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

Misquoting Darwin

Proponents of intelligent design often point to Darwin’s own words to address another so-called irreducibly complex system, the eye.

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 confess, absurd in the highest degree.

Sadly, they often use these words out of context. Darwin understood the problem and proposed that a solution to the eye’s complexity was possible (if not yet proposed):

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.

McGrath, the biologist turned theologian, in support of Darwin, notes that the eye has evolved not once but many times in different species. There are at least nine different kinds of eyes and we can see from the genetic record that these evolved. We may not know how but we can see evolution from primitive to complex at work. Irreducible complexity seems reducible.