Our eyes and brain provide us with a nearly instantaneous mental picture of our immediate surroundings. This in itself is amazing and should prompt us to thank and worship our Creator. But the Lord has enhanced our visual experience with a wonderful feature: color. What exactly is color, and how do our eyes and brain process it?
I recently had the opportunity to ride in one of the newer Tesla electric cars. The dashboard had a single touchscreen which displayed a perspective view of the vehicle itself – as if seen by a bird following the vehicle by 300 feet at about 100 feet in altitude. The screen also displayed grayscale model representations of all surrounding vehicles, along with the markings on the road, the speed limit, nearby traffic lights, and other driving information. In principle, you could drive the car without ever looking out the window by looking only at the screen. Apparently, cameras surrounding the vehicle feed images into a computer which constructs a 3D virtual model of its environment, which is then displayed on the screen. In other words, it does in a very limited way what your eyes and brain do with much higher fidelity every second of your conscious life.
Advancements in digital photography over the last several decades are truly amazing. Cameras of high quality and resolution now come standard in most smartphones. But there is an extremely versatile and innovative camera that is far superior to anything else on the market. This amazing device can capture both still images and video with unprecedented clarity and unrivaled color-depth. It has the capacity to automatically adjust its focus from infinity down to an inch in less than one second. This camera has a night-vision (greyscale) mode capable of detecting light from galaxies over two million lightyears away. But it can also be used during the day in conditions that are trillions of times brighter. It is highly portable, being less than one inch in size, and weighing only 28 grams.
One of the many scientific lines of evidence against neo-Darwinian evolution involves the concept of irreducible complexity. Microbes, plants, fungi, animals, and human beings all have bodies that are composed of extremely complex microscopic machinery. The different parts of a biological cell are interdependent. Hence, neo-Darwinian evolution is incompatible with irreducible complexity.
Carl Sagan once said, “Evolution is a fact, not a theory.” And he was partly right; evolution is not a theory. He’s not right about evolution being a fact of course…. This is the idea that all life on earth is descended from a common microbial ancestor: that the information in our DNA is entirely the result of mutations over time that happened to convey survival advantage. It is this version of evolution that is neither a fact nor a theory.