The ‘Miracle’ Perspective
“There are only 2 ways to live your life. One is as if nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.”
Albert Einstein
I just love the above quote from Einstein! Isn’t it amazing that 2 people can be in the exact same circumstance and from it gain 2 different experiences? Policeman encounter this regularly as they hear witness give accounts of car accidents.
It shouldn’t surprise us then that when 2 people are encountering a single circumstance that there are different responses. One person believes that science disproves God… the other is caught up in wonder of God as he explores science.
Let me leave you with a great read I got off the net at Creation Science (click HERE to see the origional artical):
The eye is constructed exactly like a camera except that it is infinitely more complex and sophisticated. Like some modern cameras, it has autofocus and automatic adjustment of the iris diaphragm. In the case of the eye, the lens actually changes it’s shape or correction to focus at different distances. The lens is made of living cells that are marvelously transparent as is the cornea, the window like skin that covers the eye.
The most amazing component of the camera eye is it’s “film” or retina. This light sensitive layer, which lines the back of the eye ball, is thinner than a sheet of Saran-Wrap and is vastly more sensitive to a wider range of light than any man made film. The best man-made film can handle a range of 1,000-to-one. By comparison, the human retina can handle a dynamic range of light of 10 billion-to-one and can sense as little as a single photon of light in the dark! In bright daylight, the retina bleaches out and turns it’s “volume control” way down so as not to overload.
The light sensitive cells of the retina are like an extremely complex high gain amplifier. There are over 10 million such cells in the retina and they are packed together with a density of 200,000/mm{2} in the highly sensitive fovea. These photoreceptor cells have a very high rate of metabolism and must completely replace themselves about every 7 days! If you look at a very bright light such as the sun, they immediately burn out but are rapidly replaced in most cases. Because the retina is thinner than the wave length of visible light it is totally transparent. Each of these minute photoreceptor cells is vastly more complex than the most sophisticated man-made computer.
It has been estimated that 10 billion calculations occur every second in the retina before the light image even gets to the brain! It is sobering to compare this performance to the most powerful man-made computer. In an article published in the computer magazine _Byte_ (April 1985) Dr. John Stevens said:
“To simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution of about 500 simultaneous non-linear differential equations one hundred times and would take at least several minnutes of processing time on a Cray supercomputer. Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cels interacting with each other in complex ways it would take a minimum of a hundred years of Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times every second.”
What makes this comparison even more incredible is the fact that nerve cells such as the photo cells of the retina conduct electrical signals approximately a million times slower than the circuit traces or “wires” in a man made supercomputer. Dr. Stevens said that if it were possible to build a single silicon chip that could simulate the retina using currently available technology it would have to weigh about 100 pounds where as the retina weighs less than a gram. The “super chip” would occupy 10,000 cubic inches of space whereas the retina occupies 0.0003 inches of space. The power consumption of the man-made superchip would be about 300 watts, whereas the retina consumes only 0.0001 watts of power!
Psalm 19: 1-3
1 The heavens declare the glory of God;
the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
2 Day after day they pour forth speech;
night after night they display knowledge.
3 There is no speech or language
where their voice is not heard.
Please do leave a comment. I would love to hear from you!
Clive Smit 