The Encyclopedia Barfieldiana helpfully defines logomorphism as:
Simply put, logomorphism is the fallacious habit “at present extraordinarily widespread, being indeed taken for granted in all the most reputable circles” of “projecting post-logical thoughts back into a pre-logical age” (PD 90), of surreptitiously substituting our own phenomena for those which [our predecessors] were in fact dealing with” (SA 45). More broadly, logomorphism occurs when we read–anachronistically–into the experience, the thought, the literature of a given stage in the evolution of consciousness the “logos,” or world-view of a later age. in Blakean language, logomorphism is a “spectre” (WA 114).
“The world-picture of modern science,” as Sanderson explains in Worlds Apart, “is a fallacy, if we project it back into the past; and if we try to fix it for the future” (WA 134). Logomorphism leads to all sorts of absurdities, of which Barfield took note throughout his career. In the book in which he first coined the term (Poetic Diction [1928]), Barfield discovers our thinking about the mythic to be logomorphic.
It should be painfully clear that both conservatives and liberals, biblicists and skeptics, all commit this fallacy when it comes to the first parts of Genesis.
I say that in a pre-Fall, pre-diluvian, pre-transfigured world, we just do not know how the overarching structure of the world would have been. All of our evidence now has been changed by Christ’s advent, resurrection, and session. He threw down the powers of the air and the fundamental elements of the world, and in doing so the heavens were shaken and the celestial bodies fell. If we don’t think that affects our “evidence,” then I submit we are simply not taking into account the many variables that are indeed out there.
There’s no need to scorn science and technology, but neither is there a need to ask them to do things that they simply cannot do. We certainly should not sideline the explicit revelation we are given in an attempt to answer our opponents.
It is better to just learn to live with the weird. Learn to love it.
Barfield’s cure is still helpful advice: “a realization of how much younger is the Tree of Knowledge than the Tree of Life” (PD 90).
