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Intelligent reply. I wonder if our friend who thinks he or she knows more about Aristotle and Plato than this Greek comprehends why I brought up these fathers of the Natural Sciences.
Could it be that they believed in an intelligent creator of the Universe based upon the Empirical evidence available to them? Is it because they believed the universe showed an intelligent design based upon the Empirical evidence?
I guess I'm in very good company.

Plato was a man of his time. He appears to have held that living bodies were infused with soul, an agency or power of self-motion that non-living things lacked. His Timaeus is his most sophisticated exposition of this position, but Phaedo, Republic, Philebus and Laws also contain pertinent passages. While Plato didn't invent this doctrine of what came to be called 'vitalism', he certainly gave it its first important written expression. Aristotle in no way disagreed with Plato's view that living things were infused with soul while non-living things were not.

Vitalism lost its vitality in the early decades of the last century (Bergson was perhaps its last well-known proponent), but creationists and ID'ers appear to have been attempting to revivify it.

The claim that there's some special force or substance ("the spark of life") whose presence in matter brings that matter to life is either true or false. Almost all modern biologists think that it's false; creationists and ID'ers seem to think that it's true.

In the next few years, we're likely to hear the announcement of the laboratory creation of a brand-new, never-before-seen living thing. I'd like to think that such an announcement will finally show that vitalism is false. But it's unlikely that everybody will be convinced. And so the wrangling will continue.