As you are reading this article there are millions of cells along the inside of each eye changing the light waves they receive into electrical impulses – little bursts of electricity. These electrical impulses then travel at about 200 miles an hour to the brain, where they are sorted, organised and analysed. According to Evolutionists, this capacity to see things began with a random mutation of a single cell, so that it was able to sense light. This may not sound too incredible, but what is totally incredible is that millions of other positive random mutations would have to occur around this first mutation to build the human visual system. And you may remember from a previous article that scientists today are still looking for evidence of even one positive mutation – one that is helpful rather than a hindrance.
So did such a complex system arise out of lots of random mutations by a series of amazing coincidences? No, God designed the eye and created it fully formed. He designed it so that the eyes are protected by being inside bony sockets, so that tear glands keep the eye wet and help to wash out any foreign bodies, and so that eyelids protect the outer area.
Maybe someone is reading this article out aloud to you. You will be able to tell whether their voice is male or female. Maybe they have a cold and you can tell that too. Maybe there are noises in the background: someone turning over the page of a book, or someone else drinking a cup of tea, or maybe you can hear a car outside. You can tell if the sounds are far away or near to you. How does all this happen?
Your ears are designed to pick up all these sounds and the information is passed on to your brain, where the sounds are interpreted. Sound comes to you in the form of sound waves, which are like ripples on a pond. They make their way down our ear canals at tremendous speed – about 340 metres per second. The sound waves then hit our eardrums, which vibrate and in turn pass these vibrations on to three small bones in the middle of each of our ears. These bones make the vibrations stronger and pass them on to a fluid-filled structure called the cochlea. Inside the cochlea there are about 55 000 hairs, each of which has 50 to 100 tiny bristles which stick out and respond to vibrations from the sound waves. Electrical impulses are then passed on to thousands of nerves which combine to form the acoustic nerve going to the brain. This can happen up to 20 000 times a second. Does that sound complicated? It is!
It is a well co-ordinated, amazingly exact mechanism. It works as a unit and problems arise when even a small part of the unit fails. If we were to believe that this process of hearing evolved, we would have some tough questions to answer. For instance, how did the three bones come about? If a random mutation had resulted in the first bone, what good would it have been on its own? What was it about this single bone that made it worth keeping through natural selection? And what would be the likelihood of two further random mutations happening which would lead to two more neat little bones to fit beside the original one? Millions of mutations would have been necessary to evolve the human hearing mechanism and they would have had to be purposeful, not random. Surely it is much more like common sense simply to accept from the Bible that our ability to hear was created by God.
S M Campbell
[This article was first published in the September 2006 edition of The Young People’s Magazine, and was the tenth in a series entitled “How Did It All Begin?”. The previous article, Dinosaurs, can be found at this link.]