The animist fallacy

Animism is usually defined as giving human attributes to nature, or matter. Today I want to look briefly at the related error called Reductionism.

Quotes and comments;

A. 'He [Monod] defines animism as a; ''projection into inanimate nature of man's awareness of the functioning of his own nervous system.'' [1.]

Monod calls it animism when man attributes human attributes to matter - but what about the reverse, when materialists claim that man has the attributes of matter? It seems to me that as an intellectual error, this is just as bad or worse.

- What should we call this? It's the dehumanizing of man at any rate. Reductionism is the other side of the animist coin as it were. (We might call this the animist fallacy.) If the animist exaggerated man, the materialist shrinks him. Where the animist saw man everywhere; the materialist sees him nowhere.

We see evidence of this fallacy everywhere. You can't escape it. The idea man is just matter is the key idea in current academic thinking. This ends up as the claim there is no mind; that the brain is all there is. It ends up being the claim that thought is just chemical reactions. The outcome of this kind of thinking is that man in the biblical sense completely disappears.

The key concept (or pretense) of materialism is that the human mind (spirit, soul) is merely the product of matter acted upon by physical forces; that there was no intelligence behind human intelligence. This is akin to attributing spirits to matter as the animists of old did.
- The biblical view is that man is the product not of matter, but of Intelligence.

M. Johnson [frfarer -at- gmail.com]

Notes;
1. Alive; an enquiry in to the Origin and Meaning of Life - Magnus Verbrugge/p.105
- I recommend this book highly. It's one of the best books on the subject of origins that I've read. (If not the best.)