Creation for Kids
The amazing eye and the gift of sight
Published in Creation 40(3):32–35, 2018
Cameras are amazing pieces of technology that can be used to permanently record what you see in nature or in your personal space. But no camera comes even close to being as good as your eye in seeing things.
In the days before smartphones, if you used a camera or a projector, one thing you needed to do was to focus it, so that you got a sharp picture or image. This is to ensure that every point on the object is matched by one point on the image, so the image is a clear match. If one point on the object is matched by more than one on the image, the image will be blurred.
Cameras, binoculars, and some telescopes have one or more lenses to focus light. Lenses are curved pieces of clear material that bend, or refract light. Our eyes have lenses. And we also have muscles that change the shape of our eye lenses from when we look at near objects to when we look at things far away. This changes the focus of our eyes.
The biggest optical telescopes for looking at stars use curved mirrors to focus light by reflection—bouncing light back to form an image inside the telescope and focus it towards the eyepiece. The reflecting telescope was invented by the greatest scientist of all time, Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), who was a creationist.
God made special eyes for creatures with special needs
The eye itself is only half of ‘seeing’. Your brain has to decode and interpret what your eyes are seeing. This brain function works faster than any super-computer that man has ever created! So something as amazing as the human eye couldn’t have come about by chance processes, even once.
Some creatures have eyes that are very different from ours, and this works very well for what these creatures need. God created some insects, such as flies, with compound eyes, which enable the insect to see in many different directions at once. Scientists are studying them so they can make devices like them. This could improve surveillance systems and missile tracking units.
Newton wasn’t the first to use mirrors for focusing, as in his reflecting telescope—God made mirror eyes too, when He created lobsters and scallops.
In fact, God created one creature, the brownsnout spookfish, with both a lens and a mirror in each of its eyes! It lives very deep in the ocean, about 1,000 metres or 3,000 feet down, where very little sunlight reaches. So one part of each eye is like a telescope pointing upwards, using a lens to focus, so the fish can see things above itself. But the other part of each eye uses a mirror to focus light coming from deep-sea creatures below that emit their own light—called bioluminescence!
Colour blindness
Sometimes people are born with colour blindness. People who are colour blind find it hard to distinguish colours. The most common kind of colour blindness makes it hard to distinguish red and green. There are more men than women with this type of colour blindness, because it is caused by a copying mistake (mutation) in a gene on the X chromosome. Girls have two of these in every cell, so if one of these carries the mistake, she usually has a ‘backup copy’ that is correct. But boys only have one X chromosome (plus one Y), so if they inherit a chromosome with the mistake, they will be colour blind.
But clever scientists are finding ways to help colour blind people see the colours that they normally can’t. They have created glasses to help the eye distinguish between the different wavelengths of colour, allowing people to see the world the way people without the mutation can.
Correcting vision
You probably know a lot of people who wear glasses or use contact lenses to help them focus their eyes. If people can’t see distant objects clearly, then they are near-sighted or short-sighted. This is because for them light focuses in front of the retina, and they need glasses that increase the distance taken for the image to focus onto the retina. Those who can’t see close objects clearly are called far-sighted or long-sighted. For them the image focuses behind the retina, so they need glasses that bring the image forward onto the retina.
If God created our eyes, why do we need to correct vision today?
When Adam and Eve sinned, one of the consequences was that things started to go wrong with our bodies. All the things that God created so well started to break down due to the Curse God placed upon His creation because of Adam and Eve’s sin of disobedience. Jesus Christ is our Creator and He showed us that He had the power to restore sight miraculously, which proved He was God! You can read about Jesus’ amazing healing power in John’s Gospel, Chapter 9, where He healed a man born blind.
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