anthropomorphism

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The ascription of human attributes to supernatural or divine beings; in theology, the conception or representation of God with human qualities and affections, or in a human shape. Anthropomorphism is founded in man's inability to conceive beings above himself otherwise than in his own likeness. It determines the growth and form of all human religions, from the lowest up to the highest: as where the Scriptures speak of the eye, the ear, and the hand of God, of his seeing and hearing, of his remembering and forgetting, of his making man in his own image, etc.
2. n. The conception of animals, plants, or nature in general, by analogy with man: commonly implying an unscientific use of such analogy.
3. n. In pragmatistic philos., that philosophic tendency which, recognizing an absolute impossibility in the attainment by man of any conception that does not refer to human life, proposes frankly to submit to this as a decree of experience and to shape metaphysics to agreement with it. The term was first used in this sense by F. C. S. Schiller (Riddles of the Sphinx). See humanism.

Wiktionary

1. n. theology the attribution of human characteristics to divine beings

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The representation of the Deity, or of a polytheistic deity, under a human form, or with human attributes and affections.
2. n. The ascription of human characteristics to things not human.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. the representation of objects (especially a god) as having human form or traits