OPINION:
Grit. Dedication. Introspection. Faithfulness. These are just some of the lessons and traits embedded in renowned eye surgeon Dr. Ming Wang’s stunning journey to freedom.
Dr. Wang, a Chinese expatriate who fled his native land for America during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, defied all odds to become a well-respected doctor in Nashville, Tennessee — a surgeon who created a revolutionary eye treatment used to bring vision to many who had lost hope.
It’s perhaps most fitting that a new feature film about Dr. Wang’s life is called “Sight,” a cinematic exploration of his real-life quest to restore an orphan’s eyesight.
Beyond physical healing, the surgeon’s story is also one of spiritual awakening, with Dr. Wang, a once-atheist Chinese immigrant, abandoning his nonbelief to fully embrace Christianity.
It was a transformation that changed everything for Dr. Wang — a voyage rooted in a simple recognition: The complexities around us couldn’t have emerged by chance.
As Dr. Wang looked deeper at his medical studies, he was stunned to see the finer details of the human body undoubtedly point back to the design of an intelligent and loving Creator.
“It was in a study of a human eye, at Harvard Medical School, I realized that my notion, my atheist worldview, was in crisis,” Dr. Wang recently told me, underscoring how a deeper look at the eye changed everything. “The human eye is so complicated, but yet it can form nearly perfectly nearly every time. It’s just impossible to form out the randomness as atheists believe.”
With the seeds of doubt about his atheistic worldview taking root, Dr. Wang met a professor who asked a question that inspired a profound malaise in his heart.
“Can you imagine a random piece of metal form[ing] itself into a car?” the professor said, before turning his attention to the human eye, the object of Dr. Wang’s studies.
“How about the human eye?” he continued, with the then-student realizing there was absolutely no way the profound and stunning design of the eye could form randomly and without intentional design. Dr. Wang immediately came to recognize the eye “did not form out of randomness” and was “formed with a purpose, so there’s a Creator and designer behind it.”
This general openness to God’s design led Dr. Wang to eventually embrace Christianity, seeing it as having the best and most fruitful framework for explaining creation, life and other realities. The irony here is implicit: While secularists and anti-Christians often use science as a wedge issue, for Dr. Wang, a deeper understanding of the sciences led him directly to God.
“It is in the study of science, interestingly, that I discovered evidence for the existence of God,” he said.
Dr. Wang’s story offers many lessons, but the biggest is a simple reality that a deeper and more fervent look at things present in our natural world — from trees, flowers and animals to the many facets of human anatomy — screams of intentional design.
Somehow, people have accepted the absurd notion that an elusive Big Bang randomly sparked complex life, perpetuated irrefutable order, and ignited an organized evolutionary process that progressed humans to where we are today.
The idea that any of this happened without a higher power is ludicrous and requires the total abandonment of rational thinking. Sadly, some of the smartest among us have fallen prey to this chucklesome madness, exchanging realities for myths masquerading as truths.
But Dr. Wang’s story shows what can happen when a person approaches the sciences with an open heart and mind, free from indoctrination and fully open to seeing God’s beautiful tapestry.
After all, it’s practically impossible for a planet to have what’s needed to sustain complex life, and yet Earth fits the bill. In fact, Discovery once made a stunning admission: “When you start to look at all of the things that have come together in just the perfect way to support plants and animals, it gets a little mind-boggling.”
Discovery detailed the many things needed for life to be supported, including, but not limited to: a stable rotation of Earth, an ozone, a stable magnetic field, the moon and the sun.
The American Museum of Natural History expounds upon all of this to astutely note that Earth is “the right distance from the sun, it is protected from harmful solar radiation by its magnetic field, it is kept warm by an insulating atmosphere, and it has the right chemical ingredients for life, including water and carbon.”
We could fill the pages of many books with the fascinating and even stunning ways the Earth is profoundly unique — and intentionally designed. For Dr. Wang, the proof of God’s goodness was found in the eye itself.
And for those who are skeptical, perhaps all they need to do is expand their vision to see the same truth — a reality that will most certainly show them their purpose and inevitably set them free.
• Billy Hallowell is a digital TV host and interviewer for Faithwire and CBN News and the co-host of CBN’s “Quick Start Podcast.” He is the author of four books.
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