Here’s an eye-popping fact, according to National Geographic: You blink more than 10,000 times a day. Your sight is incredibly important , so your body has ways to protect your eyes. Each eye sits on a cushion of fat, surrounded by protective bone. Your eyebrows prevent sweat dripping into your eyes, while eyelashes keep dust and other particles out. The eyelids act as windscreen wipers, spreading tear fluid with every blink to keep your eyes moist and wash away bacteria. And if anything gets too close, your eyelids slam shut with amazing speed. How fast does this happen? In the blink of an eye – about 2/5 of a second.

If you’re over the age of 50, the chances of you singing along to this much-loved children’s song below when you were at primary school are quite high. The song in question is called “Dem Bones”.

The melody was composed by author and songwriter James Weldon Johnson and his brother Rosamond and first recorded by The Famous Myers Jubilee Singers in 1928. Both a long and a shortened version of the song are widely known. The lyrics are inspired by Ezekiel 37:1–14, when he visits the Valley of Dry Bones. The key verse of the song is as follows:

The hip bone’s connected to the back bone
The back bone’s connected to the neck bone,
The neck bone’s connected to the head bone,
Now shake dem skeleton bones!

We all know that the head, which houses the eyes, is anatomically connected to the spine. But most people are unaware that back problems can affect vision, particularly a condition called ankylosing spondylitis, which is an inflammatory condition that can affect vision as well as a stiff lower back.
Anatomical links affect more than the way you learn—they can change and, even, dictate your health. According to Dr Bishop & Associates Optometrists:

Your eyes represent a complex part of your central nervous system, connected directly to the brain. To see the way you do, your eyes accept light beams. These beams hit the photoreceptors, known as rods and cones, located in your retina at the back of your eyeball. The signals the retina receives translate into electrical impulses, which travel on the optic nerve into the brain’s visual cortex. When impulses reach the visual cortex, your brain interprets them and uses them to determine how the body should respond. The brain sends messages down the spinal cord to tell the rest of your body how to react to what the eyes see. When you have good posture, the communication your brain sends via your spine comes fast and uninterrupted. Your brain stays in constant command of your body, using information gathered from each of the five senses, including sight.

And if you think it’s odd that certain bodily parts are linked to other bones in the body consider the procedure known as tooth-in-eye or osteo-odonto-keratoprosthesis, which involves removing a patient’s tooth, sewing a piece of it into the cheek and placing the structure into their eye.

Once the tooth-lens complex is integrated with living tissue, it is surgically attached to the front of the eye, replacing the damaged cornea’s function. Tissue from inside the patient’s mouth is used to cover the tooth part of the device, giving the new eye a pink shade. Light can then pass through the clear lens to the retina, enabling vision again, provided that everything behind the cornea — the retina and optic nerve— remains healthy.

When you think about it, the eye is the most fascinating organ in the human body. It is even used in proving the existence of a creator God who designed it, as well as debunking Darwinian Evolution.

The Argument from Design entails the intricate design of the eye, with its various components working together in a sophisticated way which only an all-powerful Designer could create. Scientists from all walks of life marvel at the following components: The cornea, lens, retina, and optic nerve that convert light into electrical signals, allowing us to see the external world.

Even Charles Darwin acknowledged the difficulty of explaining how such a complex, sophisticated organ could evolve through the process of [blind] natural selection. The eye’s design suggests that it could not have arisen from random mutations alone, as all parts must be present and functional simultaneously for vision to occur.

Dr. Michael Egnor, of this parish, argues that the human eye exemplifies intelligent design. He believes that its complex structure and functionality cannot be sufficiently explained by random evolutionary processes. Dr Egnor posits that the intricate design of the eye indicates the presence of a purposeful creator rather than mere chance (I highly recommend his excellent co-written book with senior science journalist Denyse O’Leary, The Immortal Mind: A Neurosurgeon’s Case for the Existence of the Soul, and look out for their forthcoming follow-up book due for publication 2027).

Common sense tells us that intelligent design is the intelligent answer on how the eye works and exists, along with all the other amazing body parts of the human body.

But the eye is something special and is highly symbolic in both world religions and the Arts. In movies, some of the most profound shots are that of the human eye, especially in dreams. In the classic 1945 Alfred Hitchcock movie, Spellbound, we see a psychoanalyst trying to interpret the protagonist’s dream, the scenes of which are infused with large paintings of eyes.

In semiotics, the study of signs and symbols, the focus is on how they create meaning and communicate ideas and how we interpret them. Drawing from linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and cultural studies, the visual effects of semiotics are a powerful tool, especially in the fields of propaganda and indoctrination. What the eyes perceive, the mind picks up and can manifest behaviors both positive and/or negative. Symbols are particularly powerful in achieving this.

In literature, one of the most famous books of the 20^th century and beyond focuses on vision: 1984, with Big Brother always watching you, while the evil O’Brien uses the question, “How many fingers am I holding up?” to test Winston’s loyalty to the Party, forcing him to deny reality of the amount of fingers and accept the Party’s version of truth being a category of Big Brother’s mind, when it should be the Logos of the Mind of God.

In music, eyes also feature heavily in love songs, both literally and metaphorically, in some of the greatest melodies of all time: I Only Have Eyes For You; Can’t Take My Eyes Off You; Brown Eyed Girl; Spanish Eyes; Smoke Gets in Your Eyes; Don’t it Make My Brown Eyes Blue; to name just a few.

In poetry, two classic poems of the 20^th century come to Mind: The heavily visual “The Stolen Child” by W.B. Yeats, and his other poem “The Second Coming”:

…Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds…  

To quote Scripture: “The eye is the lamp of the body”(Matthew 6:22-23).