There are several fallacies that are regrettably easy to commit. I would like to ask what religious notions may have arisen from them.
One example is reification: thinking of an abstraction or process as an object or substance. If one asks "Where does the fire go when the fuel is exhausted?", one is treating the combustion process that we call fire as a substance. Is this where the idea of the soul comes from?
A related fallacy is personification: thinking of something as a person when it is not. The folk personage of Jack Frost is a personification of the physical process of frost formation. Might the idea of gods arise in this fashion?
A particularly insidious fallacy is to ascribe attributes to things that cannot possess them. For example, it is sensible to speak of the hardness and mass of a pebble, but it is not sensible to speak of its joyfullness. Is this where notions such as "meaning of life" come from?
Can we find other examples?
Might it be that religion is neither true nor false, but rather nonsensical?
to admin: this could go in Faith and Belief.
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