No serious photographer takes light for granted; it is his or her stock in trade.  The very term photography means “writing with light.”  Admittedly, cameras are now so computerized you can ignore the built-in light meter and allow the exposure to adjust automatically.  I do this sometimes when I need to work quickly.  But if I really want to set up a shot and do some fine-tuning, I must start with the light.  Which, interestingly enough, is how God did it when he created the world.  “Let there be light,” he commanded when he kicked things off in the Book of Genesis.  Of course, with God there was no light until he called it into being.  For the photographer, the light is already there; it is the medium in which he works his art.

But how did it get there?  Leaving aside the Genesis account for a moment, cosmologists currently believe the universe began in a blaze of light called the Big Bang.  They know this because the afterglow from this cosmic event is still detectable nearly 15 billion years later as background microwave radiation that pervades the universe.  It must have been one hell of a bang.  But it went undetected at the time because there was no one to witness it.  This raises a philosophical issue simlar to the problem of a tree falling in a forest when there is no one to hear.  Does light exist if there is no one to see?  

Perhaps the question we should be asking is not where light came from but where seeing came from.  The universe existed in utter darkness for billions of years, even if it was abaze with galaxies and stars, simply because no sentient being was able to perceive the light.  Then rudimentary “eyespots” made up of photoreceptor proteins began showing up in even in the simplest organisms on earth.  Complex optical organs emerged during a period of rapid biological diversification called the “Cambrian explosion” some 540 million years ago.  In his famous “argument from design” in the early in the 19th century, the naturalist and Anglican cleric William Paley singled out the human eye as evidence of a creator’s handiwork in the formation of the universe.  Charles Darwin recognized that his theory of evolution “would absolutely break down” if it could not account for the development of an organ as complex as the eye.  Proponents of intelligent design continue to argue that the “irreducible complexity” of the human eye could not have been produced by the blind processes of natural selection alone. 

As it happens, naturalists maintain that the eye has evolved not once but many times in a process called convergent evolution.  Convergence in evolution is the independent development of similar biological features in unrelated species.  A case in point is the nearly identical eye in humans and squids, which have followed separate evolutionary paths for more than 700 million years.  Their respective camera-like eyes work very much like my high-end Canon digital SLR, although fully automated and with much greater light sensitivity.  Overall, according to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, the eye has developed independently dozens of times using nine separate basic designs.  “It seems that life, at least as we know it on this planet, is almost indecently eager to evolve eyes,” Dawkins has written. 

Notwithstanding the suggestion of an underlying purpose here, neither Dawkins nor any other orthodox Darwinist believes there is anything intentional about it.  Teleology – the idea that nature acts purposefully -- is still a dirty word in most scientific circles.  The title of Dawkins’ book, The Blind Watchmaker, sums up mainstream thinking on how evolution works.  The human eye and every other organ and biological process in nature developed by painstaking trial and error, with no blueprint and no overarching principle other than natural selection based on adaptation to the environment.

However, cracks have begun to appear in the heretofore-unbroken surface of evolutionary thinking.  Paleontologist Conway Morris, whose study of fossils in the Burgess Shale led to the concept of the Cambrian explosion, has suggested convergence may point to a “deeper structure to biology” – deeper than purely random genetic mutations in unrelated species that somehow result in nearly identical eyes that are better engineered than my Canon digital SLR.  As Dawkins himself demonstrated in his remark about the indecent eagerness of life to evolve eyes, there is a tendency for even the staunchest Darwinist to lapse into teleological metaphors when talking about nature.  If you didn’t know any better, you might think that God, having commanded the light to shine, then set about through painstaking trial and error to bring into the world creatures who were capable of watching the show.