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. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibilites."

Can you think of anything, my dear Mr. Fell, more intricately complex, more perfectly compact and thoroughly functional than the human eye?"
"No, sir," said August.
"I thought not," said Larchcroft. "Consider this, though. Our eyes were created by light. Without the existence of light, we would not have eyes. Over the long course of man's evolutionarily maturation to his modern condition, light sculpted these magical orbs, making subtle adjustments through the centuries, until now they are capable of the incredible process of sight. This most vital sense, not only a means of self-preservation but the single most important catalyst for culture, is a product of the inherent genius of light.

[On the controversy between and .] [T]he classic case of convergence would be the eye and the human eye, or ian eyes. ...The common ancestor they had had a light sensitive spot, they did have some regulatory genes in common... for example, but that had to effectively independently recruit all the rest of the genes required to make a camera type eye, and that direction of evolutionary travel was in parallel. It was convergent. We even see in some s... a camera-type eye in single-celled critters where there's a retina made from s. There's a made from mitochondria. There's a there. They don't have a brain. I don't know how they use this thing but... plainly it's a camera-type eye. ...It's a of some sort. ...I would see that as a completely independent origin of a camera-type eye, albeit without a brain. I would see the octopus' and mammalian eye as being convergence in the Simon Conway Morris sense... There are certain ways that you can make an eye, that work, and all the steps along the way have to be favored, and... perhaps there are seven or eight... fundamentally different types of eye that we see on earth, and most of them have arisen more than once, always from a common ancestor, generally, that had as a light sensitive pigment. So you're then into an interesting terrain or... How common are the right types of light sensitive pigment? They're chemically not so straight forward.

... it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye ... It's no wonder "the" eye has evolved at least 40 times independently around the animal kingdom ... It is a geological blink.

The species with eyes appears suddenly, capriciously as it were, and it is this species which changes the environment by creating its visible aspect. The eye does not come into being because it is needed. Just the contrary; because the eye appears it can henceforth be applied as a serviceable instrument. Each species builds up its stock of useful habits by selecting among, and taking advantage of, the innumerable useless actions which a living being performs out of sheer exuberance.

My eye came to rest on the delicate convolutions of her ear-those intricate, perfect ears. The thought passed through my mind: "No, those ears were not created by any chance coming together of atoms in nature (the Communist view). They could have been created only by immense design." (p. 16)

Atheism is so senseless & odious to mankind that it never had many professors. Can it be by accident that all birds beasts & men have their right side & left side alike shaped (except in their bowels) & just two eyes & no more on either side the face & just two ears on either side the head & a nose with two holes & no more between the eyes & one mouth under the nose & either two fore leggs or two wings or two arms on the sholders & two leggs on the hipps one on either side & no more? Whence arises this uniformity in all their outward shapes but from the counsel & contrivance of an Author? Whence is it that the eyes of all sorts of living creatures are transparent to the very bottom & the only transparent members in the body, having on the outside an hard transparent skin, & within transparent juyces with a crystalline Lens in the middle & a pupil before the Lens all of them so truly shaped & fitted for vision, that no Artist can mend them? Did blind chance know that there was light & what was its refraction & fit the eys of all creatures after the most curious manner to make use of it? These & such like considerations always have & ever will prevail with man kind to believe that there is a being who made all things & has all things in his power & who is therfore to be feared.

I don't mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing. I mistrust the picture of reality conveyed to us by our senses, which is imperfect and circumscribed. Our eyes have evolved for survival purposes. The fact that they can also see the stars is pure accident.

With respect to the theological view of the question. This is always painful to me. I am bewildered. I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidæ with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, and to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not at all necessarily atheistical.

Although every part of the human frame has been fashioned by the same Divine hand and exhibits the most marvellous and beneficent adaptions for the use of men, the human eye stands pre-eminent above them all as the light of the body and the organ by which we become acquainted with the minutest and the nearest, the largest and most remote of the Creator’s work

As a man is, so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.

The eye of the human understanding is not a naked organ of perception (lumen siccum), but an eye imbued with moisture by Will and Passion. Man always believes what he determines to believe.

Reason by degrees submits to absurdity, as the eye in time is accommodated to darkness.

The wonders of nature, she learned, from wing of bee to sonar of bat to eyeball of baby, were not so much perfect machines as adequate contraptions. If nature bespoke a mind, it was a confused and inchoate one, a mind incapable of locating the optic nerve on the correct side of the retina, a mind unable to accomplish much of anything without resort to jerry-building and extinction.