Lotteries are designed to be won. There are only two possible options. It’s a very simple system. And becUse of the way lotteries are designed, someone has to win.
It’s a miracle for the person who won. Buy it’s not a miracle that someone won!
As to what this has to do with eye evolution… you will have to ask @T_aquaticus. Unless he is referring to evolution as a designed process with the specific objective of someone in a big population ending up with an eye…The analogy is not valid.
There are no “correct” numbers in a lottery drawing. There are simply the numbers that are drawn. Given enough players there is a good probability that someone will have a match.
In the same way, there is no “correct” evolutionary adaptation. There is simply the adaptation that is found. This is why we see different adaptations in different lineages, such as the different wings found on birds and bats and the different eyes found in vertebrates, squid, and insects. The lineages we see now are the winners, but there were also a lot of losers, some of which are found in the fossil record. There are also lineages that never evolved eyes, or have a simple eye that never evolved the ability to produce a focused image (e.g. planaria).
The point is that given all of the organisms that existed the evolution of something as advantageous as an eye is inevitable.
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If we wanted to we could use lightning strikes as our analogy. Given the number of lightning strikes and the number of humans it is inevitable that a human will be struck by lightning, even if the probability of any single person being struck is very low. I guess you could argue that weather is designed to strike people with lightning, but that seems ancillary to the main argument.
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Do you have any math to support this claim? Or is it your intuition.
The evidence is all of the lineages where eyes evolved independently.
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Thanks very much for your response. You are always very gracious in your responses and I do appreciate your time. I can really see the difference you previously noted between the “top-down” vs “bottom-up” views. I may truly be stuck in one paradigm and that may be causing the lion’s share of difficulty in understanding.
But, thank you again for explaining. I think I’ll just leave things as is and acknowledge the fact that I may not have the capacity to see things the same way that you see them. I’ve been giving it an honest effort, but I may simply not be able to do so. But one compelling takeaway for me (from these conversations here) is that this discussion is inherently challenging because of perspective. You may have gotten the impression that I was simply arguing for the sake of argument, but that’s not so. I now have a better understanding of your perspective, as well as what challenges are impacting the conversation itself. You are very much to credit for that, so your efforts have not come up empty!
I do think the top-down vs. bottom-up is the big difference in perspective here. You may be viewing evolution as having an end goal in mind and then nature tries its hardest to reach that goal. Biologists view it quite differently, at least within the limits of the scientific method. Evolution can only see one generation ahead. The only thing evolution favors is increased fitness no matter how that increase in fitness is achieved. This results in some really strange adaptations that would not otherwise happen, such as the dolphin fin looking superficially like a shark fin, but looking much more like the human arm or bat wing when you look at the bones underneath the skin. Why? Because the mammal forelimb is what evolution had to work with. Evolution couldn’t scrap the entire limb and start fresh to attain some end goal.
In biology this is called contingency. Evolution works with what it has and increases fitness for the immediate environment. Future adaptations are contingent on the evolutionary history of the lineage.
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This is very close… I’m actually looking from even further away, observing what is seen and trying to wrap my brain around how it came to be… But, again, I greatly appreciate your explanation. I can better see how it is that we sometimes use the same words but mean very different things. I’ve learned quite a bit about that in recent days, so now I must try to sort it out and make sense of it all from another perspective.
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The timescales involved in that approach are huge!
But read up on Ring Species and it comes very close to answering your target complaint.
The thing to remember that the core of speciation is reproductive compatibility. And incompatible types can be made just by re-arranging existing genes… without any NEW genes at all!
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I find that “blind chance” actually means “I do not understand” or “I can’t be bothered to explain properly”. It tend to get slung around around as if it proves something.
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Here… the only fellers who talk about blind chance are the atheists.
Color me as agnostic statistician. I’m too far behind to catch up on this discussion, but tag me next time. 
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We want to use language we possible that allows for theological flexibility. Rather than merely saying “blind” chance it might be better to qualify that with “from a scientific or human point of view”.
As I’m sure you’d agree, God if He exists may not be blind to chance, and might even be excercising choice in what looks like chance to us.
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