The animistic fallacy is the logical fallacy of arguing that an event or situation necessarily arose because someone intentionally acted to cause it. While it could be that someone set out to effect a specific goal, the fallacy appears in an argument that states this must be the case. The name of the fallacy comes from the animistic

Animism

Animism refers to the belief that non-human entities are spiritual beings, or at least embody some kind of life-principle....

 belief that changes in the physical world are the work of conscious spirits.

Examples

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell

Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social theorist, political philosopher, and author. A National Humanities Medal winner, he advocates laissez-faire economics and writes from a libertarian perspective...

 in his book Knowledge and Decisions

Knowledge and Decisions

Knowledge and Decisions is a non-fiction book by American economist Thomas Sowell. Sowell explicates social and economic knowledge and how it is transmitted through the many facets of society, and how that transmission affects decisions made. The book's central theme is drawn from F.A...

presents several arguments as examples of the animistic fallacy:

• in the argument from design
  Teleological argument
  A teleological or design argument is an a posteriori argument for the existence of God based on apparent design and purpose in the universe. The argument is based on an interpretation of teleology wherein purpose and intelligent design appear to exist in nature beyond the scope of any such human...
  
   for the existence of God that the order and complexity observed in nature must be the result of a creator
• that people earn wealth always because of superior choices
• that central planning is necessary to prevent chaos in society

Sowell repeatedly dismisses the necessity that order comes from design, and notes that fallacious animistic arguments tend to provide explanations that require comparatively little time to implement. In this light he contrasts the six-day creation of the world described in the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 to the development of life over billions of years described by evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

.