How shall I introduce myself? I’ll do it with a riddle:

I look at you, but you don’t see me.
You carry me with you, but you don’t notice me.
All people need me, but they don’t feel me.
My very existence is a miracle, but many don’t know it.

Who am I? Haven’t you guessed yet? Well, let me add a little to my description: I have a spherical shape, and I am completely transparent. My diameter is no bigger than nine millimetres, and I’m only four millimetres thick. My volume is tiny, only 0.06 cubic centimetres. Just imagine! I’m thirty times smaller than a ripe cherry. Oh, and something else: without me, you couldn’t see a thing.

I’ve almost given myself away: I’m one of the most important organs of your visual apparatus – the lens of your eye. Before I begin to tell you about myself, I want to say something about sense organs in general. Precisely here you can perceive some of the principles of the work of my Creator. Keep that in mind, and you will understand my own biography much better.

The Work of the Creator and the Laws of Nature

Sense Organs:

If you examine the world of sense organs from a technical perspective, you will never get over a sense of wonder. You find such ingenious and technically refined designs that you find nowhere else. If these inventions were all created by humans, I can tell you that you would need a special patent office just for dealing with the patents for sense organs alone. But these are all God’s ideas, and no technical authority is in charge of registering these ideas. The Psalmist was thinking of the richness of these ideas in creation when he prayed, “Lord, how great are Thy works! Thy thoughts are so deep!” (Psalm 92:6). You ought to know how God works. In every instance of design and construction, in the entire range of living creatures, never does a design principle violate a natural law. Or, to put it another way, to achieve their goals, the varied organs utilise the physical and chemical laws in what are often the most ingenious ways, but in ways which are often difficult to understand.

Many different measuring procedures are used in your technology and in natural science, each having a high degree of accuracy. You accomplish the most accurate measurement of time by the use of atomic clocks. But precision can even get a great deal better, since the limits of the laws of physics are far from being reached. The so-called “relative uncertainty” is a standard for the uncertainty of a measurement. One can use a metre stick to measure the length of a metre with an uncertainty of 0.5 mm. The relative uncertainty is thus 0.5 mm/1000 mm = 0.5 × 10-3.

Present levels of relative uncertainty in atomic clocks are at a level of about 10-13, and according to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, this level could be reduced to 10-16. So up until now, no measuring process has been developed for which the precision and utilisation concept has approached the limits of what is physically possible. But the Creator has realised such amazing concepts again and again precisely in the field of sensory organs, achieving the limits of what is technically and physically possible.

I want to explain another important fact. Please differentiate clearly between how that which the Creator made works and His creative work. While all created things and all processes in nature are subject to the laws of nature, the creative actions of the Creator Himself cannot be explained in terms of those laws, because they themselves are a result of creation. They are not its cause.

Now I want to tell you more about the visual organ, because I am an irreplaceable part of that organ. That’s true not only for humans, but for all seeing animals. Just imagine, each dragonfly eye consists of thousands of individual compound eyes. And each individual eye is equipped with half a million switching elements. And each of these functional elements is a hundred times smaller than the smallest switching element in your modern computer technology. Naturally, each individual eye has its own lens, or, more accurately, microlens.

Do You Know How Your Eye Functions?

Even your own eye will never cease to amaze you. For every image which you see, an optical image of 130 million individual cells is processed. In cooperation with still unknown processes in the nervous system, a high definition image of the thing you are observing is generated in your brain. These highly complicated processes are largely beyond the understanding of your scientists. Just imagine you had to use semispherical shaped film, instead of the conventional flat form, in your camera! The images on that film would be as distorted as the ones you see on the distorted mirrors at the fair. That is just the kind of world that arises on your retina at first.

The Creator has installed fast running programmes in your brain which instantly correct distortions in the image, so that the world around you appears as a flawless image, just like a photograph. The sense of vision, along with the brain, does something quite wonderful: Your sense of vision is not intended for measuring physical objects precisely. Rather, it is constructed to meet biological requirements. That means: at varying distances, you don’t judge the size of the object by the size of its image on the retina. Rather the size which you assign to a distant object is different from its corresponding size on the retina. You are familiar with representing things in perspective: the sense of vision reports its findings to you in terms of converging lines – not the physically “correct”, but rather the biologically significant values. For the correct evaluation of the environment, the estimation of the size of an object is necessary, no matter what distance it may be from the viewer. The evaluation programme in the brain processes the physical data received by the sensory organs: it enlarges, reduces, and adjusts them precisely, so that the information is presented in a way that makes sense biologically.

To put it another way: it is the brain which turns the eye into an apparatus which is much superior to a pure instrument of physics. It is able to see in the darkest shadows as well as in the brightest sunlight by automatically adjusting the optical range of operation; it can see colours; it can perceive white paper as being white, even when it is illuminated by bright light of varying colours; it contains the ability to perceive colours in essentially the same way, whether in the dim light of early morning, or in the bright light of midday. Colour and shape are perceived as the same, whether the object is close or far away, and even if the lighting varies radically. One fundamental capability of the visual system (and also of the hearing system) is the ability to recognise and remember objects, situations, other organisms and humans. This ability still functions even when you haven’t seen people for a long time. In a class reunion, you recognise former classmates in spite of changes brought about by the many years which have passed. The important thing to remember is that the sense of vision has a kind of precision which cannot adequately be described in terms of physical measurements alone.

You know Aristotle’s famous saying, “The whole is greater than the sum of the parts”, which of course applies to all living things. But if complexity, structure, purpose, and inventiveness are recognisable on the level of the individual elements of an organ, how much more to at the level of the organ as a whole. So instead of talking about the eye as a whole, I want to concentrate on myself for a bit, on the lens, a tiny detail of your eye.

A Manufacturing Impossibility

I’d like to clarify some points regarding my technical capabilities; see if you can follow my train of thought. Just imagine you wanted to get a company that makes precision optical components to introduce me as one of their production line products. How do you suppose you would go about it? Now, you would quite correctly say that the company would need a catalogue of specifications in order to make the lens. Well, no one knows me better than myself and so I’ve prepared a list of just six of the most important points for you.

1. Concept for the lens:

In your conventional optical industry, the camera focusing is made possible by either shifting the lens system, or the film position. The eye needs a lens system which consists of just one lens, which still meets all the possible requirements. In order to meet all of these conditions, it would be good to get away from the photographic industry’s restricted principle of hard, non flexible, lenses and use a flexible “glass body” instead. All necessary focal lengths between 40 and 70 mm and focus settings should be catered by means of lens deformation. The lens should be elastic and supple enough to change its form easily. A system of push and pull mechanisms at the lens edges should be responsible for changing its shape. A command centre (brain) needs to be developed in order to coordinate the extent to which the shape of the lens should be altered. When each element works in harmony with all the others, then the lens should be assured of acquiring the optimal form which is in accordance with the given conditions.

2. Material Synthesis:

A pumped circulation system is to be used as a source of raw materials and to provide for the removal of processing wastes. This should resemble a watery solution (blood), containing various dissolved substances. The lens’ own production system is to be connected to this general supply network. The necessary materials (proteins) are to be produced on site, by chemical means, ensuring that no temperature exceeding 37°C may occur. Which of the millions of possible proteins are necessary for the lens development is a matter which can be easily ascertained. The materials should be named and coded to the given code system. The process of chemical synthesis must be indicated and the management of the process engineering is to be undertaken.

3. Production Process:

The production system should be computerised and fully automatic, requiring no manual intervention. This computer system is to contain all the production programmes and is to perform the process control supervision of all chemical and energetic reactions. To ensure a steady process, expended materials are to be replaced continuously. This should in no way disturb routine operation. Breakdowns and down time must therefore be kept to an absolute minimum. Because of this grand conception individual lenses cannot be mass produced and then singularly finished. Each one must be produced according to the individual given conditions, based on a computer controlled construction plan.

4. Optical Characteristics:

Although proteins are not generally transparent, a method must be found of producing a lens with a very high light transmission coefficiency. The refractive index, which determines the refraction of light in various media should remain constant throughout the lens. The various methods employed to overcome the many construction problems encountered should in no way interfere with the incoming light.

5. Miniaturisation:

Because of the essential decentralised construction of the lens elements, which must be maintained for years and years, a cellular construction technique is to be used. Every cell is not only to carry out its optical functions, but is also to be an independent and fully functional production unit. An extreme level of miniaturisation is to be used to fit the fabrication process complete with energy generation and data processing systems into 60 cubic millimetres. I realise that your computer systems are well known for their high density memory chips. However, for this purpose they simply don’t come up to scratch and will have to be replaced by a more space-saving technology.

6. Reliability:

Finally the lens operation must have a lifetime warranty. That means what it says, generally from 70 to 80 years, and up to 100 and beyond in certain cases.

The Creator’s Solution

 Do you see what I’m getting at. Nobody could meet these requirements. There isn’t an optical, chemical, precision mechanical or analytical instrument company in the world that could meet these specifications. All of your brilliant Technological Institutes for Advancement, which consider themselves “hightech”, wouldn’t even come close to fulfilling them. And yet these are the tasks I carry out day by day, for your benefit, although you take them for granted. Let me do my best to present the Creator’s solution:

1. Transparency:

A very special mixture of two different types of proteins is used in my construction. The lens, with a protein content of 35 %, has the highest protein concentration of any body organ. Two completely different proteins are used to create the correct optical characteristics – Crystalline and Albumin. The former is well known for its water solubility. These proteins are unique. They are not found anywhere else in the body. The transparency is achieved through the reciprocal interaction of the two proteins in the presence of water. The biochemical balance is carefully controlled to maintain transparency. This requires a complicated, though automated, system that is based on finely tuned control principles. Should an imbalance occur, say through excessive water concentration, or through a change in the concentration of protein molecules, then the transparency may be adversely affected. This biotechnical control process, like all technical processes, requires energy. The Creator took care of this by building tiny generators into the lens which take energy from the biochemical process itself. Your coal fired generation stations may have a high working temperature, but their efficiency leaves a lot to be desired. As for my generators, they produce 100% of their energy from the chemical energy of their surroundings. Keep in mind that this all happens at very moderate temperature, pressure and concentration of reactants. To achieve this, the Creator developed a system whereby a substance with very special characteristics controls the reactions under the required conditions. Your chemical engineers call these substances catalysts. Two of my 100 protein molecules achieve just that and are known as enzymes.

2. Internal Structure:

Other deciding factors in the achievement of the lens’ characteristics are it’s form, organisation and internal structure (Fig. 2). It’s only when you magnify my image that you begin to see the highly specialised and tightly packed order of protein layers. Looking at these layers, I’m always reminded of the orderly stacked layers of planks in a mill (Fig. 3). The lens cells bind together tightly but still manage to keep the lens flexible. Each individual layer is fitted with an original hooking mechanism which resembles clasped hands. Precisely this packaging method is necessary to guarantee the high degree of transparency. The correctly ordered layering system, together with the mesh system and the wonderfully constructed ball and socket joints, absolutely amaze your process engineers. And the Creator didn’t choose the seam separation haphazardly either. It has been finely matched to the wavelength of visible light, so that deformations are negligible.

Figure 2: Cross-sectional view of the human eye. The core in the middle (so called embryonic lens) has a Y-knot on both its front and rear poles. Cells that are joined to the hub of the Yknot are connected to the fork of the Y-knot of the opposite pole. The lens is surrounded by a thick transparent elastic capsule (membrane).

Figure 3: Microscopic eye lens structure. The four different levels of magnification shown by the raster electron microscope display the precisely ordered layer structure. The length of one-hundredth of a millimetre has been drawn to scale for each picture. The protein layers are knitted together to form an elastic compound with the aid of peculiarly formed ball joints (marked with arrows on the two lower diagrams). This allows setting of the focal length by means of adjusting the shape of the lens.

The wafer-thin protein layers and the elastic clasping mechanism have another important purpose: the lens’ shape can be easily modified. In its relaxed state the lens is quite flat and focuses on distant objects. Sinewy fibres which emanate from a circular cilium muscle achieve this by keeping the lens taught. For close-up focus the muscle flexes together which in turn relaxes the holding fibres letting the lens, with the aid of its inbuilt elasticity, to return to its more rounded shape. This ingenious and well thought out ordering of the layers in an elliptical shape allows every geometrical shape corresponding to the required refractive index (focal length) to be formed, depending on the applied force.

3. Production Process:

The processes used in my production are extremely complex, and only the external effects may be observed. Just how this fully automated manufacturing system comes to convert all of the raw materials into the end products and organise them all into the correct form remains, even to today’s scientists, largely unknown. The recorded information in the DNA-molecule nevertheless plays a central role as far as the control of the growth processes is concerned.

My Origins

You’ve just been looking at a small building block of the eye in terms of its complexity, ingenious construction and the wonderful variety of ideas which back it up. Nevertheless, this describes the eye about as well as a brick could describe Buckingham Palace or a screw could describe a car! To explain the existence of the eye in the context of a selection process, was acknowledged to be impossible by none other than Charles Darwin. He wrote about the subject in his book ‘Origin of Species’:

“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”

Every individual part of the eye can only enable sight in the presence of all other parts at the same time and provided they are all working together correctly. If the eye were complete except for the lens, the whole organ would be useless. Evolution can neither design nor plan ahead. Even existing products can’t be modified. Otherwise the evolving universe would have to have been like a building site with the notice: “Works temporarily shut due to renovation”.

As all of mankind’s attempts to answer the question of his origin somehow miss the point, I trust the Bible’s God of creation, who has kept us well informed.

“Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the LORD?” (Exodus 4:11). The psalmist also shows us God to be the builder and architect of the eye: “He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? he that formed the eye, shall he not see?” (Psalm 94:9).