Do you find that reasoning — or more accurately, this statement of assumptions — sufficiently compelling? Far from being scientifically documented, its main flaw is to completely remove the very mechanism of vision, and this obviously by design. Indeed, a few paragraphs earlier, Charles Darwin stated unequivocally: « How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself first originated » ⁵. In fact, « he had an excellent reason for declining the question: it was completely beyond nineteenth-century science », says biochemist Michael Behe, who says that « as a matter of fact, no question about the underlying mechanisms of life could be answered » ⁶. Had this been the case, Darwin would have had no choice but to modify his conclusion in the form of a question: « May we not believe that (…) superior (…) the works of the Creator are to those of man? » Because life, our life, by its prodigious complexity, cannot be due to chance!

In addition to their complexity, our eyes still bear witness to another reality often present in nature: the interdependence of elements. Thus, in order for the eye to perform its function properly, it is necessary that all its components — the cornea, retina, conjunctiva, iris, pupil, lens, choroid, eyelids and eye muscles — cooperate harmoniously together. If one of them is absent or no longer functioning, the eye can no longer perceive the images and becomes useless. Similarly, if the process of vision allows the use of only one eye, it is only by working as a couple that our eyes can reconstruct the world around us in three dimensions. But to see otherwise than in blue, green and red, it is still necessary that the hundreds of millions of photo-receptors lining the retina transmit the images to the complex visual area, located at the back of the brain, via the neural networks that make up the optic nerve. Therefore, it is not inaccurate to say that it is our brain, more than our eyes themselves, that allows us to see things as they appear to us. The extraordinary process of our vision of things depends on structures at once so interdependent and specialized that it cannot have appeared gradually, as the Darwinian theory of evolution suggests. No, but while declaring himself « agnostic, and close to Darwin » ⁷, the astronomer Robert Jastrow recognized: « It is not so easy to accept that theory as the explanation of an extraordinary organ like the brain, or even the eye. (…) The eye appears to have been designed; no designer of telescopes could have done better. How could this marvelous instrument have evolved by chance, through a succession of random events? » ⁸.

Like the eye, everything that lives testifies, beyond an apparent simplicity, to mechanisms at once complex and interdependent that cannot have appeared by chance. The sheep and goats Jesus quoted in his parable are herbivorous animals. As such, they cannot digest the cellulose contained in grass without the help of the billions of bacteria and other microorganisms that inhabit them. But these in turn cannot exist outside their host. It is also necessary to recall the interdependence between insects and flowers, the former helping to pollinate the latter, the latter offering the former the nectar from which they feed. In your opinion, is it possible that such associations could have appeared simultaneously without external assistance? Now, if you were asked what is the commonality between a sheep, an insect, a flower and a bacterium, what would you say? Maybe all these living organisms are made up of cells — and you’d be right. At the microscospic scale, cells are the scene of another interaction essential to life: the collaboration between nucleic acids (DNA and RNA) and proteins. And once again we can speak of symbiosis, since here it is imperative that each of the three elements combine with the other two. Their prodigious collaboration has led many people — including top scientists — to rethink their belief in the clearly well-adjusted origin of all that touches the living world.