CORRESPONDENCE WEEK 8

CORRRESPONDENCE WEEK 8

The Construction of the Eye

(J) It was the eye last week: what is it now?

(R) I have not done with the eye yet. I must be content with amateur indications: but sometimes these are more useful than technical morass.

(J) I agree with you. The subject is often lost in the details, like a landscape when you apply your magnifying glass to the blades of grass. What more is there about the eye?

(Note: Dr. Michael J Behe wrote a book “Darwin’s Black Box” About irreducible complexity, see here http://www.truthinscience.org.uk/site/content/view/137/57/ However, we as Christadelphians do not hold to the vague scientific accounts of “Intelligent Design.” And that we believe that the Bible is the only source of divine revelation concerning the earth and its nations through God’s plan concerning them, not the fallible books and words of men however helpful they may be in helping us.

(R) Well, there is the system of muscles by which we turn it about at will in the socket. These are so placed with regard to thickness and thinness, and so attached to the ball of the eye as to enable the possessor of the eye to use it to the very utmost advantage, and with the rapidity of lightning. He can turn it this way and that, up or down, to the right side or the left side, just as he wishes. Who contrived this perfect apparatus, which excels the most exquisite machine ever invented by man, as much as the sunlight exceeds candle light? Man did not contrive it. It could not contrive itself.
It could not be there without being contrived. Give us God, and we are at rest. Take him from us, and you must give us something more baffling: for the wise workmanship you cannot deny. But you cannot take Him from us. Only “The fool has said in his heart there is no God.”

(J) I do not wish to take him from you.

(R) Pardon me. I am speaking to the impersonal mass of unbelief.
The force of the argument about the muscles of the eye becomes very great in connection with that one of them which enables us to turn the eye upwards. This differs from all the rest in a peculiar way. The others are all laid alongside the eye inside the socket, and work easily by contraction; but, on account of the jutting of the eyebrow over the eye, there is no room for the working of an ordinary muscle to give the upward motion. It is the way this difficulty has been got over that shows the participation of intelligence in the organizing of the human structure. An American professor recently explaining it to his students, said, “And here, gentlemen, I will show you what a clever thing God Almighty has done.” He called their attention to a little hole in the bone of the eyebrow (which anyone may see on inspecting a skull). He stated that the muscle for giving the upward motion, on getting to this hole, shrunk into a tendon and on getting through the hole, again turning into muscle, spread out upon and attached to the eye, so that when the muscle behind contracted, it pulled this tendon through the bone-hole, like a rope through a pulley, and so produced the motion otherwise impossible. What are we to say about such a thing as that? If we were to discover a contrivance to get round a difficulty in the clumsiest machine used by man, we should never think of attributing it to anything but the action of a human intelligence. In this case, we cannot attribute it to human intelligence. What are we to attribute it to?

(J) (Pauses)

(R) What have you to say?

(J) Well, I have a difficulty which I know not how to express.

(R) What is it?

(J) There is such a difference between the products of Nature and the contrivances of man, that I find myself unable to reason from one to the other. If I find an adaptation of machinery to accomplish some human end, I know man must have designed it and worked it out, because mechanical contrivances do not adjust themselves. But, in the matters you are speaking of, I cannot help feeling there is a great difference.

(R) Doubtless, there is a great difference, but the difference is not of a kind that affects the principal.

(J) I am not sure about that.

(R) Do you think natural adaptations are self adaptations?

(J) There is a good deal of self adaptation in Nature. If I cut my finger, the cut parts, if placed together, instantly begin to weave themselves together again.

(R) That is but the operation of an already existing machinery, is it not? It is not a self performance. It is the nature of the ruptured organism to re-unite its ruptured parts by the very law which maintains and perpetuates it from it from moment to moment, out of the blood. The oozing blood and the cut flesh have in them, by their properties, the power of coalescing with sundered parts. The power is already in the organism. It is part of it. It is not a self-evolved power. You would have to seek its origin in the origin of the organism as a whole.

(J) I am not quite clear about it.

(R) You would not say that the finger, being cut, says to itself: “Now I must stop this bleeding: I must heal this wound,” and goes to work, and does it by intelligent contrivance? The healing is done not by intelligent volition, but by a law already in the finger.

(J) No doubt, that is how it is; and it seems to me that that works against your argument.

(R) How so? I say that an intelligent arrangement of any kind argues the action of intelligence in arranging it.

(J) And yet the finger heals itself without intelligence.

(R) But the finger itself is the product of intelligence, and its power to heal is only a part of the constitution imparted to it in the original operation of that intelligence.

(J) You must go back to the origin of the finger to discuss the matter properly.

(R) Do you say the finger made itself?

(J) I am by no means lucid on these questions as I would like to be.

(R) Surely you cannot hesitate about so simple a matter.

(J) Of course the finger didn’t make itself; but it does not follow that it had a maker in the sense you are contending for.

(R) I am not contending for any sense inconsistent with the facts of the case. I do not say the finger was made as the watchmaker makes a watch, for that is a human performance, and God’s ways and methods are altogether different from man’s, as He Himself says. What I do say, that at some stage or other, Operative Wisdom must have contrived so wisely-constituted a thing as the finger.

(J) If it grows, it would not require to be “made.”

(R) Grows? What is that? Do you know what growth is?

(J) It looks pretty much like a self-development.

(R) Reconsider. Is not growth but the development of an already existing organism, by the power it has of assimilating suitable materials to its own nature?

(J) Suppose I say “Yes.” You say “it has” the power. This must be self power.

(R) A self power in the sense of possession: but how was it acquired?

(J) Ah, that is the question.

(R) Does not that take us away to the beginning of things?

(J) Well.

(R)Take the case of a man, a cow, or a rose. They all grow by assimilation of extraneous material; but is not the growth-power a helpless power, and in no sense a self power? Will food taken by a cow grow into man nature? Will a rose turn into a cabbage? What makes a rose a rose? What makes a cow a cow?

(J) Is it not growth, for they are rose and cow from the first moment of growth?

(R) The question can only be considered at the starting point. What is the origin of cow nature? What is the origin of rose nature? There is not a creature upon earth, in the actual experience of things, but what has come from a previous creature of like nature.

(J) But it is by growth.

(R) You seem to think that weakens the argument. In my judgement it strengthens it. It is a greater feat of power and wisdom to endow seed with the power of developing the full nature of a thing in all its forms and attributes, than to make it direct in each individual case. Is there anything like it in human works? Take into your hand the seed of a rose, or tomato, or a tree. Realise if you can, by what process of involution the nature of the previous plants from which these seeds have come, is condensed into the minute substance, so perfectly that, when subject to the right conditions, it will unfold a rose or other organism, as complete and identical in form, and nature and fragrance, as the original flower, plant, or animal. The parallel in human work of any kind would be, if a man, having made a sewing machine (say), was able to so contrive it that a speck of iron from the machine could be grown into another sewing machine by simply blowing it into a red heat. That would be an invention for you. You would say that such an inventor must be a superhumanly clever inventor. Yet, because God shows this wise power, you think it is no wise power at all, but…..what?