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Article: Emergence
- Article from:
- Encyclopedia of Science and Religion
- Author:
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Emergence
The term
emergence
refers to the appearance of a new property in an evolving system or entity. As the system changes over time, a new property that was not present before comes to be associated with it, often through an increase in complexity. Emergent phenomena are not fully reducible (in a causal, explanatory, or ontological sense) to the lower-level phenomena from which they arise. Emergence thus represents the hypothesis that the whole story (in science, and perhaps in religion) can only be told by multiple causal stories at multiple levels.
In the religion-science discussion, uses of the term
emergence
fall roughly into three broad categories: (1)
Scientific emergence
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