Nanoscience and the Darwinian Debate

Nanoscience is the hot new topic in the world of science and big business. Nanoparticles are essentially so small they are impossible to see with the naked eye and require special micro-spectrometers in order to even recognize that they do exist in reality. We are told they are one-billion times smaller than a meter and it would take 125,000 nanometers to circle a strand of human hair. Nanoscience is being used in many business applications such as adhering to filtration products to clean air of bacteria and binding with agents for medical applications.

Like quarks, dark holes, lasers, microchips and other fascinating scientific discoveries over the last few years, nanoscience once again reminds us that there is a world beyond the empirical, physical and optical, there is a vast universe based on physics and mathematical calculation. Just because nanometers were unknown to us years ago, that does not mean they did not exist in reality, we just did not know about them. Modern science only needed to invent the right tools and equipment in order to "see and touch" them to make them known to us. Once known, they can be moved, binded, adhered and altered to suit real-world needs. Since scientists rely upon mathematical calculation and special tools to know they exist, it raises many questions about how we come to know what exists in our world. If every effect must have a cause, if things must evolve from other things already in existence, how do we account for new discoveries?

The first instrument able to "see" atoms was a scanning tunneling microscope in the 1980s. Then came electron microscopy which could see electrons and even noted that particles can change from electrons and back. Now there is the atomic force microscope and other tools which can see images in the range of nanometers. Due to the increase in knowledge and the exciting application of nanoscience to the world of business, countries around the world are creating patents and colleges are getting funding in order to study this vast new world of life which exists in a kind of alternative universe - that of the unseen and unknown except by a handful of specialists who have the expertise and equipment to see it, to know it and to apply it.

When scientists and theologians get together there is much debate about whether something not known in the physical realm can in fact exist in reality. Biological empiricists insist that unless they can know it with the five senses (see, touch, taste, hear, smell) how can one be sure that the thing we claim to know in our minds has a place in the physical world. Nanoscience once again reminds us that what we can know with the five senses may be limited only by the tools of the trade, sufficient time, financing and the limits of our own experience. It also reminds us that just because we did not know something 50 years ago, does not mean that it did not already exist in reality. Finally, it is an object lesson to Darwinian evolutionists that new discoveries based on existent forms of physical and biological particles at the atomic level are made every day. They have substance and form with the capacity to be altered, manipulated and quantified however science wishes to do so by definition and designation. This is life on the nanoscale - most will not be able to "see" it or "touch" it, but we know it is real by relying upon the authority of those who can and do.