The World’s Most Amazing Camera

Articles on the design of the eye

Part 1

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. This camera has a night-vision (greyscale) mode capable of detecting light from galaxies over two million lightyears away. It is highly portable, being less than one inch in size, and weighing only 28 grams.

Part 2

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. 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.

Part 3 – Color

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?

Part 4 – Adaptation

The human eye is a marvel of design.  As an astronomer, one aspect of human vision that I find particularly amazing and useful is the ability of the eye to adapt to extremely different lighting conditions.  At night, the eye adjusts to be able to see stars that are 12 trillion times fainter than the sun.  The way this mechanism works is ingenious and is merely one example of the cleverness of the Lord and of His grace toward us. 

Part 5 – The Inverted Retina

Having examined some of the remarkable design features of the human eye, we here look at a feature that is sometimes claimed to support evolution: the inverted retina. Evolutionists claim this is a backward system that resulted from chance mutations. Far from being evidence of evolution, the inverted retina is extremely well planned. Furthermore, not all creatures have an inverted retina. Rather, each creature has a vision system that is well-designed for its environment.

Part 6 – Variations on a Theme

We previously explored the differences between the inverted retina of the human eye, and the verted retina of cephalopods. We found that each system was well-designed for the typical environment in which the creature lives. This prompts us to ask what other types of eyes the Lord has created. From a biblical creation perspective, we expect to find both similarities (due to having a common Creator who is a God of order) and differences (due to the Lord’s creativity) in the eyes of different varieties of animals. Furthermore, we would expect each type of eye to be well-suited for the organism in its environment, and irreducibly complex. And this is indeed exactly what we find.