I'm thoroughly enjoying being a spectator to your conversation, and would like to offer another insight from Justin Martyr from fragments of his lost work on the Resurrection.
Those, then, who are called natural philosophers, say, some of them, as Plato, that the universe is matter and God; others, as Epicurus, that it is atoms and the void; others, like the Stoics, that it is these four—fire, water, air, earth. For it is sufficient to mention the most prevalent opinions.
And Plato says that all things are made from matter by God, and according to His design; but Epicures and his followers say that all things are made from the atom and the void by some kind of self-regulating action of the natural movement of the bodies; and the Stoics, that all are made of the four elements, God pervading them.
But while there is such discrepancy among them, there are some doctrines acknowledged by them all in common, one of which is that neither can anything be produced from what is not in being, nor anything be destroyed or dissolved into what has not any being, and that the elements exist indestructible out of which all things are generated. And this being so, the regeneration of the flesh will, according to all these philosophers, appear to be possible.
For if, according to Plato, it is matter and God, both these are indestructible and God; and God indeed occupies the position of an artificer, to wit, a potter; and matter occupies the place of clay or wax, or some such thing. That, then, which is formed of matter, be it an image or a statue, is destructible; but the matter itself is indestructible, such as clay or wax, or any other such kind of matter. Thus the artist designs in the clay or wax, and makes the form of a living animal; and again, if his handiwork be destroyed, it is not impossible for him to make the same form, by working up the same material, and fashioning it anew. So that, according to Plato, neither will it be impossible for God, who is Himself indestructible, and has also indestructible material, even after that which has been first formed of it has been destroyed, to make it anew again, and to make the same form just as it was before.
But according to the Stoics even, the body being produced by the mixture of the four elementary substances, when this body has been dissolved into the four elements, these remaining indestructible, it is possible that they receive a second time the same fusion and composition, from God pervading them, and so re-make the body which they formerly made. Like as if a man shall make a composition of gold and silver, and brass and tin, and then shall wish to dissolve it again, so that each element exist separately, having again mixed them, he may, if he pleases, make the very same composition as he had formerly made.
Again, according to Epicurus, the atoms and the void being indestructible, it is by a definite arrangement and adjustment of the atoms as they come together, that both all other formations are produced, and the body itself; and it being in course of time dissolved, is dissolved again into those atoms from which it was also produced. And as these remain indestructible, it is not at all impossible, that by coming together again, and receiving the same arrangement and position, they should make a body of like nature to what was formerly produced by them; as if a jeweller should make in mosaic the form of an animal, and the stones should be scattered by time or by the man himself who made them, he having still in his possession the scattered stones, may gather them together again, and having gathered, may dispose them in the same way, and make the same form of an animal.
And shall not God be able to collect again the decomposed members of the flesh, and make the same body as was formerly produced by Him?
Truly, there is nothing new under the son. LOLOL!
God's Name is I AM.
It does indeed!
I imagine Epicurus was largely reacting against Plato and Aristotle: Broadly speaking, both saw the Cosmos as the outcome of relations between God and matter....
Epicurus held that the elementary constituents of nature are undifferentiated matter, in the form of discrete, solid and indivisible particles (“atoms”) below the threshold of perception, plus empty space.... ... a strict conception of minimal-sized atoms entails that motion too must consist of discontinuous quanta; and if motion, then time. Atoms must, then, Aristotle inferred, move in discrete hops (kinêmata), each one occupying a single temporal minimum — and hence, all atoms must move at a uniform speed. An infinite void, with atoms distributed throughout it, led to problems of its own, for it permits no intrinsic spatial orientation and hence no account of why things fall, as they are observed to do.Oh how modern Epicurus sounds! Check this out:
But [Epicurus' theory] also provided a solution to another problem, that of entropy: for since atoms can never slow down [as Epicurus maintained], the universe can never come to a halt (in modern terms, there is no loss of energy). As for gravity, Epicurus may have had a solution to this too, and in a novel form. If an atom just on its own cannot slow down or alter its direction of motion, then an atom that is rising or moving in an oblique direction cannot at some point begin to tilt or fall, unless something blocks its progress and forces it to do so. If, however, after a collision atoms tended to emerge in a statistically favored direction — that is, if the motions of all atoms after collisions did not cancel each other out but on average produced a vector, however small, in a given direction, then that direction would by definition be down. The absence of a global orientation in the universe was thus immaterial. Due to this vector, any given world will, like our own, be similarly oriented in respect to gravitation. (Given the infinite expanse of the universe on Epicurean theory ... we must expect there to be a plurality of worlds, some like ours, some — within limits — different.)[The above passages are from David Konstan's article, "Epicurus," appearing in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.]
Indeed, dearest sister in Christ, it appears there's "nothing new under the sun." That might be because mankind continually works on the same critical problems....
To God be the glory!
Thank you ever so much for posting the excerpt from Justin Martyr — and for your thought-provoking essay/post!