

Menton, D. (2003). The Hearing Ear: And the Seeing Eye.
Answers in Genesis - DVD

Rainwater, J. (1962). Vision: How Why and What We See. New
New York: Golden Press Inc.

Walker, R. (1994). The Children’s Atlas of the Human Body.
Brookfield: Millbrook Press Inc.

Walker, R. (2007). How the Incredible Human Body Works.
New York: DK Publishing

Williams, F. (1997). Human Body. New York: DK Publishing, Inc.