On the face of it, the detailed intricacy, roiling complexity, and staggering functionality of the natural world point to intelligence. That's the common-sense conclusion humans have made since the beginning of time.
 
For example, a crudely chipped flint stone in a dig is considered an artifact produced by an intelligence who chose to create it. If such rudiments of organization and functionality signify intelligence, something stupendously more dynamic, complex, and functional, such as the simplest of living cells, must also point to an intelligence choosing to create them.
 
NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) and SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) probe space for extraterrestrial life by looking for order and patterns that would signify intelligent choice.
 
Forensic science, cryptography, and archeology are also beset with the problem of discerning what is due to chance and what is due to intelligent intervention. The criteria these scientific specialties use to determine intelligent origin are complexity, information, probabilities, repeating patterns, and choice.

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Our entire world, from subatomic quanta, to atoms, viruses, amoebas, ants, elephants, us, stars, and galaxies contains the unmistakable earmarks of purpose and design. Purpose and design point to mind, not self-causation or randomness.
 
Beauty
 
Nature is suffused with exquisite beauty for which there is no apparent cause or purpose. A peacock's fanned tail does not need to be that beautiful to attract a mate. A monarch butterfly's wings don't have to be so elaborately ornate in order to signal to predators that it's poisonous. The venation in a leaf doesn't need to be beautiful for any reason whatsoever. A Bengal tiger is an incredible work of art and simply does not need to be so perfect. Flowers may attract insects, but really, must they be that breathtaking? There are even exquisitely beautiful flowers that don't even need to attract anything, other than, apparently, our awe and enjoyment.

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The elaborate beauty and diversity in nature cry out to us that something other than necessity, chemical mixing, and degrading mutations are at play.
 
Irreducible Complexity and The Eye
 
Everything in nature is irreducibly complex. That means that if something is made to be less complex than it is, it doesn't work. Functionally complex things (cars, washing machines, computers, organs, and creatures) work because all the parts are there and in sync.
 
If any part of the eye is removed, it will not work properly. If something less than the eye preceded the eye it would not have worked, would have had no survival value, and the creature having it would have been culled out of the population (natural selection).

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Consider the eyelids. If they were smaller than needed to cover the eye, the cornea would become damaged from exposure and from not being properly lubricated. The cornea would then ulcerate and eventually, vision would be lost. If the lids were too big, they would not seal properly to protect the globe. If the eyelashes are not placed properly (distichiasis), they may rub on the cornea and ulcerate it. (A condition frequently seen in certain dog breeds and needing veterinary intervention.) Lash length is also critical in permitting the correct airflow over the cornea (why long false eyelashes are not a good idea). If tear lubricants aren't present, that too can result in ulceration. If all the parts and pieces, the skin, glands, blood vessels, lymphatics, and neurons made up of the five million or so cells in the lid are not there, that will result in a faulty lid and potential loss of vision as well. The eyelid doesn't need just to be a little close, it needs to be pretty much right on the money, or the eye will not function at its optimum or will be damaged resulting in loss of vision. The same stipulations and caveats can be detailed about every other structure related to the eye or any other organ or part of the body for that matter.
 
The eye is a machine able to convert light into an image that we can "see" with our brains. That's just the beginning of the story. Here's more detail.
 
Light passes through the cornea and iris to the retina at the back of the eye, a paper-thin membrane consisting of (in part) about 150 million rod and cone cells for detecting intensity and color. There a photon, within picoseconds, converts 11-cis-retinal to trans-retinal. This causes a change in the shape of the attached protein, rhodopsin, converting it to metarhodopsin II, which attaches to another protein called transducin that has attached to it a small molecule called GDP. Then GDP splits off, and a molecule called GTP binds to transducin. GTP-transducin-metarhodopsin II then binds to the protein phosphodiesterase. Phosphodiesterase, in turn, reduces the concentration of a molecule called cGMP. This results in ion channel changes by way of pumps that vary the level of sodium ions, creating a charge differential and thus a current that can be transmitted down a million optic nerve fibers to the brain's vision center.

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As complex as that sounds, it's pathetically under-understated. It's like me explaining how my laptop works by describing that I plug in the power, open the top, and press the on button.
 
The above description only paints broad strokes about what is so far known about one photon striking the eye. Nothing was said about the infinite other photons that enter the cornea second by second are sorted out by the brain, how the spectrum of 370 nanometers of colors, hues, brightness, shapes, and motion is captured in the retina, and how two eyes can create one united image.
 
The retina can see one photon in the dark, then tune down bright light containing trillions of photons. It can handle light intensity of ten billion to one. By comparison, the best camera film can only handle an intensity of 1000 to one. None of this addresses the question of how all these processes can happen simultaneously from moment to moment as we look about, or how everything must be instantly set back to start to capture the next view.
 
The complexity of the eye is not an anomaly. Everything in nature has this order of complexity. Evolution will have to account for every minute chemical, structural, and physiological detail if it is to be a sound explanation. Little wonder that does not happen. Instead, there are simplistic stories like this: light-sensitive pigment evolved to light-sensitive cells, then to a primitive eyespot, to a deeply recessed eyespot, to a pinhole lens eye, and finally to the complex eye. The proof, aside from the a priori belief that evolution is true, is that there are creatures alive today that have each of the supposed precursors to the eye.
 
But that very fact contains the disproof that any of these sight organs evolved from one to the other. If supposedly semi-evolved precursor eye organs are fully functional for the creatures that have them, there is no need for them to evolve further. That's why evolutionists must suggest that the eye evolved dozens of different times along separate lines. Explaining one is impossible, explaining dozens is, well, it's whatever dozens times impossible is.

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I watched a recent educational television program that was supposedly going to sort out whether Darwinism or creationism is true. One scientist, to explain how the focusing ability of the eye evolved, shined a light at each of a series of shapes ranging from a flat surface to a globe-shaped like an eyeball. As the shape got more like a globe, the light increasingly focused onto a screen in back of the objects. This was the proof that the eye evolved. In other words, because the eye is a globe that focuses light, that proves it evolved.
 
You don't get to prove something by using that something to prove itself.

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As of yet, nobody can even fathom a detailed mechanism for creating even one part of the eye.
 
Walt Whitman wrote, "a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels."

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And speaking of mice, I am reminded of Beast, our family's cat. He is a partly domestic cat, combined with lynx and bobcat. A gorgeous creature in so many ways. He can run like a cheetah, jump several feet in the air, climb trees to show off for us, talk to us, hiss when he gets upset—like when he's too hot, hungry, not getting his love, or just plain cranky because things are not going quite his way. But never mean. His markings are beautiful and completely camouflage him in the woods. His eyes are like perfect gemstones and his lean musculature knots under his skin, yet he has never done one curl, squat, or deadlift. Rough and tumble play with us is always measured so that he carefully pulls his punches by keeping his claws retracted. (He's polydactyl with six toes on each front foot, making a particularly lethal arrangement.)

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Not only is it totally baffling how such creatures could have originated by mere chemical mixing and natural forces, but how the trillions of elements and functions in Beast's body could form from a speck-of-dust-egg gestating inside another such creature in just 65 days. Evolutionists must explain with specificity every nanometer of every hair on his body and every cell and their constituents in the rest of his physique, let alone the countless elements of his brain and personality. No such explanation is even attempted. Yet learned people worldwide claim evolution to be a fact.
 
Beast likes to interrupt my writing of this book by jumping up on my lap, wedging himself between me and the keyboard. I push the computer away giving him his due space and he then starts his purring motor and makes cookies with his two gigantic front paws (our label; it's a kneading similar to what they do when they are nursing as kittens). Then he rolls over, exposing a scrumptious belly of soft fur for petting. If I tell him what a good boy he is, he will twitch his bobtail, look me straight in the eyes, and give a sort of chirping sound. If I ask him a question, he chirps back. He will try to snuggle up close to my face to give me a few licks and then go into the most relaxed sleep in an upside-down contorted position of complete trust.
 
Last night my daughter came into my room looking for him. She just smiled at how silly we both looked with him all sprawled out and me leaning back in the chair to give room for his almost three and a half foot length. She came over to pet him and marvel at his beauty. He just looked up, gave a chirp, and purred even louder. She's helping proofread this book for me, so knowing she would follow my train of thought, I said to her, "Yep, no problem, just mix up atoms for a few billion years and this is what comes out." She said, "Sure thing, Dad."
 
As I write this and reflect upon Beast and all the rest of the phantasmagoric world in which we live I feel silly for even having to go through all this argumentation. Intelligent design in nature is so staggeringly common sense and so obvious it's absurd.