Have you ever plugged in a WebCam and found that your computer didn’t know what to do with it? The WebCam was structurally sound but there was no software that could read it and show you an image. There you are with a device that has a perfectly good lens, a method of catching the light and turning it into an electrical signal, and the cable to send it to the computer. But the computer says, “What camera?”

Let me tell you from experience. At that point, you get to stare blankly at your monitor and come to grips with the fact that there is nothing you can do. If there isn’t already software on that computer that can read the information from the camera, there’s nothing you can do to teach your computer how to do the job. You’re not going to sweet talk your PC into popping up a window with an image of you captured from the web cam. You got nothing.

When a creationist brings up a camera, you know he’s about to launch into the amazing design of the eye. Probably gonna bring up that quote from Charles Darwin where he admits that the idea that the eye could evolve was, how did he put it?

“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.”

Darwin, On Origin Of Species

That’s right. ABSURD in the highest degree! Well said, Chuck. But that’s not what I am talking about this time around. Of course the eye is the greatest camera in the universe, but there is something equally astounding which needs to be addressed, which is why I brought up your web cam problems.

Putting aside the ASTOUNDING complexity of the functioning eye for a moment, the real trick is creating the hardware AND the software to make sense of the information sent in from the camera. Your eye is amazingly complex, but what good does it do if your brain didn’t have the software it takes to receive and interpret and use the information? Just think about color, shape, distance, an hand/eye coordination. All of that is packed into a tiny space in the back of your head, and yet the ability of it to distinguish between shapes and colors, identify objects, translate symbols, judge space and distance, speed and changes in motion, and a thousand other things happens seemingly instantaneously. What the eye perceives can be used to change the motion or position of the body to allow the most complex of actions, from reacting to a fastball to landing a triple twist, to juggling half a dozen objects or more. And we’re supposed to believe that it happened by ACCIDENT?

The lens, the light sensitive photocells that turn the light into information signals, the phone lines that run to the back of your head, and the chunk of brain that receives the signals, and all of the software that can interpret it so you are aware of an image, and then the software that connects the image and related information to the ability to MOVE and interact with the world around you… all of that was an ACCIDENT? To think that software than can do ALL of these things could write itself without a designer is, I admit, absurd in the highest degree.

Every biological system has this problem. Evolutionists love to show us these cartoons of worms evolving eyes, or fish evolving legs. But with every one of those new appendages, even if they COULD magically build themselves, comes the need for the software to RUN the system. Without the software to control the legs so the freshly evolved lizard can walk, you’ve essentially just stapled awkward weights onto a fish. Hardly what it takes to win that whole “Survival of the fittest” award.

If the changes in FORM and the changes in SOFTWARE do not happen in the SAME GENERATION, then the mutations which MIGHT have been beneficial are almost certainly detrimental. But if the software evolves first without the hardware to make use of it, then it also becomes detrimental to the organism. The software problem becomes yet another insurmountable hurdle for the evolutonary theory. It becomes another in a long list of near impossible accidents that have to happen on every step up the Darwinian Tree of Life.

If I told you my webcam was the result of mindless, purposeless, accidental random chance, you’d think I was sniffing model airplane glue and drinking Draino. Because that’s insane. But we’re supposed to believe that a FAR MORE COMPLICATED SYSTEM did build itself by accident? And at the same time, it wrote the processing code to not only RECEIVE the data from the input device, but then the software to send that information to other, completely unrelated systems, like legs?

All at once, with no engineer or programmer?

You accept that mess, and I’ll wager good money that part of YOUR brain is a few clicks away from that Blue Screen of Death. Time to reboot my friends.