So between the heavenly bodies there is an aether, not a vacuum; and the fundamental elements are not quarks, but earth, wind, fire, and water. Got it.
Thank you for pointing out the fundamental advantages of Aristotelian science over the modern version.
BTW, your rhetoric about science strikes me as odd. Science does not disallow anything. However, there is a domain of questions that can be answered by the scientific method. That domain is the limit that modern science sets on itself. Is this a different view of science than Aristotle’s? Yes, of course. But that is for the better. Circumscribing the domain of science keeps it humble. From the Christian viewpoint, the circumscribed domain allows it to be a servant to the Lord God, and not a false god.
There are many other questions outside the scientific domain which are very much worth our best efforts. These are the most important questions, questions about beauty, and love, and purpose. You love to ponder those questions, Eddie, and I do too. I imagine anyone who would come to a forum sponsored by a Christian organization would have a predilection for those kinds of questions.
So yes, it is good to ponder the ultimate origin of life. I affirm that a scientific explanation of that ultimate origin will never be available, because the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the creator of the universe and of life. Once the quantum wave functions at the Big Bang have been described and the RNA world has been explained[1], humanity will have a better scientific understanding of origins. However, we won’t know anything more about their ultimate origins and purpose than the Psalmist, who proclaimed:
The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
he stretches out the heavens like a tent
and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot
and rides on the wings of the wind.
He makes winds his messengers,
flames of fire his servants.
He set the earth on its foundations;
it can never be moved.
And if we’re not careful, we may know less. It would be a terrible trade to gain the whole scientific world but lose our souls. I am convinced that an important way to avoid that terrible mistake is to respect the limits of scientific inquiry. Not to respect those limits is to go the way of Dawkins and Stephen Meyer.
And with that, I echo your wishes of a merry Christmas and a healthful, joyful new year,
Chris Falter
[1] Of course, scientists may discover even better scientific explanations than the ones we currently have. In addition, there are some questions that are theoretically possible for scientific examination but may be intractable in practice. Among these are the origin of the first cell and the location of my other purple sock.
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