If you think the way you see things nowadays is the way people saw things through the history, you are wrong.
As strange as it sounds, our eyes have evolved through the years. In this documentary, zoologist Dan-Erik Nilsson demonstrates how the complex human eye could have evolved through natural selection acting on small variations.
Back in the days, our eyes did not produce as clear vision as we have today. Nilsson shows that with a simple patch of light sensitive cells, and his model evolves until a clear image is produced.
Just think about this for a second, the first animals with anything resembling an eye lived 550 million years ago. Over time, a light-sensitive spot evolved into a retina, and everything else.