Sensus Divinitatis- A Sense of the Divine is our Sense of Our Soul.

Religion has feed men's appetite for knowledge of the soul for too long. Aristotle's

statement "All men by nature desire to know" conveys this hunger for deep understanding. Throughout these series of posts, I have abandoned traditional ideas of the soul by probing into nature's complexities. I extracted emergence- a unique pattern intrinsic to nature. I stretched the imagination about the soul by arriving at a plausible alternative explanation for the soul. Claiming that emergence is a manifestation of men's soul. Incidentally, my suspicion are shared with others. Metanexus, an institute that promotes transdisciplinary approach to the most profound questions of nature, culture, and the human person makes connections between emergence and the soul. Below is an excerpt from Metanexus article on Emergence.

The other characteristic of a science that might speak in the same grammar as theology is one that is aware of the depth of nature beyound out knowing even our possible knowing. This sense of depth is important in allowing faith space to work. The theory of “emergence” is another clue to God, or at least the possibility of God, and hence of an eschatology. Emergence is recognizable in a number of natural phenomena. Take the hardness of water as it freezes for example. At a certain point a new phenomenon occurs which is not reducible to previous states, even though it has emerged out of them. The universe seems to be full of examples of emergence at every level, of solid planetary bodies from gaseous precursors, of light emerging out of darkness 900,000 light years after the Big Bang, perhaps of life emerging out of the primal mud, of consciousness out of the long evolution of hominids.

In a world dominated by positivism and reductionist science, distinct levels of reality have long been explained away. Emergence, at least in some of its forms, counters this reductionism, claiming that higher ontological levels really do exist, that direction and movement toward another level is not illusory. There is now a whole science of emergence, with strong and weak forms, and with various thresholds being debated depending on whether the new state can be predicted, whether it acts back upon the substrata, where it is composed or non-composed.

One of the theological repercussions of the science of emergence is that however thorough we think our knowledge of the universe to be, it is likely to be very scant. For inevitably there will be new emergent levels in the future about which we can know nothing or very little in the present. Although a new emergent level sometimes “makes sense” backwards it cannot be predicted or anticipated forwards. This gives us hope that there will indeed be a final, eschatological transformation which will emerge out of this universe, a universe which currently appears to be headed only for annihilation, darkness and emptiness. Emergence does not necessitate such but it does begin to open up the possibility within the imaginable for the first time in two hundred years. Extrapolating from present parameters gives us only future death—of our species, of our sun, of our galaxy. But extrapolating from previous emergences of new phenomena suggests there may be surprises in the future we cannot yet envisage or begin to imagine. Overall, a conception of strong emergence points to hierarchies of existence, and to an ongoing process whereby the universe, presumably as it is indwelt by God and transformed by incarnation, gives rise by an emergent process to new and surprising states of being.(CLICK HERE to see article in it's entirety)

This article eloquently articulates the connection between emergence and God. Though this article does not explicitly define emergence as the soul, a direct assertion that "emergence is a clue of God" is the closest to the realities of an otherness. This otherness is not God but rather is man's soul. Experience not by our physical senses but rather by our sensus divinitatis-a sense of the divine felt by no other than our soul and interpreted by our mind as meanings. Our mind and our soul are permeable to one another, in an constant flow between meaning and sensus divinitatis. Have you been touch by your soul today?