Essentially, the world is a system of gears. To understand some activity that happens in world, look at the gears, what they do, and how they interact. Don’t search for a mysterious spirit responsible for the activity, if the activity can be fully explained by the gears.
You put your finger on something I’ve been attempting to articulate. There’s a similar idea I’ve seen here on Lesswrong. That idea said approximately that it’s difficult do define what counts as a religion, because not all religions fulfill the same criteria. But a tool that seems to do the job you want to do is to separate people (and ideas) based on the question “is mind made up of parts or is it ontologically fundamental?”. This seems to separate the woo from the non-woo.
My mutation of this idea is that there are fundamentally two ways of explaining things. One is the “animistic” or “intentional stance (Cf. Daniel Dennett)” view of the world, the other is the “clockwork” view of the world.
In the the animistic view, you explain events by mental (fundamentally living) phenomena. Your explanations point towards some intention.
God holds his guiding hand over this world and saved the baby from the plane crash because he was innocent, and God smote America because of her homosexuals. I won the lottery because I was good. Thunderclaps are caused by the Lightningbird flapping his wings, and lightning-flashes arise when he directs his gaze towards the earth. Or perhaps Thor is angry again, and is riding across the sky. Maybe if we sacrifice something precious to us, a human life, we might appease the gods and collect fair weather and good fortune.
Cause and effect are connected by mind and intention. There can be no unintended consequences, because all consequences are intended, at least by someone. Whatever happens was meant (read: intended) to happen. If you believe that God is good, this gives comfort even when you are under extreme distress. God took you child away from you because he wanted her by his side in heaven, and he is testing you only because he loves you. If you believe in no God, then bad things happen only because some bad person with bad intentions intended them to happen. If only we can replace them with good people with good intentions, the ills of society will be relieved.
In the clockwork view of the world, every explanation explains away any intention. The world is a set of forever-falling dominoes.
Everything that happens can be explained by some rule that neither loves you nor hates you but simply is. Even love is spoken of in terms of neural correlates, rising and falling levels of hormones. Sensory experiences, like the smell of perfume or excitations of the retina, explain love the same way aerodynamics explain the flying of an airplane. We might repackage the dominoes and name them whatever we like, still everything is made out of dominoes obeying simple rules. But even if the rules are simple, the numerous interacting pieces make the game complicated. Unintended consequences are the norm, and even if your intentions are good, you must first be very cautious that the consequences do not turn out bad.
The animist is more likely to parse “China has bad relations with Japan” in the same way as they parse the sentence “Peter dislikes Paul”, while the clockworker is likely to interpret it as “The government apparatus of either country are both attempting to expand control over overlapping scarce resources.”
The animist is more likely to support the notion that “The rule of law, in complex times, Has proved itself deficient. We much prefer the rule of men! It’s vastly more efficient.”, while the clockworkers are more likely to bind themselves by the law and to insist that a process should be put in place so that even bad actors are incentivized to do good. The animist believes that if only we could get together and overcome our misunderstandings, we would realize that, by nature, we are friends. The clockworker believes that despite being born with, by nature, opposing interests, we might both share the earth and be friendly towards each other.
The animist searches for higher meaning, the clockworker searches for lower meaning.
As stated, my comment is more a vague suggestion than a watertight deduction from first principles.
What I intend to suggest is that just as humans vary along the dimensions of aggression, empathy, compassion, etc., so too do we vary according to what degree, and when, we give either explanation (animistic/clockwork) primacy over the other. I’m interested in these modes of explanation more from the perspective of it being a psychological tendency rather than it giving rise to a self-consistent world view.
In the mental operations of humans there is a tendency to say “here, and no longer, for we have arrived” when we explain phenomena and solve problems. For some this is when they have arrived at a kind of “spirit”, for some it is when we arrive at “gears”. For some it is gears six days a week, and spirits on Sunday.
The degree to which you seek spirit-explanations depends on the size and complexity of the physical system (a spec of dust, a virus, a bacteria, a single celled organism, an ant, a frog, a mouse, a cat, a monkey, a human), and also the field of inquiry (particle physics, …, sociology). And it probably depends on some personal nature-and-nurture quality. Sometimes explanations are phrased in terms of spirits, sometimes gears.
I’m also not saying that the world-views necessarily contradict each other (in that they deny the existence of phenomena the other asserts), only that each world-view seeks different post-hoc rationalizations. The animist will claim that the tectonic plate moved because God was wrathful and intended it. The clockworker will claim that God’s wrath is superfluous in his own model of earthquakes. Whether either world-view adds something the other lacks is beside the point, only that each desire to stop at a different destination, psychologically.
In real life I once heard, from an otherwise well adjusted member of society, that the Devil was responsible for the financial crisis. I did not pry into what he meant by this, but he seemed quite satisfied by the explanation. Let me emphasize this: when being told that the cause of the financial crisis was the Devil, he was quite content with simply nodding his assent. I have not researched the crisis myself, but I am confident I would phrase my explanation in terms of “externalities” or “perverse incentives” or some such. The two explanations would agree to every detail of what actually happened during the financial crisis, but for some psychological reason what he and I find to be a psychologically satisfying explanation differs.
It’s perfectly fine to say that “Alice wants coffee”. The question is whether a person is more likely to believe that Alice’s “wanting something” is what sets in motion her biochemical reactions, or whether it is the biochemical reactions which sets in motion her “wanting something”. Whether the cart pushes the horse, or vice versa.
I don’t think any world-views (as implemented in real humans) are self-consistent (or even deduced from first principles), but a person’s gear/spirit tendency can probably predict additional beliefs that the person holds. For example, which person is more likely to believe that ghosts exist? If a person tends towards gear/spirit-explanations, in which is he more likely to say “when I’m in a room with only my teddy bear, I no longer feel alone”? I’m not necessarily saying that these beliefs are necessary consequences of each world-view, only that certain ideas are associated with each world-view for one reason or other.
As to the “by nature” part of my comment, I mean that those who tend towards spirit-explanations are more likely to believe something approximating “we descended from the gods”, while those who tend towards gear-explanations are more likely to believe “we ascended from the beasts”. The former tend towards utopianism, the latter tends towards the “tragic vision” of life. (See: A Conflict of Visions ). The utopians/spiritists take it for granted that we should be friends and wonder why we aren’t. Those with the tragic vision of life/gearists take it for granted that we are in conflict and wonder why we sometimes aren’t.