Why an Atheist Thinks the Shroud of Turin is the Real Deal

The Retina

It all begins in the retina of the eye, an amazing bit of tissue that reacts to light. It doesn’t matter to the retina if the light is emitted as it is from the sun or a light bulb or reflected as it is from a face or table. Well over one-hundred million tiny photoreceptors—rods and cones—detect incoming light and generate neural signals. But even before these signals are sent to the brain, some very fancy computer-like processing takes place within the retina. The data is compressed, not unlike the way a computer compresses an image in order to make it easier to send over the internet. Anyone who has read the instruction manual for a digital camera knows that there is a difference between raw image format and JPEG formats. We are really talking about something similar to this. The retina must compress the data because there are only about one million optic nerve fibers to carry the data from one-hundred times as many receptors. In other words there is a sort of micro-brain, or at least something that we can call a micro-computer or processor in the retina.