Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.
We discussed the problematic anthropomorphic God enuf, so I'd like to extend the discussion a bit to how we look at the world in general, notably the natural world.
There seem to be lots of anthropomorphic projections in any documentary on animals, plants and evolution. Intelligence and intent are "seen" everywhere. The Intelligent Creator-Watchmaker with Beard on Cloud might have (mostly) expired... but the features of intelligence and creation have not expired really: they have been moved and are now projected on the process of evolution and animal behavior.
The introduction of "random process" doesn't really help to counter general anthropomorphism; concepts like randomness or chance belong to the same anthropomorphic family as intelligence or intent. As in the other discussion where "evil" is defined as "the absence of light", here "randomness and blind chance" can be defined as "the absence of intelligence and intent". Two sides of the same conceptual pancake and the pancake is an anthropomorphic one all the same.
It is a bit of a cliffhanger; since we cannot but look at the world through our human eyes... it has to be an anthropomorphic world. But if we want to understand the world better it might help to at least try doing the impossible.
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