Metaphysics
One story is thus; The name was given c.70 B.C.E. by Andronicus of Rhodes, and was a reference to the customary ordering of the books, but it was misinterpreted by Latin writers as meaning “the science of what is beyond the physical.”
Another story is someone came into a library in the 1st century and asked where Aristotle’s new book was located and was told it was beyond physics as in further down the aisle.
No the quest for deeper meaning is not dead or outdated.
“It is believed that time, or the measurement of events in the physical universe began some 15 billion years ago with an advent referred to as the “Big Bang”. Since science is the study of nature, it cannot address what existed prior to the natural universe.” Stephen Hawking states in his lecture, “The beginning of time”, that “The solar system can be extrapolated far beyond the four thousand and four years BC, suggested in the book of Genesis.”
The details of how God created this universe, I will never understand. He Did. To some the answer to that question is a life long pursuit, one I enjoy watching and reading about. Keep it up. To me however, the more important question is why. While I am curious about, and amazed by His work, why? The brilliant, dismissive and pseudo intellectual may seek no deeper meaning, the how is profoundly engaging. Fair enough, let’s leave them to it. Why, and for what purpose is the realm of philosophers.
Yet, we can’t get something from nothing. We may focus on what we see, and search for the answer in the material itself, but it came from somewhere, something, some It. With only the naked eye, the grandeur of the heavens, the plants, the sea, the plethora of life., evokes a sense of wonder. Some desire to reverse engineer, others desire to see beyond visible and cogent creation for, “All of creation speaks of a creator.” And there, beyond physics, is faith. Not opposed to knowledge, rather giving credit to the energy, the source which precedes the energy, mass and matter occupying our space, The visible and dark.